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The annual XYZZY Awards are here! The XYZZY Awards are given for the best works of interactive fiction released the previous year in a variety of categories (Best Writing, Best Puzzles, and so on). Anyone can vote in the XYZZY awards; in this round, all games released in 2011 are eligible to become finalists. In the next round of voting, starting in February, the winners will be selected from the most popular finalists in each category. This year, there are a number of fantastic ChoiceScript games on the list! (Here they are in alphabetical order.) Dead Already? Dilemma The Land

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Are you writing an interactive novel using ChoiceScript? Don’t make these common mistakes! Not Enough Delayed Branching In “By the Numbers: How to Write a Long Interactive Novel That Doesn’t Suck“, we draw a distinction between choices that branch the story immediately and choices that cause the story to branch in a later chapter. It’s impossible to write a story with lots of choices if all choices branch the story immediately; delayed branching solves that problem nicely. When authors try to write a linear story without delayed branching, the result is a game where the player makes minor choices that

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Have you ever wanted to write an interactive novel? November is National Novel Writing Month or “NaNoWriMo” for short. This year, thousands of authors will write 50,000 words of fiction between November 1st and November 30th. Of course, most NaNoWriMo authors will write traditional linear novels this year, but we’d like to invite you use ChoiceScript to write an interactive NaNoWriMo novel. ChoiceScript is a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice games (MCGs) like ours. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. When you’re finished, you can even submit your finished ChoiceScript

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Choice of Games writer Heather Albano has branched out into non-interactive fiction! Her first novel, Timepiece, is available for download at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and will shortly be available on a variety of other platforms and formats. Timepiece is a steampunk time-travel adventure – the story of girl, a pocket watch, Frankenstein’s monster, the Battle of Waterloo, and giant clockwork robots taking over London. (No, really.) If you like Heather’s games, you’ll love her book… come on over and check it out!

The sequel to Choice of Romance. What will you do with your new-found power as the tides of the court ebb and flow around you? Will you control those tides, or will you drown beneath them?

A wonderfully fascinating and addictive experience that will leave you playing it over and over again as you attempt to discover each new ending.

As we discussed in an earlier article, if you want to write a long interactive novel that doesn’t suck, you’ll need to make to make heavy use of numeric scores or “stats.” Indeed, if you merge branches aggressively as we recommend, the entire game will be about the stats; every decision will update the stats and test earlier stats to make earlier decisions meaningful. In this article, we discuss a few techniques for designing great stats.

Traditional gamebooks tend to be pretty short. The average story in a 110-page Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) book is only six pages long. It’s not hard to see why. If each page of a CYOA book allows the reader to choose between just two options, a seven-page story requires 128 pages of text. If you want eight pages, the author has to deliver twice as much text, 256 pages. And if you want to write a twenty-page short story, you need a book more than a million pages long. You’d never finish writing a “short story” of that magnitude!

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The IntroComp 2011 winners have been announced. There were thirteen entries this year, all introductions to games not yet finished. Five entries were in ChoiceScript, including two of the top three entries! 1st Place: Choice of Zombies by Heather Albano 2nd Place: Speculative Fiction by Dianne Christoforo and Thomas Mack 3rd Place: Choice of the Petal Throne by Danielle Goudeau Everyone who entered has the chance to win a prize in the Honorable category; the first non-placing entry to complete their game will receive the $25 Honorable prize. Congratulations to the winners and everyone who entered!

Amazon is running a sale on its interactive fiction titles for Kindle, ending July 24th. You can get all of our games (including our newest title, Affairs of the Court, which includes “Choice of Romance” and “Choice of Intrigues“) for 50% off. Share and Enjoy!