Are there any game engines designed for serialised works?

[bodypoetic]

Pretty much what it says on the tin! I've been considering making a serialised interactive project - and it made me realise how many game-making tools take for granted that you'll be making a single, more-or-less self-contained work. Which is kind of odd, now I think about it!

Web-based stuff allows for repeated updates really well, obviously. Also I know that a lot of long-form interactive fiction gets released in instalments - mostly using Twine with an import/export save function, I gather? Are there any others? How would video game culture change if there was more of a focus on publishing games in small chunks?

Do interactive narratives just... not really lend themselves to serialisation? I'm reluctant to believe that! Importing player choices comes with a lot of complications and potential scope-creep, for sure, but there's so many games with relatively linear storylines. Plus, accounting for player choices isn't impossible - you just need to be clever about how you handle it! BioWare games have done this both extremely well and extremely badly at various points.

(There's also space for a wider discussion here about other assumptions made by digital tools, although possibly that deserves its own thread? I would dearly love to find a code editor with the same kind of drafting/editing capabilities as writing tools like Scrivener, for instance.)

[IndigoGolem]

I've been working on something similar to Myst for my site, just using Blender and HTML image maps. I figure it should be pretty easy to update, i'll just need to re-render all the frames that can see whatever's new. I'm not sure i'd call that a game engine tho.

You could look into stuff that's meant to be updated a lot as people play, especially MMOs. Evennia or RanvierMUD for something in the Multi-User Dungeon genre would probably be easiest to use.

The only other games that are meant to be played thru updates that come to mind are things like Minecraft and Terraria, which are not really known for their stories.

Making a series of games that all try to account for player choices is trickier. The Elder Scrolls does this by having unreliable (or just not omnipotent) historians in-universe and being vague about some past events, especially stuff that was important to previous games in the series. It also doesn't usually let you revisit old games' settings and has time skips between the games (ranging from a few years to centuries). I'm sure other series do this too, but that's the one i'm most familiar with.

[ABlueRose]

I think Gamemaker might have some of what you're looking for. I don't know the details, but I know there was an update a few years ago that was pretty instrumental for Deltarune's chapter system.

[Dan Q]

Twine is driven by what are effectively hyperlinks, making serialisation very feasible.

[rolypolyphonic]

I feel like making a game serialised is less contingent on a particular game engine and more on the genre/format of the game itself. Say, visual novels seem easy to make serial because you can make each game its own standalone chapter and any visual novel engine like Ren'Py could work for that. As @ABlueRose suggested, GameMaker Studio is used by the serialised game Deltarune but I don't see why you couldn't do a similar format with a different RPG engine like RPG Maker.

Unless by 'serialised' you specifically mean the type of series where it's necessary to import the saves from a previous game. I can imagine working with Ren'Py to do it; not sure about any others. Although I imagine a game engine where you do your own actual coding instead of a simplified markup/WYSIWYG style it could be feasible? One way I imagine it being done is if the first game has multiple endings you could technically just save which ending a player got and diverge from there, but that would make the trajectory of the second game more complicated depending on how different you want the world/plot of the second to be based on the first's choices.

Do interactive narratives just... not really lend themselves to serialisation?

I think it's a matter of budget and scope, really. Video games tend to have a lot more stuff going into them than other typically serialised works than, say, a comic or prose story. I think solo/indie creators might find releasing interrelated chunks more troublesome than dropping the whole thing at once depending on the type of game it is, whereas making a game a whole series is already a norm among bigger companies (albeit I suppose it's more like a series of full games than 'chunks' of one game, but then again a company with enough skin in the game doesn't have a practical reason to do the latter, methinks).