In May of 2015 I posted a teaser page for something titled "The Flashpaper War." The only thing I said was that it was "neither parser-based nor traditionally choice-based (hyperlink or menu style)."
So -- spoilers -- the game was based on the idea of moving words around the page, placing them in different slots. I wanted to address the theme of telling stories with a story about manipulating stories, which was itself manipulated by the player as they played.
"The real question is: who is the audience."
I built a prototype of this in Javascript, wrote an outline, and began filling out the first few levels (chapters, pages, ...?)
Problem was, the prototype didn't feel very engaging. The idea of moving words around in a text game has a lot of potential -- Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe proved that with Ice-Bound. But my mechanics were pretty thin: only a couple of active words per page, and just a handful of possible configurations. I was constructing puzzles with fixed solutions, see, and there just wasn't a lot of variation in that range.
I told myself that it was important to start simple and work up. Indeed, my outline gets up to some fairly complex configurations. (Farther along than the prototype takes you.) The idea was that halfway through, you gain the ability to move words from one page to another, thus opening up the choice-space substantially.
But it still didn't feel like it had momentum. If the first half doesn't work, nobody gets to the second half.
Also, I wasn't sure how to wrap the whole thing up, which was a bit of a stumbling block.
I tried doing a rewrite on the text -- same structure, but shifting from a two-character dialogue to three characters, and present tense instead of past. I also added a traditional binary choice point at the end of each page.
I ported the engine to iPad, added nicer graphics and animations, and showed it off at Boston FIG 2015. People liked the story; I liked it too. The writing was bouncier. But players told me that it felt like traditional (static) prose with occasional minor interactions. I had walls of text with not enough meaningful choices. Protesting that it would get more interactive "later" was hardly going to convince anybody... least of all me.
I had wanted to break new IF ground, but I wasn't really succeeding. And I couldn't convince myself that it would attract an audience.
So I put the whole thing on the back burner and started the process of getting Hadean Lands up on Steam. (Launches Monday!)
So what now for The Flashpaper War?
I haven't given up on it, but I have scrapped that storyline and prototype. I am now mulling a different approach and different mechanics. It hasn't gelled yet, but I intend to keep pounding on it, particularly after the HL launch is out of the way.
The game will still be titled The Flashpaper War. (No reason to waste a good teaser page!) It will still be about stories. The characters may still be named Jacks, Bell, and Rook. Or not.
I would really, really like to release it in 2016. We'll see how that goes.