Slightly more than two weeks ago I asked people to contribute ideas for an interactive fiction game.

Play “Improvised Story #0 – Release 0, First Draft” now!

What Went Right

• The “call to action” was on Twitter, but I have my accounts set up so that most things I post on Twitter also show up on my Facebook page.  All the ideas came from Facebook.  Nobody on Twitter seemed interested.
• Reusing old code from previous projects.  I’ve built up quite the repertoire of IF objects to play with.
• Evocative suggestions.  A couple of these were great for sparking the imagination.
• Creating a framework to fit everything together.  I’m starting to think that what I’m really best at is creating systems to help things (or people) work together.
• Hacking at Parchment, the tool I’m using to let people play the game over the web.  Now that I’ve gained some experience with it, I can do even more cool things.

What Went Wrong

• Overly ambitious ideas.  Seriously, a time machine?  Not in the “First Draft”, I’m afraid.  (I made sure, however, to include at least one idea from each contributor in the first draft.)
• Characters.  They’re the most complicated IF objects to create.  (I only created one; another will come in a later release.)
• A dearth of puzzles.  Puzzles are hard to think up; I had to brainstorm some based on the contributed objects and characters.  That was the part of the project where I just kind of sat there grimacing; testing and debugging is annoying, but at least I felt like I was doing something.

What’s Next

More ideas can be implemented.  Of course, the project will be even more interesting if more people contribute…