Re: Feu de Joie (serialized interactive fiction): Session 2 uploaded

adeniro

Hey all, so I've just released the first installment in Twine of a work of serialized interactive fiction called Feu de Joie:

'A freelance QA specialist has started archiving an unusual project online that he has been working on. A mysterious company named BUCOLIC ehf, a "digital literature publisher", is developing an interactive version of Lord Dunsany's collection of essays about World War One, Unhappy, Far-Off Things. (Lord Dunsany is probably best known as the fantasist who was an early influence on Lovecraft.) Each essay in the collection is being tested as a "Session." But something is not quite right with the first one.'

http://www.feudejoie.net

There'll be ways to engage with the story outside of Twine in future installments.

This is also the first work I've done that seems like a good fit for Patreon, because of its serialized nature.

http://www.patreon.com/adeniro

Thank you and I hope you enjoy playing and reading it!

litrouke

Interesting! I'm also planning something of a serialized work, so this is cool for me to see.

If I may suggest a few things -- for the longer excerpts of Dunsany that don't contain line breaks, either increasing the spacing between lines or increasing the font size might be helpful. For example, the passage starting from 'human thing, for men and women worship no more in Arras Cathedral, and the trees have come instead; little humble things, all less than four years old....' At least for myself, reading tightly-lined blocks of text on the computer is difficult. As these passages are short, you have plenty of space on the page to increase font size.

And this is getting nitpicky, but the big gap between the passage and the Restart/Bookmark buttons bothers me a little --- although perhaps the design is meant to look unpolished and rough?

Uhh what else... On my computer, your mousereplace macro is lagging: did you add in the CSS to make smooth transitions, or are you wishing for the text to lag like that? As for the backwards-written text, I wonder if a full page of it isn't a little much (the one starting with "Between the bog and the salt plain: this is our Arras"). A few lines isn't any trouble to read, but more than that really slows things down... Maybe play around with timedreplace/hoverreplace to do some kind of alternation with the direction of text? Ie, the reader has only a second to read the line before it reverses directions, or if they touch it, it immediately reverses, etc... That at least gives the reader's brain/eyes a little help in reading the backwards text.

I like the blurred grey after we come back from the orange passages, and all the actual writing and the idea of it seems quite nice. Just formatting nitpicks! ^___^

adeniro

Thank you very much! I hadn't been looking for feedback (for this one, at least) but your comments are really appreciated.

adeniro

I figured I'd keep updates about new installments in a single thread. Session 2 is now online.

"The Tester continues his testing of the latest interactive Dunsany essay about World War I. But something is still "broken" in the text. And the muted voices from the first Session have become more insistent, all while his employers seem to have a mysterious motive of their own... "

http://www.feudejoie.net

and the Patreon for this work: http://www.patreon.com/adeniro

Thanks!