Air Pressure is a short "interactive visual novel" written by Bento Smile using a program called Ren.Py, which is a "Visual Novel Engine". Air Pressure has also been ported to Flash by Raitendo. I'm not going to comment on the content of the story, since part of the enjoyment of interactive novels is exploring that for yourself.

The reason I'm blogging about this is to highlight a simple technological solution that can let someone with almost no programming experience create an interactive story. By putting the Flash-ported version of Air Pressure on Newgrounds, Raitendo showed that interactive visual novels can be popular - even among the casual gaming crowd. As I write, Air Pressure's current rating on Newgrounds is 4.14 out of 5! I assume this means that the content of the story was so compelling that most people didn't care that the gameplay only consisted of clicking on one of two buttons to make a choice every few paragraphs, or that the graphics consisted only of monochrome still images.

I've personally found that a great solution for educational games is to make a somewhat-sophisticated flash-based engine that allows writers or instructional designers create their own interactive stories without having to know much about programming.

Play Air Pressure