Can Unity be used to create an interactive story video game?

When I say Interactive Story, I'm not referring to things such as Life is Strange. I'm referring solely to games such as Episode and Choices where you are essentially writing a book(s) and allowing the players to select the choices that the protagonist will make. Like the games given as examples, it will be made available solely for mobile devices. I'd leave a link to the examples but not sure how the rules would apply to something like that.

 

Ever heard of visual novels? That's similar to what you're describing.

And, yes. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/game-toolkits/fungus-34184

 

I have heard of Visual Novels, yes. In fact, I am making one right now, and I can assure you, it's not quite the same thing. All you have to do to realize this is search for how to make both. You will find a million ways to make a VN and 0 ways to make what I'm talking about.

Still, I will give the toolkit you recommended a try to see if it is capable of performing the precise task I'm looking for.

 

Go ahead and provide examples.

 

If I understand correctly it sounds like something more suited to twine.

 

It's exactly the same thing.

You give players text to read.

And at certain points, you give them choices.

Anything I'm missing?

 

Please describe what you had in mind.

Because what you described so far fits squarely into description of a visual novel. In visual novel you write out all possible choices, and then let the player pick ones they want in their playthrough.

If you're trying to do some sort of collaborative writing (seen this one happen in manhwa occasionally), meaning you write a chapter and let players vote what the character is going to do, and then write continuation based on THAT... then that's not necessarily a gamedev question.

 

Episode is a game design tool, not a game. So is Choices. From the look of it, they're basically delivering text-heavy choose-your-own-adventure type content, ie the basic level of interactive fiction. They look like they're proprietary takes on Twine, with a walled garden content portal.

So are you asking if Unity the generic game design tool can be used to make an interactive fiction game design tool? Sure it can. All the most basic implementation needs to do is basically be able to build something that contains ten thousand iterations of (to paraphrase in BASIC, because that's how long ago I was seeing these kinds of CYOA games done)

if <condition> then <print text block>, goto <section>

Though obviously that's as crude as it gets.

If you want to go complex text-based narrative in Unity, without writing your own parser engine, then look at Inkle, and the Ink integration for Unity.

 

Renpy seems to be the most elegant solution for Visual Novels. And it's free.

Unity is overkill unless you trying to do something novel. But if you asking questions on forum, no good sense trying to do something novel.

A couple tools that help with design come from literature and latte: Scapple and Scrivener. There is others like campfire which is popular but for me simplicity wins. Trying to use too many softwares, tackle too many disciplines at once leads to brain drain and then the work doesn't get done. So these are the simplest tools which can get the job done IME.

 

You have just very accurately described the last year or so of my life

 

Hey it takes one to know one. If I am talking about some dumb stuff a person could do it's because I just did it.