Hello, I’m a graduate student conducting research on the impact of design on player immersion in video games—my study is “Familiar and Strange: Defamiliarization’s Impact on Immersion in Experiences with Non-Human Player Characters.” I’m looking for a few people to play through short game segments and then take an online survey – it should take about 30 minutes. Participants can also sign up for a brief (15 minutes or so) interview about their experience.

Specifically, I am looking for people 18-49 years old who play games moderately to frequently. Those under 18, 50+ or those who play games infrequently are excluded from this study.

This study has been approved by Ball State University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB-FY2026-317).

If you are interested in participating, please use this link! https://bsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bxSzsAcVPaYl9To

If you have any questions, please reach out to me, June Fields, student Co-PI, at [june.fields@bsu.edu](mailto:june.fields@bsu.edu), or to the PI and Associate Professor at the Ball State School of Journalism and Strategic Communications Joshua Fisher at joshua.fisher@bsu.edu.

Hi friends! What do you think?

Shop Crush is a mysterious shop simulator with psychological horror elements, set in the early 2000s.

In this hybrid visual novel, you run a small thrift shop, get to know your customers, figure out what they really want, and decide what to put in front of them. Every customer has their own personality, preferences, and hidden motives - and it’s up to you to figure them out.

Behind each customer is a small psychological mystery waiting to be uncovered. Read their behavior, make the right calls, and balance profit against customer trust as you try to keep the shop running for one more day.

Hey everyone! I'm working on a prototype and would love to get people's feedback on what I have so far. It's a cozy murder mystery in the same vein as Nancy Drew and Danganronpa.

Happy Sleuthing!

Game:

The Midnight Muse - Visual Novel by tomwilhelm

password: gumshoe

Bug Report:

https://forms.gle/cb7tZe1Nw33fwtKa8

Feedback survey:

https://forms.gle/hkcMaSfrWVfMzUV79

Hi! If you have time to kill some feedback on this would be really appreciated!

Genre: Psychological thriller/gothic/drama

Setting: A very loose depiction of Victorian London

Format: Kinetic Novel

Content Warnings: Domestic Violence, Misogyny, Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Ambiguous Consent

Brief pitch: In Late Victorian London, a broke barmaid and her con artist friend make a plan to rob a wealthy and reclusive nobleman. Little do they know their target is far stranger and more dangerous than they could've ever imagined.

The story is partially coded but I'd rather get the script fully locked down before I start commissioning artists and finalising it into an actual game. The dialogue is far from historically accurate but the setting isn't all that exaggerated (who knew the late victorian cigarette had mass produced cigarettes?). If you do read thank you! I'd love to hear what you think good or bad.

Once the first episode is done and has all the art together it'll be released for free on Steam and itch.io. Thanks again :)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTJvcqA9cIl9EkhASnuMpUd0TCDV0cjiYHpIZf8C9C0sTYix30LaRddwXG97Yogsi68oQNbfvHS5N8R/pub

Just came across this raw, gritty interactive psychological horror book on Amazon and wanted to share it here. It's a choice-driven slasher story with multiple paths and 10 different endings depending on what decisions you make to survive.

If you're looking for a new text-based horror nightmare to dive into, check it out here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HHFCXD7K

It's called Vice Signalling - your goal is to infiltrate a secret society, decipher their secret signals and use them to uncover a conspiracy against the Emperor.

It kinda plays like a mix of a visual novel and a puzzle game. One playthrough takes about 40 minutes, and it features 3 different endings.

And it's completely free!

Originally, Vice Signalling was a Ludum Dare 59 entry, but we decided to turn it into a proper standalone game and release it on Steam adding QoL features, achievements, and a lot of extra polish.

Here is a quick follow-up to yesterday's intro post. I appreciate the upvotes on my last post.

Update on Prisoner of the Crown: this week added a whole new wing of the dungeon, new rooms, new puzzles, new dangers, and a few discoveries best left for you to find yourself.

Also spent time on things you won't see directly but that matter: fixed a bug where a save checkpoint could trap players in an unwinnable retry loop, and rebalanced hunger/thirst/light pacing so the early game plays fairer.

The demo is still up if you want a taste of the prose:

👉 https://artfulleprechaun.itch.io/prisoner-of-the-crown-demo

You can also find the studio at artfulleprechaun.com if you want to follow along outside Reddit.

Hey guys! I've created an interactive fiction piece that is build around the telescopic text feature, which I haven't seen used that much. It's a story about traveling through one's memories and assositaions, trying to find peace with the past. I'm really eager to hear your feedback if you have any! Play on Itch

I've always been really into the aesthetics and atmosphere surrounding Satanism, occult rituals, and all that dark stuff. At some point I started looking for interactive games that really leaned into those themes -- and honestly, I couldn't find any that scratched that itch.

So I decided to make one myself.

It is called Sacrificium, an interactive horror game about a guy who gets kidnapped by a Satanic cult and wakes up trapped inside their castle. Now he has to find a way out, survive whatever the cult has prepared for him, and somehow keep his sanity intact along the way.

Your choices actually matter -- some will cost you health, others will mess with your sanity, and both can completely change how certain situations play out. Sometimes running is the smartest option. Sometimes fighting back is. And sometimes the choice that looks safest can make things much worse.

I recently released a free demo on Steam, so I thought I'd share it here. I'd love to hear what you guys think -- and if you know any other interactive fiction that explores similar themes, I'd genuinely love to check it out.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4719600/Sacrificium/

An interactive story I made with Twine.

It is a continuation of the video game Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Please give it a try.

I want to get better, so feedback is very much appreciated.

Hello Everybody!

I want to send some people a game book, which is around 60 puzzles long, and I've been working on it on and off for about half a year.

I would very much appreciate some playtesting of it with thoughts about the story and the puzzles.

The theme of the book is a Secret Agent / Spy-themed espionage game book, where the reader becomes the agent of a secret agency stopping global threats. Here is the cover. If you would like to have a PDF copy sent your way, ping me a dm or respond in the comments.

Thanks In advance :D

Whenever dialogue or negotiation is the core mechanic in games, 95% of titles use multiple-choice branches (Pick A, B, or C).

While multiple-choice is easy to balance, it often feels like reading a branching script rather than having a genuine conversation where you're trying to convince someone.

What are some of the best games you've played where the conversation felt truly dynamic or where typing your own arguments/questions was actually the central puzzle mechanic?

I have had a vision of a game with similar mechanics to Disco Elysium for a few years now and finally decided to pull the trigger, but the existing tools (arcticy, twine, yarn) just didn't meet my needs so I'm building my own. So far, it's helped me complete Act 1 writing, but I've built it with a *potential* future of 500k-1M words in mind so I don't run into the same problems that a large team (DE) or even a solo dev (Esoteric Ebb) ran into.

My main features I added are first class entities (dialogue, quest, faction, skill, etc), validation built-in, text/node editing, easy search, in-editor review comments, dialogue route playing and saving, and lots more. I'm not a game dev by trade, but, the more I pursue it, the more it feels like you need to build processes and workflows for content/balance/whatever your game's core mechanic is early on, if you want to keep yourself somewhat sane haha.

Anyways, if folks want to try it, it's free, engine agnostic, and I have implementations for common frameworks and demo projects to reference. Probably overkill for a lot of folks who wouldn't be using all of the entities, but, if you are tired of misconfigured references, uncaught typos, and managing dialogue dependencies, it could be quite helpful.

After dozens of test lives, I still haven't managed to become Pirate King myself.

Parser IF needs a keyboard, and consoles don't have one. That's most of why text adventures on consoles turned into menus of verbs. I wanted to know whether the constraint was real, so I put a Z-machine on the original PlayStation and made the controller type.

English is the telephone keypad. The D-pad picks a key, a face button picks which letter on it — 2 = ABC, 7 = PQRS.

Japanese is phone flick input. Left hand picks the consonant row, right hand the vowel — and the flick directions land on the face buttons in the positions they already point to (□ left = い, △ up = う, ○ right = え, ✕ down = お). The parser underneath stays English, so all, except and disambiguation questions all still work.

It's slower than a real keyboard, and much faster than poking at an on-screen one with the D-pad — which is the thing it actually replaces. I'm still clumsy in the video; the layout is doing the work, not my hands. It gets intuitive quickly, because there's nothing new to learn.

English mode is a plain z3 player, so in principle you could swap in another story file and rebuild. I've only ever run Zork I through it — untested, not a feature.

Video: https://youtu.be/rmKmOpTu2to

Code: https://github.com/msonrm/zenmai

Here's my latest IF (still a WIP) that I've written and designed during the last Writing Interactive Academy of Greg Buchanan (https://www.gregbuchanan.co.uk/courses; I recommend taking a look!)

\[https://gurpegui.itch.io/the-last-seven-days-of-sir-suero\\\](https://gurpegui.itch.io/the-last-seven-days-of-sir-suero)

I’ll update the game whenever I can, as it’s just a small part of it! But I appreciate any comment, star, or advice!