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The Clock Village: an Interactive Fiction Experience

April 24, 2023

Experiencing, Fiction, Programming

fiction, game, programming, text adventure, video games

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The Clock Village, my latest programming project, is first and foremost an interactive fiction experience. Only nominally could one also call it a modern text adventure game, like my earlier Mansion Escape.

In other words, though in this process as a “player” you move around, engage in interactive dialogues, collect and use items, and try to increase the score that will let you get a “better” ending, I prefer to see The Clock Village as something more artistic.

Perhaps it’s a philosophical exploration of self. Or maybe a short interactive reflection of our innermost existential anxieties. Maybe, like true art, it simply is what its experiencer wants it to be

interactive fiction clock village game screen
This is the main screen of the interface. I don’t want to call it “game”; it’s interactive fiction
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Mansion Escape – a Text Adventure App for Android

January 22, 2019

Literature, Programming

Android, app, computer, programming, text adventure

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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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