Narrows: online storytelling system

It was fun to play and received a degree of general acclaim, but it was also a lot of work! If I were building tooling in support of a similar game, the first thing I'd write would be a bot that'd observe and correlate directional moves, "look"/"examine" commands, and the like, with their responses - and, when a previously visited location or a previously examined object were encountered again, give the author the option of reissuing the previous response, with or without prior editing. Such a bot could also be preloaded with responses to commands likely to be issued during a game.

Inventory management, and object management in general, would be another high-payoff automation target. Remembering what's where, both on the map and in the player's inventory, is a drag and severely error-prone; a bot tracking TAKE, DROP, and like commands, or even just able to be told by the author of object status changes (or both!), will both save a lot of time, and greatly improve the flow.

In my experience, it's easier for players to remain involved and engaged, and the game to remain enjoyable, when responses come quickly - although I'm not too sure this isn't an artifact of my having played these games in a public Slack channel, which necessarily has a certain performative aspect about it. Games with a smaller audience, or no audience at all beyond those actually playing, might not have such concerns. In any case, having a bot that's seen what came before and can reproduce it without manual effort, but also gives the author a chance to modify those responses where necessary, saves a lot of work that could be better spent on imagining and describing a compelling story, and would thus I think be a good place to start.

How to scale the game to multiple players, I have no idea - for classic interactive fiction, that'd more or less mean multiple games running in parallel, so the model doesn't really fit. For something more like a multiplayer RPG, I'm not even sure where I'd start.

(One other note - unless there's a very compelling reason otherwise, I'd lean by default to an open source offering like Mattermost or Rocket.chat over Slack for this. On the one hand, Slack's pricing model and rolling archive on the free tier lack appeal; on the other, some of the tooling we're talking about might well be more effectively built as part of the platform than as user scripts or as bots interacting with webhooks. I've used Slack, and it is very good! But another similar platform might be better for this use case.)

I will say that https://github.com/emanchado/narrows/blob/master/README.md#i... could have been almost completely scripted.

I did know Storium! It's very similar indeed but I decided to write my own because it didn't quite fit my vision.

1) I have an intense hate for challenge-based RPGs, and I hate when players have to do math or focus on calculating if they have enough points of whatever nonsense to reach some target.

2) I didn't want players to write part of the story text themselves because I wanted all that text to have a single voice/style. NARROWS has a way to "export" a narration as a kind of novel, and it reads more or less like a normal short story.

3) I wanted it to feel as immersive as possible, and have as little UI (for the readers) as possible. Having an audio track and a background image for every chapter was important to me. It might be a petty thing, but as I had decided to write my own anyway...

I have actually been thinking of buying some domain and having a public installation that anyone can use (I'd have to change some things, like add a "Forgot password" feature and such)... but I'd have to pay for it myself, and it might become a maintenance burden. So I dunno.

They both predate the Internet and personal computers, but are still very interesting, creative, and inspiring.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo