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Climb to the very top of the class at your exclusive private school for socialites! Will you study hard, find a perfect match, or embrace scandal? Gallatin College is a “finishing school” where young people must learn social graces, surrounded by their high-class peers. When your parents fall into disgrace, the rest of high society rejects them. It’s up to you to enroll at Gallatin, to secure your future and restore the family’s good name.

Crème de la Crème is a 440,000-word interactive novel by Harris Powell-Smith, author of Blood Money. I sat down with Harris to discuss their new games and the foibles of all high school experiences. Crème de la Crème releases this Wednesday, November 27th. 

Crème de la Crème is set in a second world’s version of Europe at Gallatin College, which is a finishing school. I think our readers may be confused by “college” referring to what we call high school in the U.S., or secondary school elsewhere, and also confused by what a finishing school is in this world (or in our world.) In the U.S. we have a long 19th-C forward tradition of finishing schools for young women, but those that still exist today focus strongly on academics like a prep school, rather than…deportment and husband-hunting skills. And Gallatin is co-ed! So please, lay it all out for us.

Gallatin is a co-ed finishing school for young people to get a genteel education so they can fit in with the upper crust of society, and the age range of boarders is around 12 to 18. In Crème de la Crème, you’re in your final year, having completed most of your education elsewhere. Etiquette, deportment, and general manners and bearing are some of the most important aspects of Gallatin, but the college also prides itself on turning out well-rounded students, so you’ll learn about the arts, philosophy, fancy sports and so on as well…mostly so you can impress your fellow guests at dinner parties.

Although the environment is highly exclusive, the students at Gallatin aren’t expected to become political or military leaders, to have major careers or be hugely academic. Mostly, they’re expected to become socialites and live a life of leisure, or make a good match to an eligible partner–but there are plenty of options in the game for those with ambitions in other areas.

I was inspired by Swiss finishing schools, or “charm schools” for young women in the late 19th to early 20th century. They were a strange, rarified environment which combined immense privileges and social restriction. Nowadays, such places are less gendered–in theory–and often focus on business etiquette, which has a host of interesting class biases in itself. In Crème de la Crème, I wanted to play with the idea of a charm school while reducing some real world marginalizations–same sex marriage is accepted, women aren’t the only ones who are expected to adhere to the rules of a debutante–while keeping a feeling of constrained, weird, class-stratified social mores.

This is your second COG, your first being Blood Money, and I have to remark on what a departure Crème de la Crème is! What took you in this direction?

I’ve written a lot of dark fantasy in my time and wanted to try out lighter fare, experimenting with making stakes and tension feel high while not necessarily being life or death. There are darker things going on beneath the surface at Gallatin, but you can’t just take a hit out on someone like you can in Blood Money, and I liked the idea of pushing the player to deal with problems in different ways!

While writing Blood Money, I’d been mulling over school stories, reading books like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks, Laurinda by Alice Pung, and Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, and had been playing a lot of Monsterhearts tabletop games. The pressure-cooker, rigid environment appealed to me as a surefire way of creating characterful drama. I also wanted to try my hand at a game where romance and friendship were brought to the forefront. Blood Money is more family orientated, and I liked the idea of focusing on different–though still potentially fraught–relationships. I love a bit of figuring out how to deal with difficult people in games!

There are a few thematic similarities. Blood Money has aristocrats draining literal lifeblood from people to power their dodgy schemes. Crème de la Crème has aristocrats who are…well, less literal bloodsuckers, but are exploitative, and blinkered about their place in the world. Also, I love writing about fancy parties and outrageously opulent outfits. Blood Money has a touch of that, which I enjoyed a lot, and in Crème de la Crème, I got to let my imagination loose when describing evening wear!

This is a pretty massive game, coming in at 400k+, so even longer than Blood Money. And yet, you wrote it relatively quickly. Tell me a little about your process. What was easier the second time around?

Making and polishing up the outline was much easier having made one before, and I found that having that sense of the broader plot affected everything positively. I still had points where I changed my mind about scenes or chapter events, but I felt much more clear about what I was doing.

After the outline was greenlit, I wrote broad strokes summaries of scenes and major choices for the chapter I was about to start. I then coded everything with placeholder text, and did automated testing often to check that it all worked, and to check balance. Then I filled in the writing. I’d often shuffle things around at that stage, but it was great to have it in place first. I learned that that method suited me partway through Blood Money, and it’s served me well.

On the nitty-gritty side of things, ChoiceScript now has functionality which makes it much easier to implement variably-gendered characters. I had more experience, so was more confident about coding things like repeatedly calculating who likes the main character the most, or using RandomTest to balance difficulty. I had a better understanding of using *bug to weed out unlikely but game-breaking situations, and the code is generally more efficient. And honestly, I also was more confident this time round because of having a game under my belt already.

I would not necessarily recommend including ten romanceable or befriendable NPCs, though–that’s where a lot of the 400K+ words went. I love my characters and I hope players love them too, but whew, that’s a lot!

Do you have a favorite NPC?

It’s so hard to choose, but I think the Honourable Florin Kraemer, from Archambault Academy, a neighbouring school to Gallatin. The two establishments have a longstanding rivalry. Florin has very little to worry about in life, is a notorious flirt and treats people carelessly…but gets some nice one liners, and I had a lot of fun writing a character who doesn’t take things seriously. Florin’s not as readily accessible as some of the other characters like the Gallatin classmates, but I always know what they’d say or do in any given situation. It’s usually something annoying.

What sort of student were you in high school? Do you have an analogue at Gallatin?

I was as cool as you might expect from someone who made a lot of romance mods for RPGs, but I was fortunate enough to have a circle of close friends who were very important to me. My school was very academically focused which I think helped me fit in–everyone was nerdy to a certain degree. I worked very hard, loved English Literature and the humanities, and hated PE.

I think my closest analogues in Gallatin are Freddie (high achieving, nerdy) and Delacroix (gothy in my late teens, told off for reading Tarot cards in the library at lunchtime). Though I hasten to add that Delacroix’s family bears no resemblance to mine!

And what else are you working on now?

I’ve just started working at Fusebox Games, a UK-based game studio, which I’m really excited about! By night, I’m drafting a mobile game about small-time teens summoning demons, and have done work on Fallen London about creepy competing aristocrats. Both will be out in the wider world at a later date.

As for CoG games, I currently have an idea set in the Crème de la Crème universe, and others more in the dark fantasy vein–between them or potential ideas for romance-focused games, I’d love to make more ChoiceScript games in the future.

How will you find your happily ever after? The choice is yours! Become the main character of an interactive romance novel and choose your path to love.

Since 2009, the team behind Choice of Games has created high-quality interactive novels in all genres. Now, our new Heart’s Choice label puts romance at the center of the story, and you at the center of the romance.

We’re proud to announce the December 2nd release of the first four Heart’s Choice games in a new omnibus app on Google Play, Apple’s App Store, and the Amazon Android Marketplace; and as individual games on Steam. Right now you can:

• Visit our website and try the demo for each of our games.
• Sign up for our Heart’s Choice mailing list to be notified every time we release a new game.
• Tell your friends about our new games, find us on Facebook, tumblr, and Twitter!

Here are some of our first exciting titles:

• Jazz Age: Sing your heart out in Roaring 20s New York! Will you find love with the owner of a Harlem nightclub, or with the dangerous G-man trying to enforce Prohibition? Play as male, female, or non-binary, gay or straight. [PG-13]
• A Pirate’s Pleasure: When a pirate finds her heart caught between her rival captain and the noble governor, which man will she choose? What does she value most: her love, her treasure, or her ship? Play as a straight female. [PG-13]
• Dawnfall: Find true love and family with a spaceship pirate crew at the ends of the universe, where aliens, ghosts, and portals open the space between worlds…and your heart. Play as any gender or orientation. [PG-13]
• All World Pro Wrestling: What happens when professional wrestlers feel things start to heat up in the ring – and how hot will it get when they’re out of the public eye? Play as a gay male. [NC-17]

As with Choice of Games, Heart’s Choice games contain no graphics or sound effects, so we can focus on the story. Every game is filled with vivid, fully-developed characters and complex narratives that respond to your choices.

Every path is always open to you; we never charge extra for the best options or most interesting storylines. Whatever gender or orientation you want to play, there will be a Heart’s Choice game for you in our catalogue! And whether you like your romance sweet, spicy, or smoking hot, you’ll be able to find a story that you love.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

As the ruler of a province in the Western Peninsula, it will be expected of you to hold court and make yourself available to petitioners, settling disputes and delivering justice to the land and its inhabitants.

It’s 30% off until November 21st!

The War for the West is a grimdark 485,000 word interactive medieval fantasy novel by Lucas Zaper.

Among your duties will be to administer the money collected from taxes and see that it is well spent, be it in improvements to the local infrastructure or in purchasing personal objects and services. You will also need to manage your relationship with other powers and arrange a proper suitor for marriage, which will serve both to ensure the continuation of your lineage and consolidate your alliances.

But even if diplomacy fails, the military will always be at your command, ready to suppress rebellions and defend your fief against foreign invaders. To guarantee their supremacy in the field of battle, you must keep a steady flow of recruitment and enforce constant training.

Alas, not all problems can be dealt with by soft words and sharp blades. In such circumstances, one may find that there is little a few drops of poison or a well-placed agent cannot solve.
This all may appear overwhelming at first, but you will count with the assistance of your counselors, each with their own specialties. Their advice will prove invaluable as you navigate through the dangerous dynamics of the realm’s politics.

If you can keep their treachery in check, that is.

• Play as a Lord or a Lady, and find pleasure wherever you see fit.
• Fight in the open field, withstand a siege, join your enemy or avoid conflict entirely.
• Marry for love, power, or convenience, and use lovers to settle your lust if necessary.
• Bow to the church or defy it by joining the northern heresy or making your own religion.
• Uncover the secrets of your lineage and the ancient mysteries of the world, as well as many hidden endings.
• Make allies and enemies as you visit neighboring provinces and interact with other nobles.
• Decide over a vast number of random events that might happen as you hold court.
• Build your army and test it in battle against your enemies.

Lucas developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Join The Archangels on their bloody campaign against the Chicago Mafia, to take them down by any means necessary. Play as criminal vigilante alongside them, or play as an informant and secretly work against them. Roll the dice, and survive the deadly consequences of your actions.It’s 30% off until November 21st!

Breach: The Archangel Job is an 822,000-word thrilling interactive crime novel by Michael Maxwell and Ben Luigi, where your choices control the story.

Explore the rich background and personalities of your motley crew of international criminals as you wage a war against the mafia throughout the game. With the randomized dice system, no gameplay will ever be the same, and your skills are half of what you need. To survive in this world, you’re also going to need luck. Good luck!

Your randomized fate and destiny awaits you!

• Play as male, female, trans, or non-binary; gay, straight, bisexual, or asexual.
• Romance more than 10 characters with their own different backgrounds and personalities.
• Plan and execute 2 critical and meticulous heists.
• Scale down the side of a high riser after a daring kidnapping.
• Explore the underground black market hidden under a church.
• Customize your player’s appearance, gear, and weaponry.
• Survive a deadly FBI raid.
• Become Chicago’s most wanted criminal, vigilante hero, or betray your crew as an informant.

Michael and Ben developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

We’re proud to announce that Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the Choice of Games Omnibus app. It’s 40% off until November 14th!

Congratulations! We are delighted to welcome you back to the Grand Academy for Future Villains, the world’s finest evil preparatory school. It’s sophomore year, and everyone’s back for a deliciously meta sequel.

Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel is a hilarious 215,000-word interactive novel and sequel to Grand Academy for Future Villains, by Katherine Nehring, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

In the space between worlds, between stories, beyond time and space itself, the Grand Academy for Future Villains trains the bad guys that every epic saga needs. Behold our dormitories, each befitting their narrative genre: horror, fantasy, sci-fi, or thriller.

This year holds terrifying new challenges: a roommate, a pet, and the ominous Board of Visitors and Overlords, who have come to review the Academy’s accreditation. Under the Board’s steely gaze, you may be eligible to receive a destiny, which every true villain craves. They have also set each genre against one another in the house tournament. Will you lead your house to victory, betray your comrades, or perhaps both?

And of course your “friends” are back, too. Aurion, Kinistra, Phil. Why, even your maleficent mother, Maedryn the Terror of Three Worlds, is here. Or shall I call her…Professor Maedryn?

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary (or unhuman), gay, straight, bi, or ace.

• Play the game as a standalone, or import a saved character from Grand Academy for Future Villains.

• As Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Thriller battle each other, use your genre-savvy to lead your genre to victory–or to seize a destiny for yourself. • Raise an illicit monstrous pet in your dorm room!

• Support your mother’s plans for school domination–or break free and steal her clone army.

• As a TA, help your favorite professor get tenure–or sabotage their chances, and as the RA of Sci-Fi, Horror, Thriller, or Fantasy, figure out what’s best for your evil little charges.

• Discover the Academy’s fatal weakness!

• Acquire the metafictional tools you’ll need to win the game of genre against genre! What can you do with a plot-hole digger or a flashback gun?

• Defeat your nemesis! Or save them! Or smooch them!

And when things look bleak just remember: it’s a trap! But you should know. You set it.

We hope you enjoy playing Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

Congratulations! We are delighted to welcome you back to the Grand Academy for Future Villains, the world’s finest evil preparatory school. It’s sophomore year, and everyone’s back for a deliciously meta sequel, Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel. This year holds terrifying new challenges: a roommate, a pet, and the ominous Board of Visitors and Overlords, who have come to review the Academy’s accreditation. Under the Board’s steely gaze, you may be eligible to receive a destiny, which every true villain craves. I sat down with Katherine Nehring on Halloween to talk about this long anticipated sequel, and what kind of villain she is. 

This has been an amazing year for sequels at Choice of Games, and though no editor can love one project more than any other (it’s like children), I do have a special fond affection for Grand Academy II: Attack of the Sequel. Tell me about how it was to dive back into this world?

I’m glad this world has an enduring appeal for you – it does for me too. When I was a kid I would tell stories set in a version of the Grand Academy to entertain my siblings, and coming back to that concept so many years later to develop into a full-fledged game was a lot of fun. Because the Academy is a place that’s explicitly set outside the borders of genre, it’s a place where anything can happen. Hordes of mindless replicas swarming the school? The school computer system taking a romantic interest in you? The mailroom being full of–well, I should save that for the game! Of course, that sort of freedom comes with its own restrictions–one wild event after another can lead to a loss of forward momentum, improbably good or bad events can lose the reader’s interest unless they have consequences. So maybe I should say it’s a place where anything can happen–so long as it can be narratively justified.

And like a lot of games written without a sequel in mind, Grand Academy for Future Villains was not an easy game to pick up a number of disparate endings from for people who want to import a character into this sequel.

This was a challenge! The first game featured three very different states for the Academy at the end of the game, including one where the Academy was destroyed. At first I thought I’d design the sequel only for the first two endings, but I realized that people would want to port their characters and experiences over no matter what they did in the first game. So then the challenge was to bring every narrative possibility back together without making it seem like the choices made in the previous game were simply being erased. I’m quite pleased with the solution I eventually came up with. As the title suggests, we’re having some fun with the very idea of sequels.

Grand Academy II sees the return of many of our old friends, we have some wonderful new characters in the form of the Board of Visitors and Overlords. Tell me a little about the inspiration there.

In the last game, the player determined what kind of institution the Academy was going to be (or if it even survived at all). This game asks the next questions: What keeps the Academy going? What underpins it? And who could it possibly answer to?

The names of the governing boards of institutions of higher education have always struck me as a little peculiar. “Board of Visitors,” “Board of Regents,” “Honorable and Reverend Board of Overseers.” From there, the name and role of the Board of Visitors and Overlords was clear.

Why do institutions of education make such wonderful settings for entertaining literary pastiche?

Schools famously straddle the line between reality and unreality. “Wait till you get out in the real world,” students are warned darkly, as if studying a thing were less real than practicing it. Certainly study affords a degree of distance, and I think that’s part of the fun of fictional (and metafictional) educational institutions. You the student are not yet a full-fledged villain (or hero, or wizard, or what have you) so you can look at your field of study from the outside. But you’re not just waiting for your story to begin, you’re having adventures and intrigues within the school setting. Add to that the attempts of teachers and administration to restrain and direct student activities, and you’ve got an entertaining contrast between the world-as-studied and the world-as-experienced.

We’re conducting this interview on Halloween, so I would ask: is Halloween the national holiday of villains? If so, what sort of villain are you?

Dressing up as anything is fun, but Halloween certainly has a particular affinity for the monstrous and the frightening. You can try on the role of a creature of unbridled appetite, of chaos and hedonism, and suffer consequences no worse than indigestion. As for what sort of villain I’d be– my most successful scary costume was dressing as a praying mantis as a kid, with a posterboard mask and large paper plates for eyes. Suddenly swivelling this head produced gratifying reactions in the onlookers.

And finally, if you taught at the Grand Academy for Future Villains, what subject would you teach?

I’ve asked myself this several times! I have a particular fondness for Professor Ulik and the whole Evil Design department–the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating an effective villainous setting deserves attention! And I’ve put more of myself than I care to admit into Maedryn, the player’s mother, who’s arrogant and high-handed but who constantly overextends herself. But I think if I had to pick a subject, I’d pick something metafictional. Tropes To Watch Out For, perhaps, or Developing a Tragic Backstory.

We’re proud to announce that The Fog Knows Your Name, the latest in our popular Choice of Games line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the Choice of Games Omnibus app. It’s 33% off until October 31!

Step into the fog to confront your terror: the evil that hides within.

The Fog Knows Your Name is a 300,000 word interactive teen horror novel by Clio Yun-su Davis, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

It’s senior year of high school. Your classmate Rex Keller was found dead six months ago, and you were the last person to see him alive. Half the town thinks you murdered him, including his sister, Ennis. The other half believes it was the fog.

In your town, ever since anyone can remember, people die when the fog rolls in. No one knows exactly how or why. Some say the land didn’t want the colonizers, so it sends the fog as an agent of vengeance. Some say the Devil himself lurks in the fog, collecting souls. Others believe the fog simply drives people mad, causing them to enact violence onto each other and onto themselves.

There is one element of the tale that remains the same in every telling: those who perish in the fog are guilty of wronging another without confessing to it. Those who admit to causing harm can walk in the fog untouched. The liars die.

Their ghosts haunt the town. They’re haunting you, they’re haunting Ennis Keller, and they’re haunting your friends at school. If you and your friends can’t unravel the fog’s mysteries in time, those ghosts are going to kill you, one way or another.

• Play as female, male, or non-binary; gay, straight, bi, ace, aromantic, or poly.
• Stop the thing in the fog and exorcise the ghosts who haunt your town.
• Enter the fog and die.
• Solve murders. The clues are just waiting in the fog.
• Entangle yourself in romances with your friends and enemies.
• Protect the town that despises you or take vengeance against them.

When the dead speak, will you give them what they want or put an end to them? Clear the past, clear your name, clear the fog.

We hope you enjoy playing The Fog Knows Your Name. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

Step into the fog to confront your terror: the evil that hides within.

It’s senior year of high school. Your classmate Rex Keller was found dead six months ago, and you were the last person to see him alive. Half the town thinks you murdered him, including his sister, Ennis. The other half believes it was the fog.

The Fog Knows Your Name is a 300,000 word interactive teen horror novel by Clio Yun-su Davis. I sat down with Clio to talk about horror and why Maine is so horrifying. The Fog Knows Your Name releases this Thursday, Oct 24th. You can play the first three chapters now for free.

Fog is one of the few true horror stories in the Choice of Games catalogue–and it’s also a great teen drama. Why do teens and horror go so well together? 

I think it’s because being a teenager is already terrifying. You’re simultaneously coming into unprecedented power and responsibility while also realizing just how limited and trapped you are by your circumstances. Friendships that were simple in childhood can grow into complicated messes, and suddenly your relationships with everyone around you are so much more complex because they’re all going through the same thing. It’s a lot of uncertainty as well as a lot of agency since you’re an almost-adult, and those are both two key components of horror. It’s pretty scary to not understand why something is happening but to know that maybe you should try to do something about it!

It’s also a time in life when people are prone to feeling especially isolated, another ingredient that works well with horror. Adults often don’t believe you when you try to open up to them, people judge you based on rumors alone, and friends can turn on you in an instant because they’re testing the extent of their social power. You really have to learn to become self-reliant, and that skill is extremely important both when it comes to surviving horror stories and life in general. There are a lot of life lessons to be learned from the genre.

What drew you to this story in particular? I’m curious too if you’ve spent time in Maine, where Fog is set and where I recently relocated.

That’s very cool that you’re in Maine now! It does seem to be a hub for the horror genre, doesn’t it? I came up with the initial idea for Fog when I was in Stonington, Maine with family. Originally it was supposed to be a short story, but when it came time to pitch ideas to Choice of Games I realized it was a good fit. Many of my games explore grief in some way, and horror makes for an excellent vehicle specifically for that. With Fog, I was particularly interested in setting up a story in which players are confronted with the monstrosities created by overwhelming grief.

Fog itself, of course, plays an important role in the game. It was frequently foggy out while I was in Stonington, and there was one morning in particular when I was standing out by the water and couldn’t see anything around me at all. I immediately fell in love with that eerie feeling and went running around in the fog like the weird goblin I am, then did a photoshoot with my siblings where they pretended to be ghosts. There’s a certain fishing shack that appears in the game that is very much based on a fishing shack that’s in many of those photos. I also got inspiration from standing out on a dock as the sun went down while listening to the It Follows soundtrack. I scared myself so badly I had trouble walking back to the house. I ended up regretting that particular decision.

Arbor Isle, the town in the game, is very different from Stonington, though there are a few shared traits.

This is hardly your first game design rodeo, though it is your first time writing in ChoiceScript, I think? Tell me a little about your work in tabletop and LARP because I think those experiences can be uniquely informative of our game design. 

This is my first time writing in ChoiceScript! I mainly write for tabletop RPGs and LARPs, so it was interesting juggling those projects and this one at the same time. I sometimes found I was accidentally writing in ChoiceScript when I didn’t mean to!

On the tabletop side of things, I’ve contributed to Kids on Bikes, FlipTales, We Are All Monsters, Teens in Space, and Mutants and Masterminds. No Such Place as Koreatown, my adventure setting for Kids on Bikes, is the most similar to Fog out of all of those. My work on that definitely helped me with writing Fog, and vice versa, as it made me examine closely what actions a player can take in a horror or horror-adjacent game that feel the scariest. Also, both involve young people running around small towns and facing off against forces beyond their immediate understanding.

On the LARP side, I’ve written The Long Drive Back from Busan, a freeform game about a struggling k-pop group that won a Golden Cobra award in 2017, But Not Tonight, a game about high schoolers trapped in a fallout shelter in the 80s, and The Truth About Eternity, a scenario about a future of ancestor worship where ancestors are uploaded to digital tombs, to name a few. My experience writing and running But Not Tonight helped me a lot with Fog because it’s another game in which teenagers are struggling with two sets of fears – their everyday existential dread and interpersonal problems as well as fear of the world possibly ending outside. Watching players balance supposedly mundane worries and big, earth-shattering worries inspired me when writing the various characters in Fog and how they tackle their problems.

Additionally, both in LARP and tabletop games, players often have a lot of freedom to react to in-game situations in extreme ways. I wanted to incorporate that into Fog as well, the options to just totally lean into drama and lash out at people because you’re freaking out. I spent a lot of time thinking about how players might want to react to events if they had total freedom, and chose the options that I personally found to be the most interesting without completely derailing the story.

And back to Fog, the characters in this game are so finely wrought. I’m wondering which NPC you enjoyed spending time with the most. 

I think about my NPCs a lot! I actually ended up really liking the scenes with Barry Michaels, which I did not expect. I enjoy it when characters surprise me with their complexity. Out of the main crew, I’m very fond of Addy even though they can be such a jerk. I see a lot of myself in them. Hopefully that doesn’t mean I’m also a jerk! Addy is restless, doesn’t have time to deal with other people’s bullshit, and is ready for life to really get started. I think many people can identify with that, especially if they grew up or are currently in a small town that feels a bit stifling.

I also have a soft spot for Ennis. She does some terrible things, but I think a lot of people will want to understand her better and help her. She’s a strong person who has been utterly destroyed by grief and is handling it in probably the least healthy way possible. I tried to have scenes with her feel like you’re standing on the edge of a raging storm. Maybe that storm will calm down, or maybe you’ll be hit by lightning. In the meantime, you’re just watching in awe as it wrecks everything it comes into contact with. We so often are forced to put on a stoic face when coping with grief, and I wanted to write someone who just doesn’t. She’s in pain and she is not hiding it.

If you had it to do over, what do you wish you’d have known before writing this game? 

Oh my god. That’s a very good question. Probably that these games have a tendency to grow in scope in ways you’re not even noticing until it’s over three times the length you originally anticipated! Also that some of the stats I originally had (but then got rid of) would be difficult to incorporate into the game.

And what are you working on next? 

Currently, I’m working on another horror game called Home with my friend Doug Levandowski in which you explore an unsettling house that has relics of your childhood home within it. The Kickstarter campaign for a card game I worked on called Battle of the Boy Bands is also launching soon, and that game will be published by Game and a Curry. In addition to that, I’m contributing to Magical Kitties Save the Day and Hearts of Wulin, creating short RPGs for my Patreon, and recording two actual play podcasts, Red Death and the upcoming Dark Wings, Dark Waves, both on the Roll to Play network!

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

You’ve been bitten into a brand new supernatural underground. Congratulations! It’s terrifying and heartwarming all at once. In a game made by a queer woman and for queer women and femme nonbinary folk, this supernatural celebration of queer femininity takes you into the darkness and lets you own it. Use your compassion and sense of responsibility to make connections and fall in love. Or use your newfound fangs and claws to rip, shred, and tear through your problems. Is this the start of a satisfying, shape-shifting life full of romance, or the blood-soaked birth of a new deity of the forest? You decide!

It’s 50% off until October 24th!

Moonrise is a 49,000-word urban fantasy interactive novel by Natalie Cannon, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

• Play as a trans woman, cis woman, or nonbinary person; lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, or asexual.
• Date your nonbinary best friend, the ruthless Rogue leader, or the lycanthropic goddess amongst werewolves.
• Build up your Empathy, Bloodthirst, Snark, Responsibility, Uncanny Valley, and Defense to survive lethal encounters and protect those you hold dear.
• Pledge allegiance to the tradition of the Masquerade or the desperate, volatile Rogues.
• Expose the supernatural underground to the blistering light or keep their secrets in the deep dark.
• Embrace the feral monster within or hold fast to your humanity.

Natalie Cannon developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Fight the god of death on your way to godhood! Choose your path with six different characters: warrior, assassin, mage, thief, storm rider, and beastmaster. Destroy the death god’s minions by sword, magic, storms, or beasts. Rise in power to eventually destroy the death god himself. Seize your own path toward godhood.

It’s free to play.

War of the Gods is a 85,000-word interactive novel by Barbara Elzey, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

• Play a Solarian, a creature who is invulnerable by day and weak at night.
• Play the human assassin who must fight his way free from bondage.
• Play a Storm Rider, an ancient race that harnesses the power of the storm.
• Play a thief known as the Silver Fox, who must save her people from the death cultists who killed her family.
• Play a Deodrin mage, a creature from an ancient race, who hurls spells to save a family from the despotic king.
• Play a human beastmaster, who is the true heir to the throne, and who gathers allies for war, both human and beasts.
• Choose your gender; romance as gay, straight or asexual, and select your physical traits.
• Find romance with different fantastical species and characters.
• Defeat the minions of death.
• Gain power toward your own rise to godhood.

Barbara Elzey developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.