Solitary Stars likely marks the end of my (modest) "career" in interactive fiction, which consequently concludes not with a creative high point but with a sense of dismal failure, for which I am partly responsible – and partly not.
Azthath will (most probably) never exist – which means I’ve spent hundreds of hours working on it almost for nothing, except for the pleasure of creating a miniature world. I don’t regret doing it. It allowed me to dream intensely, and in any case, happiness is found in the struggle, not the victory, if I may use a martial metaphor. But the lack of time, energy, courage, and perhaps rigor undoubtedly contributed to me abandoning this project halfway through – a project in which I had invested immense hopes and equally immense (and probably excessive) ambition.
I’m currently working on an explorable map with the room descriptions I had written in the past, and perhaps a few random or time-evolving elements to give it a touch of life, but it won’t go any further. It won’t be a "game". There won’t be a "story".
This abandonment is also largely tied to the interactive fiction scene itself: there simply aren’t enough players, at least in the French-speaking community (I have to admit that my download stats on itch.io for my English-language games are a bit less disheartening). The fact that even my repeated attempts to find beta testers on various forums, in both languages, were met with indifference and silence was the final nail in the coffin. As a creative hobby, interactive fiction demands a huge amount of effort for an almost negligible outcome, and that’s a ratio I can no longer accept. I now need more immediate and rewarding forms of creation, like painting, making music, and writing – fictional, diaristic, or otherwise.
