The text adventure has two family lines. The parser line — Zork, Adventure, decades of "YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY" — asks players to type commands and asks authors to anticipate everything a player might type. The choice-based line keeps the prose, the rooms, and the sense of exploring a place made of words, but replaces the parser with presented choices. Nobody spends twenty minutes guessing the verb.
StorySplice is built for that second line. Each room, encounter, or beat is a scene on a visual map; each exit or action is a choice connecting scenes. You write prose, draw connections by dragging, and play-test in the editor. There is no scripting language anywhere in the tool — which is either its best feature or its main limitation, depending on the game you want to make, and this page is honest about both.
A choice-based adventure maps naturally onto a story graph: the dripping cellar is a scene, "climb the coal chute" and "follow the sound of water" are choices, and the map view is your game map. Loops are legal — choices can point back to scenes the player has visited — so hub areas the player crosses repeatedly work fine. The zoomable map makes spatial games unusually pleasant to build: your dungeon actually looks like a dungeon.
The Sunken Archive. A salvage diver picks through a university library thirty years underwater. Every shelf is a scene; the air supply is structure rather than a stat — the deepest reading rooms are only reachable by routes that skip surfacing, so reaching them is a commitment the player feels in the map itself.
Night Shift at the Kestrel Arms. A porter works the desk of a hotel where guests ask for impossible things: a room without a number, a call to someone dead, the same night again. Each floor is a hub, each errand a branch, and the elevator only ever goes up.
StorySplice tracks no state. There is no inventory system, no health counter, no flag for whether the player picked up the brass key. If the lantern matters, you encode it in structure: the path where the player took the lantern is a different branch from the path where they did not. This is genuinely enough for a surprising range of games — see structuring branching plots for the patterns — and genuinely not enough for stat-heavy or puzzle-box designs. For those, build your structure and prose here, then export to Twee (Pro) and add SugarCube logic in Twine. The export guide covers exactly what the file contains.
Room descriptions are where text adventures earn their keep, and where drafting fatigue sets in around room thirty. The AI tools — write, rewrite, continue, or a custom instruction per scene — draft prose you accept or reject before it touches the story, and Expand with AI can rough out a wing of the map from a dead-end choice. Free accounts get 10 AI calls a day; the tools are optional and off until you ask.
No. StorySplice is choice-based only: players pick from choices you write. For parser games you want Inform or similar tools — different family line, different craft.
No. There are no variables, so items and stats are modeled through branch structure — the path with the key is a different path. For heavy state, export to Twee (Pro) and script it in Twine.
No. The whole tool is visual: write prose in scenes, drag connections between them, publish with a click. There is no scripting language to learn.
On StorySplice — publish to the community library or unlisted behind a private link. Readers play in any browser with no account, and their progress saves automatically.
Yes. JSON export is free, and Pro adds Twee and Twine 2 HTML export, so a structure prototyped on the map can move into Twine or any Twee-aware pipeline.