a drop off night the author if you read this please return to it you create a masterpiece it’s a crime not to see it finish
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This old game called “when in rome” it had so much potential and various paths it was such a hangeron i miss it
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I miss Rise of a Gangster by Vendetta. Prohibition Era America isn’t a setting that I usually into, but the beginning with gang friends, the mystery surrounding what happened to sister Gina, and many backgrounds for MC (bagman, entrepreneur, and soldier are my favorites) really pique my interest and make me invested to the story. I hope Vendetta is okay, wherever they are right now.
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I only ever came across it via trawling the depths of DashingDon, but I loved The Monster of Rome. Super sad that I can’t even replay what was there anymore since the demo is privated ;-;
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Even if they don’t want to announce the cancellation of the project, it’s still not right to disappear without saying a word when you already have fans who are not only worried about the game, but about the author. Is the author still alive? Has something bad happened to them? How are we to interpret this silence? This is not okay.
I’ve noticed a lot of writers in Tumblr community doing this. They set up a blog for the game, are active for a while and then suddenly disappear without any explanation and often don’t come back. As if all those enthusiasts of game were not worth to take a moment to write one brief note about leaving. I don’t expect long confessions about personal problems reasons for such decision or specific plans about future of the project. But just about whatever would be better than silence.
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I don’t know man. The author doesn’t actually owe you anything. They were the one who spent hours and hours on their project, not you. They are not obligated to announce it.
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Sometimes authors disappear because of the pressure. Sometimes it’s not even from the readers, but by themselves. I never wrote any IF but for some time I was narrating a RPG campaign in a forum, for some friends, and got so frustrated with myself for not being able to keep a proper schedule of the game. 
Unfortunately the creative work is not a linear process. And I suppose it’s very hard for an author to put an end on a project because doesn’t get inspiration to keep writing. Of course they hope to continue some day.
My philosophy for WIPs is enjoy the ride without worrying about the destination 
of course I miss some WIPs, but for me is cool to enjoy even an unfinished work.
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I know we’re only along for the ride but it would be appreciated if they could say the car stalled instead of getting out and leaving me in the middle of the intersection
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You should leave more room for the possiblity that the author may not know how to answer that question. They know they’re alive, of course, but they may be totally unsure of whether their long weeks or months with no update should be interpreted as a cancellation or a hiatus–whether they’ll be able to come back to finish the game, or dismantle it and use bits of it elsewhere, or just never come back at all.
I get that you’d like them to pop up and give you…something. But it’s harder than you may think for an author to make a post that says nothing other than: “I’m alive but don’t know what to tell you about the WIP. Maybe I’ll come back to it, maybe not.” Is something like that really worth posting? Especially if their fans have already expressed disgruntlement or been talking as if they’re entitled to a finished WIP?
But they may well still be hoping it’s a slowdown instead of a stall, and that they’re chauffeuring you very slowly rather than abandoning you mid-junction. 
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- Horse: Foal Throttle
- Salt City Private Eye
- AAAAAA
- United We Stand
Most of them were before my time, but they were all very much up my alley. Horse protagonist! Clouds! There aren’t enough games about either of those, IMO.
Updates are nice — I don’t think anyone disagrees with that — but I’d liken getting invested in unfinished HG WIPs to willingly getting in a car with a 17-22 year old stranger who has little to no driving experience+ in a world where 4 out of 5 cars spontaneously combust.
If someone (this is a hypothetical, I don’t mean you or anyone in particular) finds getting stranded very emotionally upsetting yet keeps getting in cars anyway, at some point, that’s gotta be on them. 
+That’s not meant as an insult, just as a reflection of the fact that most HG WIP authors are young and don’t have much if any experience being the sole production manager, game designer, writer, coder, and PR person for a project the size and scope of most people’s first CSG idea.
It’s a tough job if you’ve got your marbles in a row, and 17-22 are peak years for a case of sudden onset quarter-life crisis.
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Honestly? Yes it is worthwhile, it gives some closure about the project even if it’s a simple “Yeah I have no idea how to write this for a while so I am going to put it on hiatus” so the public has some closure and the author can get a break or focus on other projects if they so do wish (or just simply say they are quitting it entirely and might never come back) the author 13leagues for instance even makes a list on which work is on hiatus and which is an ongoing project but then again they are focusing on their Pentalogy with “Superstition” which is arguably their most popular and awaited work so my comparison can fall flat
Like @Lan said, I can see where you are trying to get at but most of the authors are generally students or have full-time jobs while their interactive fiction works are more of passion projects, some of them come back in the future to rewrite that project but if there is no news for a year then it’s safe to assume that it’s dead for the time being
(for instance, Through Broken Lenses is a project that died for awhile because the author was a student while they were writing it, but the author came back some time later and decided to rewrite it)
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Says you.
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Absolutely. Like I said above, most authors who think they’re going to finish their WIPs are wrong. But I still say that we the reading public ought to treat their crazy, probably-mistaken hope as having more value than our closure. Respecting and protecting that hopefulness is how we increase the number of finished projects we get to enjoy–not all the ones we’d like to see, by a long shot, but more than we’d otherwise get.
For almost any creator, let alone ones doing it as a spare-time creative side gig, there’ll be times where their hope gets awfully fragile. An author who feels forced by their fans’ expectations to make an update during one of those rough stretches has to try to put that unlikely-seeming hope into words–which can easily kill it.
A lot of projects will go through a Schrodinger’s Cat phase where if observed, they’ll probably turn out to be dead…but if they make it through without a wave-function collapse, they may come out of the box alive after all.
So yes, it’s usually a safe assumption that long silence means project death-- and try not to resent the silence, knowing that for some authors it’ll be a precondition for the pleasant surprise of them finishing after all.
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Oh my apologies, I meant it as “After a year with no news, presume that project is dead unless the author comments about the development progress/updates the project” but i agree with the general sentiment of what you said.
Yeaaah, I don’t know about this part though, I think what really increases the number of finished projects end up being culminated into 4 points : Private Life problems, Public Reception, Programming, along professional issues or disagreements
The first two were already talked about so let me focus on Choicescript for a bit, to put it bluntly, Choicescript is good but limiting from what I have seen, to put it shortly it gives you a mold for you to work that is easy to learn at the cost of being difficult to program if you are not following said mold which can stress out the author and make it harder to progress on their project, it also hinders some artistic vision so the author is going to meet some problems if they wish to add things like backgrounds, soundtracks, quick time events, and other things that could and definitely would make their project stand out, which leads to my next point about professional issues.
Like I said before, Choicescript can be a bit limiting on the artistic side of things which can make authors look at other coding programs so they can try to fulfill their vision with no limitations and pull the plug on their project for awhile while they rewrite it in another coding program,
Alternatively they might jump ship if they end up disagreeing with the business itself and end up putting the project on hiatus while try to rewrite it and post it elsewhere(hell, last year there were 4 projects that I know of that decided to stop supporting COG for a reason or another and decided to self publish)
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Running with those categories, there’s only one that we the reading public can influence in any significant way, right? And at the WIP stage “public reception” is all about protecting author morale (which I should note doesn’t preclude critical feedback, but if we care about finished projects, we need to develop the skill of giving it without destroying morale).
We ought to recognize that for many creators in a rut, it’s demoralizing to be pushed to make a public update, and in general to have a high-pressure, demanding fanbase. I’d bet that a flexible, non-entitled fan environment will affect more finished projects than the professional disagreements do. We’re not talking big numbers in either case, relative to the majority of WIPs that will always go unfinished… but as far as I can see, it’s the one cause of dropped projects that readers can affect by our words and actions.
As for Choicescript, it does what it says on the tin. It lets first-time coders write interactive novels. It doesn’t support much in the way of graphics or music. We could talk on other threads about whether it should add more bells and whistles, but for this topic, let me just express doubts that we’d see a higher rate of finished WIPs if authors felt they needed to differentiate their work with visuals or a soundtrack as well as getting the writing done.
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Has anybody heard of Lemonade it was a ChoiceScript game and it hadn’t officialy been released but the author made glimpses of it and it was throughouly enjoyable just reading the snippets but it was only on Tumblr.
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The only WIP game that include “lemon” in it, that i knew was “When Life gives you Lemons”. Was there another one?
The name is Lemonade and the author didn’t post on the forum, only on Tumblr.
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I swear i am stopping after this one lol, anyway no I meant it that it might discourage the author from continuing in Choicescript which might cause them to seek alternatives for better UI and things like that and put the project on a hiatus while they rewrite it in another code, not “no visuals=no progress thus project is dead” lol
Again I meant it as more in a sense of a temporary progress death while they rewrite it and put it on hiatus but anyway I agree with the bad environment part
Honestly, I think that part is just a vicious cycle, "WIP is created, WIP gets popular, due to somewhat extended periods of silence the public peer pressures the author, Author gets stressed and abandons WIP, the public gets even more demanding of news from other WIP’s " and the cycle continues, at least from what I have seen it mostly happens in the forum while the Reddit and Tumblr communities are less aggressive with this sort of stuff (but then again, they are mostly fans of general interactive fictions so they kinda keep recommending each other slightly similar works)
I think Professional problems and disagreements can be influenced by the public too, remember when COG considered making NFTs only to be received with an enormous backlash by the public and authors alike with some of them (e.g Ballad of Devil’s Creek, When Twilight Strikes) jumping ship? well after that they kinda silenced that consideration after the public response lol, and the public can try to encourage the author when a professional issue screws them over (files being deleted, programming being a bitch)
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I forgot the name but it might have included the word samurai. This was way back around 2011 or earlier. It was set in feudal Japan and the premise was you were training to be a warrior like your father. The game started out from childhood. There wasn’t much to play but I really liked the writing style and was excited to develop my character. The author kept talking about all her plans for the story and she didn’t want to release anything until it was complete. So I was really excited for it but it was never finished.
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