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Android

Plot Generator and Writing Prompt App for Android

March 4, 2019

Literature, Programming

Android, app, computer, programming, writing

Looking for a more creativity-based solution? Try Story Dice, a program I recently made.

Please note that none of my Android apps is any longer maintained – and they’re not even available on Google Play anymore – for reasons you can read about here. If you still have any of the Home for Fiction Android apps installed on your phone, you’re advised to uninstall them. The post below should be seen purely as a snapshot of history.

After finishing my ambitious Mansion Escape text adventure app, I thought to make something a little simpler. The Plot Generator and Writing Prompt app is a simple, lightweight app for Android that helps writers come up with new ideas. This writing prompt app, as the name implies, offers authors an idea to work and expand on. Effectively, it produces a short text containing what is a plot description of sorts. You can think of it as the back cover of a book.

The generated text consists of a basic structure (common in all generated combinations) and a set of randomized items, such as protagonist and antagonist names, gender, character attributes, occupation, field of narrative tension, and others.

Writing prompt

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Mansion Escape – a Text Adventure App for Android

January 22, 2019

Literature, Programming

Android, app, computer, programming, text adventure

Note: If you’re interested in Mansion Escape, check its brand new iteration, available for PC, Mac, or Linux, on desktop or mobile.

Please note that none of my Android apps is any longer maintained – and they’re not even available on Google Play anymore – for reasons you can read about here. If you still have any of the Home for Fiction Android apps installed on your phone, you’re advised to uninstall them. The post below should be seen purely as a snapshot of history.

Mansion Escape is a text adventure app I’ve developed for Android phones and tablets. Mansion Escape pays homage to the text adventure genre of the early computer era, as well as to the “dark mansion” genre of films, board games, and narrative in general.

After all, a text adventure app is first and foremost a narrative! That is, a text adventure app is a piece of interactive fiction, where the player/reader follows a story actually participating in it, deciding which path to take.

Mansion Escape: a Text Adventure App where Clue meets the Cold War

I’ve talked in the past about the devolution of video games, and how today’s games can sometimes be a bit too easy. Text adventures were a kind of adventure games in the early computer era, where the player had to actually read (the horror, the horror) the descriptions, as there were no graphics.

text adventure app

Of course I realized that this is not 1985, and an entirely text-based Android app would not be well received. So, instead of (old-school) typing commands, we use buttons. But make no mistake! This is still a text adventure game.

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What If – Random Quote Generator Widget

December 23, 2018

Programming

Android, app, computer, programming, what if, widget

Please note that none of my Android apps is any longer maintained – and they’re not even available on Google Play anymore – for reasons you can read about here. If you still have any of the Home for Fiction Android apps installed on your phone, you’re advised to uninstall them. The post below should be seen purely as a snapshot of history.

Besides GhostWriter and Narrative Nods, I’ve also published a third Android app about which I haven’t talked in this blog. The app is called What If – Random Quote Generator Widget.

As the name probably reveals, it’s a simple widget that lives on your screen and shows random what if quotes. It’s an entirely random quote generator, which means it can produce some inadvertently hilarious phrases.

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