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Many of you have asked whether we have other games besides Choice of the Dragon.  We’re pleased to announce that our next game, Choice of Broadsides, will be debuting by the end of March.  Choice of Broadsides is a swashbuckling naval adventure, in the spirit of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower or Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books, with a dash of Jane Austen as well.  Will you become the hero of Albion, defending its shipping from the dastardly Gauls?  Or will you end up marooned on a desert island by mutineers?  Only your choices can determine the answer. As with Choice of the

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We have now made the ChoiceScript interpreter available through GitHub, a public repository for shared code.  You can download the ChoiceScript interpreter, a very simple sample game that you can edit, and some automatic testing routines for debugging purposes at http://github.com/dfabulich/choicescript/.  Clicking on the Download Source button on that page will download an archive with all of the relevant files.  As we mentioned before, the ChoiceScript Interpreter is available under a free non-commercial use license.  Contact us if you’re interested in a commercial license. We’ve added some more explanation to the Intro to ChoiceScript page that should help explain how

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Many people have contacted us about the possibility of developing their own multiple-choice text-based games using ChoiceScript.  We’re very excited about other people writing games like this. We have a short, incomplete introduction to the ChoiceScript language available at http://www.choiceofgames.com/blog/choicescript-intro/.  We encourage anyone interested in writing a game in ChoiceScript to start by reading that and trying to write a sample vignette or two. We plan on releasing our interpreter on a public repository in the next couple of days– there are just a few minor administrative details we need to take care of first.  The interpreter (and related tools,

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One of the questions we’ve gotten most frequently about “Choice of the Dragon” is whether it’s possible to get a mate and, if so, how.  (Actually, we’ve both gotten that as a question and as a complaint asserting that it’s not possible but that it should be.) To answer the not very spoilery part of the question:  Yes, it is possible to get a mate.  The code provides for it, we’ve successfully gotten a mate in playtesting, and some of our players have as well.  It is difficult, which was intentional on our part– we think that having some things

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We discussed the treatment of gender extensively as we were planning our first game.  I self-identify as a feminist, and I’ve worked to promote equality for the LGBT community in my non-gaming professional life.  So I started off with a firm commitment to the idea that our games had to be good on gender issues. Many video games assume a male protagonist, and I actively wanted to avoid that presumption.  At the same time, our games require a certain amount of identification between the player and the character.  A game that’s written in the second person runs into problems if

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While we believe that a vignette-based structure with relatively little branching lets us build strong text-based games, it produces some inherent tensions. On the one hand, we want choices to be meaningful, but on the other hand, we want to reuse later code.  The urge to reuse code can create pressure to have choices be purely cosmetic.  Sometimes we explicitly make choices not affect the rest of the game.  Those choices are about the player’s imagining of a scene or triggering thoughts about motivations, not about affecting results.  But taken to an extreme, this could destroy the meaningfulness of the

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One of the focuses of this blog is discussion of design decisions within the course of making our games.  I’d like to begin by talking about one of the core design philosophies embedded within the ChoiceScript framework.  ChoiceScript seeks to minimize wasted design effort by recording variables instead of branching. Many of us had our first experiences with text-based games controlled by choices in a totally different format:  the various multiple-choice books of the 1980s, most famously Choose Your Own Adventure.  In a typical multiple-choice book, each different choice takes you to a different new page, which then offers you

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The first game from choiceofgames.com is now live!  In “Choice of the Dragon,” you play a powerful dragon that likes to kidnap princesses and sleep on a hoard of treasure.  Dominate the local kingdom, loot and pillage, and inspire terror in the hearts of your enemies! Like all games on choiceofgames.com, “Choice of the Dragon” is free to play.  The web version is currently available.  iPhone and other smartphone versions will be available soon. –Adam