One of the hardest tasks in learning to write a ChoiceScript game is figuring out a process for writing vignettes that works. We all have experience writing stories, essays, and other prose forms. And many of us have written computer programs before. But a ChoiceScript game isn’t like a normal story, although it needs to [...]
We’ve gotten a lot of questions about what games we’re working on and when they’ll be released. I thought I’d give a quick run-down of some of the games that we have in progress. We have two games that are fairly far along. Choice of the Vampire by Jason Hill is in beta testing currently. [...]
When writing a ChoiceScript game, it’s tempting to think that you should write the game the way that it will be played: start with the first vignette (maybe with some character-generation questions), then write the second vignette, then the middle vignettes, and finish with the concluding vignettes and epilogues (if any). That can work, of [...]
Some people who are starting up the process of writing a ChoiceScript game have asked how to plan/outline/storyboard/etc. a game before writing. I don’t presume that we know the best way, let alone the one true right way to do things, but I thought people would be interested in how we plan our games. This [...]
Authorial intent is a slippery concept at the best of times, but it becomes even more so in the context of interactive fiction (IF), whether multiple-choice games like Choice of Games makes or text adventures with a parser. In a standard book (or a legal document, which is the context in which I’ve had most [...]
… and books are not RPGs. (By the way—hi there! I’m Heather. I joined Choice of Games as writer #3 just as Broadsides development was starting. It’s nice to meet you, too!) This post started as a comment to the “Help Us Switch Gender” thread, but I decided not to post it at the time, [...]
The hardest thing about writing a multiple-choice game in ChoiceScript is creating interesting choices for your players. Here are five rules you can follow to make decisions you write more fun and engaging. Rule 1: Every option should have real consequences If my decision has no effect on anything, why am I even making a [...]
As we’ve mentioned, we’re currently finishing up Choice of Broadsides. That means that we’re also working on picking our next couple of games for development– whether that’s Choice of the Dragon II, Choice of the God, Choice of the Consort, or something else. We thought it might be interesting to discuss our method for selecting [...]
As we finish up work on Choice of Broadsides, we’re starting to plan our next couple of games. We’d like your opinion on these ideas. We’re also happy to hear if there’s another game that you would really like to see. We don’t promise to make the game that gets the most votes–our preference as [...]
As I mentioned in my last post, we’re working on finishing up our next game, Choice of Broadsides, a game set in a fictionalized version of the Napoleonic Wars. Of course, the real-world Royal Navy was an (essentially) all-male institution at the time. We wanted to avoid embracing the sexism of both history and of [...]