Quick, before Christmas, let's get out a couple of announcements! This one's all about Frankenstories.
We've got:
- New image packs
- More Hall of Fame stories
- Automatically-scheduled free-for-all games
- The hottest Discord community in town
NEW FRANKENSTORIES THEME PACKS
We've been busily curating and categorising images, and now five new image packs are live. (Also, we've started including age-ranges.)
Cartoonish (10+)
We originally called this one "Cute" but it is a bit broader than that. You'll find lots of cute animals and characters, plus scenes and situations in a generally naive and cartoonish style.
Spooky (10+)
Ghosts, goblins, creepy things under the bed. Spooky but not scary—no blood, nobody's in real danger, and the characters are generally recognisable types.
Scary (13+)
More overtly monstrous or sinister. Characters in danger, but little blood and no gore. (We're working on a Horror 16+ but still trying to define the boundaries.)
Sand and Sea (10+)
At some point we all just want to write about islands, mermaids, whirlpools, and surfing. That's what this category is for: everything on, under, and by the sea.
Internet Weirdness (13+)
An eclectic mix of internet ephemera. Mostly contemporary, sometimes historical, largely silly. (This has subsumed the original General theme: so you'll find FS classics such as Male Model with Owl and Pumpkinhead Girl in here, plus a bunch of new ones.)
Upcoming theme packs
We have more theme packs in the works. 👀
HALL OF FAME!
The Hall of Fame continues to flourish. Here's a sample of recent stories:
Spooky games 👻
Funny games 🤣
- The Dogs Will Not Pat Themselves!
- Phoning it in
- It's beginning to look a lot like... you don't want to know
- The Switch and the Witch
- Rinse then spit in to the cold vacuum of space, please
- Steal from the rich; Gift to the paw
- Merry Xmas, Suzie, you little brat
Emotional games 😢
Check out more in the Hall of Fame.
SCHEDULED FREE-FOR-ALLS!
Anyone can play Frankenstories at any time, and you can always play solo, but we wanted to make it easier to for people to play in casual, quasi-spontaneous groups.
Scheduling is the biggest pain, so we've created a bot that launches a new public game every 5 hours.
These are free-for-alls. Games during Australia-friendly hours usually have a few players, and we're hoping to grow the community over time so that players can easily find drop-in games with other players.
That said, if you find yourself in a game alone, give it a shot anyway! Some great stories have come from solo games. (All of the games in the HoF list above were scheduled free-for-alls—and Forestborn and Fly Away Home are solo games.)
(Also: If your number sense is good, you'll realise that games start at slightly different times each day as that 5-hour cycle moves around.)
THE FRANKENSTORIES DISCORD IS OUR SOCIAL PLATFORM OF CHOICE
The Writelike team are all relatively shy and reticent on social media, but Discord is a perfect platform for contained, moderated, focused community-development.
Our Frankenstories Discord server is steadily warming up; we're active on it throughout the day, either playing in scheduled games or discussing new content and features.
The best thing about our Discord is that the scheduled games give it a natural focus and cadence, so it's not an endless stream of noise.
We can totally, hand on heart, recommend dropping in if you are at all interested in Frankenstories or Writelike.
STILL coming up next: Writelike integration with enhanced safety and control
Our next big push will be to integrate FS with Writelike. This will mean you can do things like:
- Create multiple games for a class (e.g. 3 x 9 player games instead of 1 x 27 player game).
- Specify the prompt, including uploading your own images and text prompts.
- See all responses in the voting rounds.
Update: This is looking so good! We can't wait to release it!