Ontale: Create your story and see where it ends.

Hi, Thank you for checking out Ontale! This was a bit of a passion project over Christmas and now made public in time for national storytelling week in the UK. It’s based on an idea I had a few years ago after reading about a game that lived and grew on a floppy disk, passed from player to player. Each person got to play for a set amount of time, and then you to pass to the next person. The players before would never get to see how it ended, only the last player would, whoever that was. It’s a bit like how stories evolve and change over time, as they’re told and retold. Originally I wanted to build this as an executable package to keep faithful to the original concept, but then I thought it would be great if people could follow along. So I built as a website, using the publishing Graph APIs I’d created for my publishing platform Unalike. Keeping the design and layout very very simple, purely focused on the text. If any developers are interested, it’s hosted on Netlify and built using the static Vue.js framework Gridsome. Gives you an idea of what possible with static generation and headless content management. There is a bit of a lag with the API, as it’s going through a Netlify function as the proxy, but I’m going to add a scheduled build to pre-generate the stories upfront. This will improve the story following for sure. If you have any suggestions on how I can expand or improve this, it would be great to hear them. Or if you plan on building your own variation of this concept, I’d love to see them. I used to code Android, but I wouldn’t know where to start now. One idea would be to create a story app or game, that you download, play, and then pass on to the next person through Bluetooth. Meaning you have no external service and the game is downloaded as a shell from the play store. If anyone manages to build that, that would be awesome :) Thank you. Jack