Right. I was completely unaware of COG until Steam just randomly recommended Noblesse Oblige and The Play’s the Thing to me a few years ago; I’d have been playing their games for ages if I’d known about them sooner. You know, I laughed at COG’s bundle on Steam that offered their whole library of games for like several hundred dollars, but two or three years later the joke is on me because I’ve played a significant chunk of the COG, HG, and Heart’s Choice libraries since then…
I’d spent some time on itch.io back in 2020 but I never organically stumbled upon any interactive fiction games—I’m not even sure I knew the term to search for it?
Hi, very new to the community here, though I’ve been reading IF and CoG games on and off for about 10 years or so. Somebody above mentioned fanfiction, and I feel like there’s a lot of potential overlap in the audiences. Fans are voracious readers and by definition like to take a more interactive approach to stories - not just as passive consumers. So I could see CYOA-style fanfic potentially becoming quite popular if more fans knew how easy it was to create their own games. There’s even an entire genre of reader-insert (aka y/n) fanfiction that’s usually written in the 2nd person. From there, more people could discover CoG/HG/HC games as well.
I’ve seen occasional Twine games on AO3, but I don’t remember ever seeing a ChoiceScript game there. There is an existing “Interactive Fiction” tag, though, as well as “Reader-Interactive”, “Choose Your Own Adventure”, and “Choose Your Own Ending.”
The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante had the huge bonus of supporting my country’s language (with a high-quality translation, no less), but I absolutely hated it. I hated how you couldn’t choose your options freely and couldn’t reach a good ending unless you picked the “correct” choices. I think the fact that the game is so highly rated really goes to show how much importance people place on high-quality illustrations, BGM, and presentation in games.
Personally, if that game had been a text-only game like other IFs, I definitely never would have bought a game where the MC is gender-locked to male, you can’t choose your appearance, and there is no romance with male ROs. I ended up regretting buying it in the end, though.
While I generally agree with the points you brought up here regarding presentation, I would bring up that one of the key selling points of CoH games is that they can be played on any device that has an internet connection, whether that be a newly released smartphone or a 7 year old shitbox that has a broken camera and barely enough proccessing power to run two apps at the same time. I can’t speak for everyone, but part of the reason I ended up getting into CoH in the first place is being able to run it in my browser on my work computer. Increasing the presentation can jepoardize this, on top of which I don’t think it’ll ever reach the point where CoH games are comparable in presentation with stuff like Dispatch or even visual novels.
Honestly, I feel like that speaks more to how much of an importance this community places on being able to choose your gender and ROs than anything else. I don’t think I’ve seen the gender of the player character being listed as a dealbreaker anywhere else, but in this community it seems to be one of the most frequently listed dealbreakers for picking a game, right next to word count and available ROs.
Oddly enough, with standard story-driven games (I love Disco Elysium and Staffer Case) and novels, I don’t mind at all if there’s no romance or if the protagonist is male. But the moment it comes to IF, I suddenly lose all interest. I probably wouldn’t even play it if it were free.
I’ve got a couple of Tiktok accounts modeled after using booktok hooks and slides, and they’re doing okay. I wish there were more from the IF community over there! It feels like I’m starting from 0 to explain what IF is. The ebook reading community from TT should be a good fit for Heart’s Choice especially.
I think there’s an opportunity to plug IF into the existing BookTok/Bookstagram platforms - especially using excerpt formats that already convert well.
The 2-slide hook/excerpt method is a great example. (Similar to your suggestion.) You have two slides: one with a hook, one with a screenshot of your game text, presented booktok-style. Readers are familiar with this, and I know from my other pen name that it converts to book format sales.
Where it gets trickier is conversion. Asking someone to move from TikTok to a dedicated app like Heart’s Choice is a bigger leap than sending them to Amazon or Kindle, just because it’s less familiar and may not have that built-in trust yet. That’s probably the real friction point for ebook folks.
I have a secondary challenge under this pen name that it’s so spicy! It’s relatively easy for my content to get flagged and views throttled.
I haven’t been posting long enough under this pen name to show strong conversion (new account, still building), but I’m optimistic. (Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: 1. TikTok - Make Your Day 2. TikTok - Make Your Day)
I tend to re-purpose these same concepts across other socials, and the ebook community is familiar with it across whatever platform if TT isn’t your jam. I’m just curious if I’ll get traction under this pen because of the friction of a new-to-many platform. (That’s why I launched FAQs for new-to-IF readers on my website.) TBD!
This is good to know, thanks for sharing! I didn’t realize slides were a big thing on TT. That would make it more accessible to the camera shy, and would probably also make it easy to cross-post to bookstagram which might not be a bad place to go either. I don’t know if I personally will ever have the motivation to much of either but I’d love to see other people succeed there.
I think most authors on Bookstagram rely heavily on canva templates that they can post quotes on or what have you. Sometimes I see people do a post with a quote that goes over like five slides. It seems like a crazy amount of effort to me when you can just go on Substack or X or something and post the exact same thing but without putting all this exrtra work into making it pretty, but I guess if you enjoy that sort of thing then it’s not so bad. And I suppose you get into a routine with your templates and it’s mostly copy and paste after that.
I personally also hate posting to IG. I’ve found it moderately useful for connecting with like-minded authors and publishers of short fiction, and there are some readers on there who are ONLY on IG so if I don’t cross-post something there about a new short story or what have you, there are a bunch of people (mostly IRL connections ngl) who just won’t see it. I’m slowly losing motivation to reach out to these people though because it’s such a huge pain lol
I totally don’t get how you’re supposed to market on Reddit (not saying you can’t, I just don’t know enough about the platform) and X is such a pain to gain a following if you’re not mega active (especially if you’re not paying for the blue check), but I do often wonder about Substack’s potential. Fiction doesn’t seem to do super well on there but posts about fiction do. I’m wondering if writing more essays on IFs would be a smart move.
I’ve done a couple with mild success but I don’t yet have enough ideas for essays to post sustainably in order to gain any traction. Probably this will get easier as I spend more time in the medium and feel more confident in speaking about such things authoritatively.
Off the top of my head, posts that might do well over there:
The changes these platforms seem to be going through, seem to somewhat favor narrations.
And read a few response but haven’t seen this being covered, is there someone here who has narrated their works before (either personally or generatively)?? Have you seen any increased engagement?? Or any advice on that??
I recently started an experimental livestream where I read through my WIP and make small edits along the way. Basically just a very chill, low commitment readalong/dev/Q&A session. I’m pretty new to all and don’t have time to put a ton of effort into making it great so it’s extremely small right now. If it magically blows up I’ll let you all know (doubtful)
It might not be pulling in many players just now but it’s a good practice to read your writing out loud anyway. It forces me to slow down and I’ve caught some typos and a very big bug that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
And I could be wrong but I do think that these platforms are starting to shift the interface to support serialization.
Like the way I understand it is that tiktok: has now introduced radio + podcast features
youtube: is now allowing creatives to make their own advertising rates for their channels.
So I might be delulu but all this is starting to sound like television all over. So I think in the long run, your narrations could pay off and be treated like a binge. (and if you don’t mind, can you drop your link here so we can check it out).
Oh, and some extra info that I came across out there on the net… There’s this niche thing on youtube called Manhwa Recap. I feel like it’s also a relevant approach on how we can go about things.
There was a gent who did a streaming readthrough of my game soon after it came out:
Bless him, I don’t think he knew what he was in for – and he was recording it first thing in the morning, when the adrenaline jolt of video games is a lot more welcome than reading a few thousand words.
I’m afraid it probably didn’t do much for his channel, and didn’t make a noticeable impact on sales for Rebels.
Sure, here’s the first one. It’s, uh, mostly just me talking to myself (and accidentally changing things that aren’t typos) while I figure out what the heck I’m doing so don’t go having any expectations
My thing is I do not have much time to devote to this so I deliberately made my system as low-effort as possible. Session 2 was more fun because I made the wise decision of making sure at least one person would be able to make it before starting, so I got to hang out with a friend in the comments and find typos and answer questions which is fun even if it doesn’t do anything on the marketing level.
2.6k is way more than I would’ve expected however! I watched a streamer reading an IF once and I was the 3rd viewer.
I think that streaming a Choice game could be a really fun and engaging event but I also think that very few streamers have the technical skills and charisma to pull it off. If you have a big enough audience to do polls and reactions and audience participation stuff then you’ll probably be playing something more visual and flashy.
Maybe I should do a stream of Kiss from Death. Speedrun the dragon romance. I’m the wrong person for it lmao.
No, your streams are classic. Just tuned in and its too funny. Will definitely check out more.
That’s so cool. And ja just one step at a step, I always try to tell myself “I’m doing this for the me in two years.” whenever it feels like my efforts are a bit slow paced. Idk, if that’s something you were feeling as well but I do think that you are onto something with the streaming thing.
STREAMERS ASSEMBLE!!! Idk why that’s the first thing that came to mind, but anyway perhaps we can come back here and give each other updates if we notice something about our streams.
But there is also probably a much more manageable route, that we can add whenever we don’t feel like streaming, though it seems like it would require some visuals. Like there is this writer, I saw their account on instagram and the way I understand it is that he/she summaries a plot/character of their story and adds corresponding images.
These are a few that I saw on youtube. There is also another writer I saw on instagram, however that writer seems to prefer smut and the approach that writer chose is to post captions of descriptive “physically close scenes” in a story format.
Like the first image would be a black background with words like:
She reaches for his belt, carefully unbuckling it.
Then the second image. Same black background with words like:
All that’s left for to do, is unhook the button keeping his pants upright. As she reaches for it, he grabs her wrist…
Arrgg just that I forgot the exact words but the images are in like a slide show, which you can like swipe through.
Thought that was an interesting approach, but I don’t have that many “physically close scenes” because literally last time I checked, that page is filled with such scenes. Like how does one even do that?? Do pants fall down every two pages?? Or maybe it’s spanning from multiple books?? ORRRR perhaps the writer sometimes tests out ideas that they are considering and depending on how the reaction is on instagram ???(<<<<actually think that I might start doing that)
And then another thing for marketing (not sure if this has been covered already) is reaching out to local book influencers or reactors. So you can just ask , by also seeing what kinda books they normally react to.
(doubtful)
that makes nine subscribers now woooo 
Or maybe it’s spanning from multiple books?? ORRRR perhaps the writer sometimes tests out ideas that they are considering and depending on how the reaction is on instagram ???(<<<<actually think that I might start doing that)