Ian Livingstone’s Top Tips for Interactive Fiction

Writing Tips from a Master of the Genre

One of Ian Livingstone’s beautiful handdrawn maps for Port of Peril

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Fighting Fantasy books. I used to make my friends play them with me — I’d act as narrator and they’d have to act out the scenes. We chose our routes through together. Creature of Havoc incorporated textual tricks I still think about today when working on interactive pieces. A secret language you could learn to speak. A magical pendant that provided access to secret passages (in both senses of the word). The ganjees in Citadel of Chaos gave me nightmares. I spent days trying to figure out how to circumvent them, until my Mum suggested I just skip past them. I was horrified at the thought of cheating back then. When I played the latest addition to the series, Port of Peril, I reached a point where I ‘won’ every battle just so I could finally make it to the ending.

It’ll perhaps come as no surprise, then, that when Fighting Fantasy co-creator Ian Livingstone came to Nottingham Central Library to share his writing tips, that I jumped at the chance to see him. Like the unnamed Adventurer carrying bits of string and handfuls of copper nails just in case they come in handy, I loaded up my notebook with all his tips and tricks (even those that were definitely jokes) and empty them out for you here.

1. Graph paper comes in handy for drawing initial dungeon layouts. Livingstone is all analogue, all the time.
2. The Something of Something is the tried and tested naming convention for Choose Your Own Adventure Books (I’ve already messed up there with my own efforts).
3. Non-sequential numbering of passages is essential. This one in particular really intrigued me, because I remember being oddly fixated on it as a child. I spent a long time wondering how on earth you would go about writing this particular feature and my mum sagely informed me that they must write it all out in order first and then jumble it up (perhaps even using a computer program to do so) afterwards. But no, as I said, Livingstone is 100% analogue, so his method was to list the numbers 1–400 (because all FFs contain 400 passages) and assign them randomly to each bit of the map as shown above, which then corresponds to the written out passages. As with many aspects of interactive fiction, it’s both simpler and more complex than I imagined.
4. Ensure there are surprises along the way. No easy paths to the treasure. Livingstone described this rather wonderfully as “sprinkling rose petals towards quicksand.”
5. Show don’t tell — it’s an oldie but a goodie.
6. Create environment-appropriate creatures. No yetis on volcanoes.
7. Offer hints through NPC dialogue. If they skip it or don’t pay proper attention to it, they’ve no-one to blame but themselves.
8. Limit left turn instadeaths. And instadeaths more generally, really. If deployed too often, it loses its power.
9. Imagine yourself as the reader. This ties back in to the previous point. It’s not fun for the reader to die continually. Although, it took me sixteen attempts to survive Port of Peril, and six of those were after determining that I’d win every battle. I was trapped in a cellar by a man-orc, wrongly imprisoned, captured by cave trolls, killed by poisoned gas, succumbed to a hail of arrows, suffered a crossbow bolt in the back, endured death by tentacle-mouthed beast and was overwhelmed by skeletons and that’s not including all the minor deaths during creature encounters because the dice are never on my side. And I had a whale of a time.
10. Avoid loops. This was in relation to game books specifically rather than interactive fiction more generally, because it’s not possible to track how many times a reader has visited a passage and whether they’ve become stuck in the same way as with digital IF.
11. Employ devices to mitigate against cheating. For example, by asking players to turn to the passage number mentioned when they collected the item, rather than trusting them to be honest about their inventory items, because they won’t be. This, shortly after saying: “We all use the five-finger bookmark when reading these, don’t we?”

If all that has inspired you to give IF a go, why not join us for our next Hello Words session? We’ll be in the NVA’s lounge on Thursday 14th September from 6:30pm. You can sign up here, or just drop in.