cadavre exquis
draw in the box to add to the drawing above
A while ago I tried writing a story (complete with photographs) via instagram story polls. So I'd present a fork in possible input decisions ("fight or run? slash or kick? reload from last checkpoint or no?"), and then make each decision by choosing the most popular option. It was fun to think through multiple potential outcomes at once, and consider where the story might go based on what decisions are made by The Masses. I think I was adding to the story daily. I photographed each frame, but I wish I would have drawn them instead. Would have been less effort.
Unrelated, I attended Roguelike Celebration a couple weeks ago. We had a lil zoom breakout room about virtual meeting spaces.
Both of these things rattling in my head together formed an idea. It got me thinking about building a game/tool like a MUSH with a minimal web interface instead of a command line interface. I'm picturing something like this:
You're presented with a story. You take actions by clicking buttons. The story unfolds based on the actions you take. You make several decisions that fork the story. (I wrote an example story in TWINE here: http://tilde.town/~emu/old-man.html) So eventually you hit a dead end in the story. But then you are prompted for the next action to take. Now you type in what you'd like to do instead of selecting it from a list. And then when you take that action, you're asked to describe what happens after taking that action. So bascially, you're guided by prompts to add to the story that you were just reading.
The MUSH idea comes in because this is meant to be a shared among a network of people. Ideas you add to the story become canon, and visible for other people to see.
Also, while building https://cadavre-exquis.emu.media, I wrote some JS that functions as a drawing pad which can submit its contents through a POST coming from an HTML form element. I believe I can reuse this code to add drawing tools on top of the interface I described. So the story is illustrated. You are prompted not only to write what happens in a scene, but to draw illustrations for it.
figma prototype, telling an incomplete version of the story from the TWINE link above: https://www.figma.com/proto/1EaWYw82F0pY7HbVyRRhti/graphical-mush-prototype?scaling=min-zoom&node-id=4%3A1