I used to write a bunch for MUDs, and a few years ago, I decided I wanted to try making my own game. I started as a writer/QA/project management for my first few game jams because I was struggling to create something fully on my own.

This hybrid “help as needed” role let me get hands on experience and showed me a deeper look behind the scenes of how games are made, without being overwhelmed by all the setup needed to get my hands in the mess – I had previously been daunted by the basics of just setting up engines and SDKs and CLIs and virtual environments and all that stuff.

This was the result from the first game where I did design/heavy writing focus and no code: https://misc-mike.itch.io/bookworm

We had envisioned something impressive with the player changing the story, but as development continued we learned about scoping and timelines: our coder ran out of time, so I focused on finding us public domain images and twisting together a concept of a thing that would work with the functions we had coded. The result is kinda cute.

From there, I tried out making my own games using a range of different engines which focused on text-heavy development:

• Twine: webdev (eg CSS, html) for interactive hypertext
• Choicescript: uses very basic scripting for interactive cyoa novels
• Ren’Py: uses python for visual novels
• Quest and QuestJS: for text adventures
• Adventuron: designed to teach children how to code via making text adventures

This is not an exhaustive list – https://intfiction.org/ is a great resource for even more options such as TADS.

Twine resonated quickly with me as I used to make websites and skin forums back in the day. The concept is overall very similar to building a website, so I found it easy to use.

I went on to make my own game for my next jam, a crazy experiment in procedural language (every dev has their dragon MMO moment) called reMemory: https://loressa.itch.io/rememory

The devlog for that has some good info about CSS – I learned a ton and it’s frankly kinda insane and awesome that I was able to produce that (even if it’s a mess) for the first thing I made in Twine.

For pure writers, I’d personally suggest you try out Choicescript via Choice of Games – it’s easy to code and focuses a lot on writing. The code doesn’t need to be complex and the only images you NEED are static ones for the cover art. Don’t have to worry about music at all. Make sure to download the IDE – that means integrated development environment, and it’s basically an app to do the coding in.

You can even publish through them to an existing audience of people who like reading/playing interactive novels. I suggest trying out some of their games first to get an idea of the kind of game you can make as a solo text developer!

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Be sure to check out the hosted games category – that’s how you’d be publishing a game if you make one through them. Even if your game doesn’t do well commercially, you’ll have a published portfolio piece, which can be used to leverage future writing work.

I’m currently working on two different choicescript experiments. One has an easter egg coded in for if you don’t properly pick a name for your player character – and, stepping back, how wild is it that I’ve gone from writing and trying to make games for other people to making my own stories I want to tell…and not just making them, but adding in secret jokes?!

It’s fun to step back and reflect sometimes, and I hope some of you reading this find some inspiration to try to create something yourself! 🙂