Writing Shotgun Style

A blog about writing stuff. Sometimes. Also TTRPGS.

[darkhologramgarden]

Jesus, I really forgot about this account huh? I meant to use it more but I could never really get the hang of using tumblr.

[nyancrimew]

they cant get you if you never log off and dont stop posting

[twilightofthesandwiches]

Hey! Spin this Wheel of all Pokemon Abilities!

You now have this Ability in your real life!

How do you feel?

HELL YEAH THIS IS AWESOME

This is extremely great!

This is very good!

This is… pretty good

This… could be worse?

I feel utterly neutral about this

This has very strong upsides and downsides, feel conflicted

This is basically useless to me!

This… isn’t great

This sucks…

This is really bad, actually!

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

Voting ended onApr 11

[kuma-kami]

Visit Original Link

[snowdaysforever]

DELETE THIS POST

[theoldspaceevibes-deactivated20]

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

[froborr]

*clicks play in morbid curiosity*

*hammers reblog button*

[chongoblog]

I think I find this post every April Fools Day and I am so happy that I do

[charlesoberonn]

[prokopetz]

YA television show that does the power-scaling thing where each season needs a new villain to keep the stakes commensurate with the heroes' increasing competence – then the final season's villain turns out to be season one's wacky Absent-Minded Professor type again, except they got an ADHD diagnosis and got properly medicated in the interim and are now tremendously dangerous.

[endlace]

whatever cute shit a game has got going on is never worth a gambling addiction

[endlace]

🫵 uninstall that gacha game.

[technofeudalism]

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

[technofeudalism]

since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.

anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.

Games

A Dark Room - text-based science fiction role-playing game.

corru.observer - science fiction adventure web game.

Improbable Island - old-school text adventure game.

Candy Box 2 - incremental clicker game that evolves into RPG.

Arcanum - open source wizard clicker game.

sandspiel, Powder Game, Powder Game 2, The Powder Toy - more sand physics games.

Orb.Farm - fishtank simulator.

Façade - experimental game with a real-time interactive narrative where you try to fix a failing marriage.

The Catacombs of Solaris - trippy art game.

Yume Nikki Online - online version of the surreal classic plus fangames.

The Barncle Goose Experiment - combine element/alchemy game based on antique theories of abiogenesis.

Fallen London - free-to-play text-based open world RPG.

Nested - very unique text-based universe expanding game. described as possibly @orteil42's favorite thing he's ever made.

The Process of Elimination - interactive web novel (by @hypertextdog)

Discworld MUD - multiplayer, text-based, online game (a MUD, or text MMORPG) based on the Discworld books.

Horse Master - surreal text game about training a horse.

EYEZMAZE - flash (RIP) or HTML5-based puzzle games.

You Are Jeff Bezos - text game. spend Jeff Bezos' fortune.

The Password Game - challenging puzzle game where you have to meet password requirements (by neal)

Universal Paperclips - incremental paperclip making game.

Half-Earth - planetary disaster planning game where you try to save the world using socialism.

ChooseYourStory - community-driven website centered on CYOA style story games.

PhD Simulator - random event based text game. make your choice each month and see if you can graduate on time.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - open source roguelike.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - turn-based survival roguelike set in the modern day.

Nethack - open source roguelike originally released in 1987.

FarmRPG - simple, mobile-friendly, text-based farming RPG.

Kingdom of Loathing - browser-based community MMORPG.

PokeRogue - browser-based Pokemon roguelike

Tools

Text Game Builder - works in your browser, with just a little bit of Python (by @grumpygandalf)

Twine - great (free!) tool for making text-based games quickly.

Ink - scripting language for interactive fiction (also free)

Flashpoint Archive - a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.

PICO-8 - fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.

Non-Games

Library of Babel - interactive illustration which attempts to simulate what it might be like to browse The Library of Babel.

Superbad - technically not a game, sprawling website full of secrets.

17776 - serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about football in the far-future. beautiful, creative, legendary. created by Jon Bois, a legend and one of my favorite writers of all time.

Choice of Games - text-based, choose-your-own-adventure games (interactive fiction). some free-to-play, others can be bought like an ebook.

The Deep Sea - scroll to the bottom of the ocean. encounter the humble squid and his friends (by neal)

Space Elevator - like The Deep Sea, but up instead of down. you can equip your avatar with a scarf (by neal)

Internet Artifacts - an interactive history of the early internet (by neal)

If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - scroll through an accurately scaled model of the universe.

r/incremental_games - reddit community for incremental games.

r/WebGames - reddit community for web games in general.

thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.

[monchursouls]

Reblogging the update too

[darkhologramgarden]

Finally had another Good Idea only for me to look it up and Ao3 and it's already been done. I was so proud of the idea too dangit. I mean I still could do it but like I don't want to be accused of ripping someone off.

It was gonna be about Quincey Harker, all grown up and a soldier in the British Army (assuming the epilogue of Dracula where he was six years old was set in 1897 when the real-world novel was published, which would make him 23 in 1914) in the trenches of the Western Front, surviving off the wits he inherited from his father Johnathan, latent minor psychic powers he inherited from his mother Mina (I was thinking he gets headaches when the unnatural is near), and the monster hunting skills and medical knack of his godfather Abraham. Combining that with his newfound army training, and you have a recipe for a mixture of brutal trench combat, character moments between men on the line, and Quincey learning that there are more monsters in the world than just one Carpathian Count, and worse: that some of them stalk No Man's Land, and he might be the only man who can put them down.

[darkhologramgarden]

I started this blog meaning to do A Post A Day and I realized very fast I simply do not have that much stuff to talk about. Oops.

[coffee-without-anesthetics]

forgive me father for i have opened a notification and read the message within to make the red dot go away and then forgot to reply for a month . it will happen again

[retquits]

there is something so crazy and powerful about having art of your oc that was made by anyone other than yourself. like oh my god you actually exist outside of my own brain that's WILD

[darkhologramgarden]

this happened to me for the first time and I literally did the danny devito "oh my god I get it" gif IRL

[flowerbleedme]

fanfic is extremely hard

[darkhologramgarden]

I have all these damn lancer pilots and I'm not doing anything with them. I should write vignettes. Maybe an anthology of Tales From The Orion Arm or something. I should be doing something with all these blorbos. In the time it took since I last thought about this I got a new one. It's so bad. Now I have four things to write.

[darkhologramgarden]

so many lancer pilots and no games to play them in, I have like 17 now it's so bad

[darkhologramgarden]

Another silly fanfic idea that will never be completed, but this one's a little less solid than the others (not that they were much more substantial to begin with.) A Space Marine is thrown bodily though the warp by a Chaos Sorcerer, not to drive him mad with warp exposure, but to drive him mad with the idea of not mattering. Because the Warp connects all sorts of strange places, he lands in a crater on the front lawn of the Xavier Institute For Gifted Youngsters. You'd think this would end in a massacre, but this is not just any Astartes, this is a Lamenter, and the combination of his awful luck, remarkable empathy for an Angel of the Emperor, and the fact that the X-Men's Omega Levels frankly outclass him means that for once, he can't just kill the mutants and be done with it. A Space Marine is not going to turn into a superhero, but maybe something remarkable happens anyway.

If I do it right it's echoing some of those classic Marvel stories about if being a hero matters, and also one of those classic Warhammer stories about hope in a hopeless place. will be linked here, eventually

[darkhologramgarden]

sometimes I just want to write gratuitous stupid stuff. my in-the-works crossover between Fist of the North Star and Fallout is one of those projects. Frankly this is nothing but excuses to throw a Deathclaw at Kenshiro and write what happens, but I think it could be fun. Besides, I get to be blatantly self-indulgent and make up new badass sounding techniques for dealing with mutants and robots and power armor users and so on. available on Ao3 when it's done (never)