Texture is Born

I’m very proud to announce the official release of our interactive fiction authoring tool, Texture!

At the top of the post is Jonathan Wyke‘s cover art for Pretty Sure, the first game I made with it. It’s about parenting after Earth is colonized. You can play it on anything with a web browser but it’s especially nice on a tablet.

Juhana Leinonen and I have been chipping away at Texture for a few years, and it started with wanting to make an interactive fiction interface that was approachable and touchscreen-friendly.

Juhana liked the word-on-word mechanic I’d come up with and we eventually started to talk about making it an authoring system open for anyone to make games with. While I can code, I really prefer staying in my right brain, and I know most writers are the same. So we built a WYSIWYG interface so you can make IF games without any coding.

If it looks like your kind of fun, jump in to the step-by-step tutorial we’ve created and get the basics in about 10 minutes. You don’t even need to sign up to start making games, though if you do you can publish and share work via the Texture Public Library. I have a few other works in the library including this silly one that works well on a phone.

It was already amazing to get to work with Juhana, an enormously talented programmer, but I am delighted to say that some awesome gamemaker friends — Robert “Cobra Club” Yang and Jake “Kentucky Route Zero” Elliott — were generous enough to create little Texture works for the launch. You can check them out on the Texture Public Library.

Also, if you find yourself enjoying the tool, keep in mind that the annual Interactive Fiction Competition is currently accepting entries until Sept. 28th!

For folks who are familiar with IF, we imagine it’ll fill a spot between Inform and Twine. We’ve gotten great feedback from key contributors to each of those tools (thanks Emily and Chris!).