Hi! I wanted to sound folks out on the idea of installment-based Interactive Fic / COG-style games.
We have “slice of life” TV shows like b99, Friends, Grey’s Anatomy etc. - has anyone ever done/been interested in doing something similar for IF/COG? i.e. The narrative is left semi-fluid and released / written a chunk at a time (rather than all at once, with a set ending?) Each chapter could even be semi-self contained (kinda like how Sherlock holmes was written and released in newspapers in discrete chunks, back in the day), held together with a loose plotline, setting, and cast of characters.
Of course, there’s games/omnibuses like “choices” or “episodes”, but is there scope to pursue this in a more legitimately branching narrative (not to diss “choices” for sure, but the narrative is pretty linear)? Or is there simply too much ambiguity to do branching narratives without knowing where exactly the story will lead? Can this be somewhat addressed via planning out the main plotpoints/branches for the narrative, and having certain global variables that pick up where the last semi-self-contained “chapter” left off?
Is it also an issue of the choice script engine and what CoG/HG is comfortable releasing? I mean I suppose installment-based IFs already exist on tumblr etc. using other scripts/platforms? Interested to know what you guys think!
[I still intend for my WIP (College Tennis: Origin Story (WIP))* to be largely “traditional” but it was just a thought that occured to me, since I could definitely see a game featuring life as a college student-athlete being quite open-ended in terms of what issues/themes/scenes to cover.
*no pressure at all to check it out btw, I’m asking this more generally and this is just for context as to where I’m coming from with this wild(?) question), and wanted to hear more thoughts on this format!