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.