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Can you win The Hero Project, America’s #1 reality competition for heroes? Team up with allies old and new to unravel a conspiracy threatening your world, and save the planet from destruction! The Hero Project: Open Season is a 170,000-word interactive novel, and the final installment of Zachary Sergi’s “Hero Project” series. I sat down with author Zach Sergi to talk about wrapping up the series. The Hero Project: Open Season releases this Thursday, March 29th. 

We’ve been on such a journey through the world of Heroes Rise, and then with Redemption Season, and now Open Season. Tell me about that journey. 

Well, for starters, the journey saw me through the ages of 23-30, so there’s been a lot of personal growth as I became an “adult.” And a lot of growth both as a writer and a budding activist. I think it’s kind of cool you can track that progression book to book–some people love it, some people hate it. There have been leaps forward and steps backwards, and a lot of lessons along the way. I’ve shed a lot of sweat and tears over these books, and smiled more than anything else, but at the end of this particular Heroes Rise journey, I feel like the books did for me what they seem to do for so many readers: they helped me hone a purpose and a voice. (Oh, and I still think it’s insane to have seen a presidential campaign be co-opted by reality TV years after The Hero Project/HeroFall told a similar story. Will never get over that one!)

What was your favorite part of writing Open Season?

Without giving away any spoilers, I love the way all of the characters across all five Heroes Rise/The Hero Project books all weave and interconnect…and ultimately seeing how they come together/divide themselves. I also love how some of the plot twists came together (I think there is one in particular literally no one will see coming, at least from my social media awareness). And I love how big the ending feels…it’s hard to top yourself after seven books, but the stakes in Open Season somehow feel higher than they’ve ever been.

What was the most challenging part of it? 

Honestly, Open Season was a joy to write! The hardest part of The Hero Project Duology writing process was actually after Redemption Season published, knowing that so many readers were asking for things that had always been a part of my plan for what was coming…I was like, ahhh I know many of you feel like it’s missing things, but those things are on the way and I can’t tell you yet without spoiling everything! I’ve seen the whole picture from the beginning, so it’s interesting to see the reactions when everyone else only gets a piece of the puzzle. I think Open Season completes Redemption Season in a way that will have a lot of readers going back to previous books, to have fun seeing how there were breadcrumbs leading to this epic finale all along the way. Or at least, I hope so!

Is it hard to say goodbye to this world, these characters? 

Um, absolutely. Some of these characters I created when I was a little kid playing with my action figures, and some as an adult collecting action figures (lol). And so much of it has been shaped by the loyal readers along the way–a lot of characters are named after readers, or character’s actions were inspired by reader requests I never would have considered myself (um, wanting to romance Prodigal much?). That’s the connective power of interactive fiction at work! But ultimately, Heroes Rise/The Hero Project feel like my babies–but now it’s time to let them stand on their own!

Who are you going to miss the most?

Everyone? Haha I guess I will especially miss some of the characters readers seem to love most too, like Jelly Kelly and Prodigal, Grandma and GG. The character that perhaps surprised me the most over the span of the series was Verdict (or the artist formerly known as Jury). I didn’t really have a plan for him aside from being a foil in The Prodigy when it all started, so to see his evolution (partially inspired by fan demand) has been really satisfying. I never thought I’d miss a Victon, but I will!

Your next game is going to be the third and final game of the Versus series. Any hints or little spoilers for fans? Do you have a working title?

Well, I hadn’t announced officially that Versus is a Trilogy yet, but now seems like a good time and place to do so! I’ve had the ending of Versus mapped out since the beginning, including the working title…but everyone will have to stay tuned for more details on what’s to come next!

What are you working on outside Versus 3?

I actually have three other projects in the pipeline right now, outside Choice of Games. I can’t actually talk about any of them yet, but if you head to the brand new https://zacharysergi.com/and give me a follow on your social media platform of choice, I’ll be sharing updates the moment I can!

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven: Part Two continues your story as you escape Nightfall with your new group of survivors in search of a safe haven. Continue your story from part one, or skip right to the new chapters with a new character! It’s 25% off until March 29th!

With three brand new chapters and another 310,000 words, Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven is now more than than 900,000 in total! That’s 32,000 words each time you play Part Two alone, and more than 72,000 for the full game. Given the number of paths from beginning to end, you can have a unique story every time and still never see all there is in Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven!

• Grow your group to as many as 20 characters, with 12 of them as romantic options.
• Become leader of the group or let another survivor take the lead.
• Expand your skills, train other survivors, or receive training from them.

Jim Dattilo 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!

Become a road warrior in the arid plains of the 21st century! Take the role of a Highway Marshall, in a bid to enforce the rule of civilization on a post-apocalyptic world. Will you prevent the sacking of the last remaining Free Cities, rule over them as a Warlord, or attempt to seek a better future for humanity in another planet? It’s 25% off until March 22nd!

Highway Wars is a 190,000 word interactive post-apocalyptic novel by Adrao, 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 male, female, or nonbinary, romance other characters, and even get married!
• Enjoy a road trip along the desolate wastelands of the 21st century, and then conquer the lands around you
• Choose your crew amongst a variety of different companions
• Several illustrations to enhance your experience
• Variety of different game paths, with 24 different endings
• Several different difficulty settings

Adrao 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!

Become the greatest telepathic villain Los Diablos has ever known! Once you were famous; soon you will be infamous. That is, unless your old friends in the Rangers stop you first. Juggle different identities and preserve your secrets as you build new alliances and try to forget the friendships you’ve left behind. It’s 25% off until March 22nd!

Fallen Hero: Rebirth is a 380,000 word interactive novel by Malin Rydén, 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.

• Hone your telepathic talents, possess people and venture into their minds.
• Build your own personalized combat armor: be a terrifying super-strong behemoth, a mysterious speedster or anything inbetween.
• Make alliances or enemies in the Los Diablos underworld while you outfight and outthink the heroes set against you.
• Explore relationships as straight, gay, bisexual or aromantic. Romance a mad scientist, your former partner, or both.
• Juggle two bodies and three identities, play as male, female or genderqueer.
• Above all; make sure your past never catches up with you.

How far will you fall down the path of villainy?

Malin Rydén 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!

Your first case as a detective is forcing you to open your eyes to a world bigger than you thought. But maybe it’s better to keep them closed. Knowing too much doesn’t help anyone sleep at night! Seems the supernatural didn’t get the memo that nothing exciting ever happens in the little town of Wayhaven. It’s 40% off until March 15th!

The Wayhaven Chronicles: Book One is a thrilling 440,000 word interactive fantasy novel by Mishka Jenkins, 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.

Experience the big and small moments with a host of characters throughout this exciting twist on the usual supernatural tale—a story which will take you through heart-pounding romance, smile-filled friendships, and shiver-inducing drama.

• Play as female, male, or non-binary—with options to be straight, gay, or bisexual.
• Discover the start of distinct and lasting romances with the vampires of Unit Bravo.
• Define and refine relationships with a variety of characters-from friends, family, exes, and enemies.
• Decide how you will fulfill the job of detective, through Deduction, Combat, Science, or People skills.
• Discover the truth of what awaits in Wayhaven in a playstyle that suits your personality.
• Indulge in true moments of romance, friendship, drama, and fun!

Mishka Jenkins 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 The Fielder’s Choice, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, iOS, and Android. It’s 25% off until March 1st!

Grab a glove and pitch your way to the top of the major leagues! Baseball season is back and you’re on the mound. Starting your career as a rookie pitcher, you’ll develop your repertoire and navigate clubhouse politics in the big leagues. Over eight seasons, you’ll use your talent and charisma to win on—and off—the field.

The Fielder’s Choice is a 115,000-word interactive baseball novel by Nathaniel Edwards. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Your talented arm will take you places you’ve never seen, and introduce you to some of the most driven athletes on the planet. Do you have the massive dedication to succeed in the big leagues, or will you resort to a little bit of cheating? Will you be baseball’s biggest stat geek or the master of hustle and grit? Will you develop an on-field persona that terrifies hitters or a cuddly exterior that lulls them to sleep? Will you go down in history as a Hall of Fame ace or a live arm that fizzled on the big stage? When your lifelong baseball dreams come true, someone else may have to lose everything they’ve ever worked toward.

• Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay or straight
• Play as left- or right-handed
• Choose your pitching style and develop the perfect repertoire to rack up strikeouts
• Perfect a fastball, slider, or curveball
• Find friends, foes, or potential lifelong partners among your teammates
• Pitch in the United States, Japan, or unlock the opportunity to explore a new frontier for baseball
• Use statistical analysis to perfect your game, or #RiseAndGrind to out-hustle your opponents
• Discover the quirky secret behind baseball’s most successful agent

What pitch will you throw when the game is on the line? In that moment, it’s the Fielder’s Choice.

We hope you enjoy playing The Fielder’s Choice. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, 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.

Grab a glove and pitch your way to the top of the major leagues! Baseball season is back and you’re on the mound. Starting your career as a rookie pitcher, you’ll develop your repertoire and navigate clubhouse politics in the big leagues. Over eight seasons, you’ll use your talent and charisma to win on–and off–the field.

The Fielder’s Choice is a 115,000-word interactive baseball novel, by Nathaniel Edwards. I sat down with Nate to talk about sports, interactive fiction, and his adorable history on the field. The Fielder’s Choice releases this Thursday, February 22nd. 

Tell me a little about your background with baseball. Did you play, growing up? Do you follow any teams now?

When I was a baby, my favorite pacifier had a baseball on it. Somehow or other my parents lost it one day and I would never take another pacifier after that.

I played Little League for a few years, filling the oh-so-valuable role of light-hitting corner outfielder. But really I’ve just been an Atlanta Braves fan for as long as I can remember. For a long time when I was a kid, I wouldn’t leave the house without a Braves hat on and chewing gum in my mouth (That’s gum that baseball players are chewing, right? Couldn’t be tobacco.)

What was the most challenging thing about writing this game?

I had never written anything at this kind of novel-length scale before, so keeping the story organized throughout was a new challenge for me. And then when the story is interactive and two players might get very different versions of the story, there are even more organization problems and continuity errors to worry about. I’m very thankful for the beta testers and editors who are able to catch when I’ve, say, introduced the same character twice, or written that a character threw the ball all the way from first base to…first base again.

How did you find ChoiceScript was for meeting the needs of your fairly complex pitching sim?

I got along very well with ChoiceScript. I got used to it quicker than other IF languages like Inform or Twine. I like a language where I can learn every tool that’s available to me so I can then know how to be creative with the code without constantly worrying that I’m missing out on a function that would make everything ten times easier, and wasting my time looking things up. And thankfully no sport has better statistical information than baseball, so it’s easy to implement realistic odds for everything that happens on the field.

This is really only the second sports game Choice of Games has done, the other being Slammed, about wrestling. What made you want to create a piece of interactive fiction slash pitching sim?

The first things I ever programmed were little choose-your-own-adventures for my TI-83 calculator in middle school. The most complicated thing I made was a soccer management “sim,” so you could say I’ve been making sports-themed interactive fiction games since I was fourteen.

Baseball is my favorite sport, so I knew I wouldn’t get sick of writing and thinking about it for the year it took to put this game together. And there’s been a recent trend of putting strong story modes in sports simulation games like Madden and FIFA, though a modern baseball game hasn’t pulled that off yet. If you don’t mind going back a few console generations, MLB Power Pros has a cartoonish and silly but mechanics-rich story mode that was an inspiration for this game. And on the off-chance you can speak Japanese, that series is still going as Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu, though it hasn’t been localized to English since 2008. I don’t speak enough Japanese to dig into the story modes very far, but I import those games whenever a new one comes, they’re excellent.

What are you working on next?

Well I’ve got a chicken sandwich sitting next to me I’d like to work on as soon as I’m done writing this answer, but I’d love to write something for IFComp this year. And I have more ideas for Choice of Games if you’ll still have me after that chicken sandwich joke.

Short answer, Bernard Pivot Style Questionnaire

Favorite word.

Gli (one of the Italian words for “the,” pronounced like “lyee”)

Favorite color.

#E32636 Alizarin Crimson

Profession other than your own you would like to attempt?

Seaplane pilot.

Profession you would never want to attempt?

Call center worker.

Can you explain the infield fly rule?

This is a tender subject for Braves fans, I’m afraid. Basically if there are runners on first and second (or the bases are loaded) then any fly ball that should easily be caught by an infielder is automatically an out, whether anybody caught the ball or not. This rule exists because otherwise the defense could easily turn a double or triple play on this kind of fly ball, because the runners don’t know until the ball is caught whether they need to be at their base or at the next base to be safe. So the defense could intentionally drop it and throw them out.

Unfortunately for the Braves, the rule came into effect in an exceptional situation where it benefits the defense instead of the offense. The shortstop accidentally didn’t catch a fly ball way out in left field, so the runners all advanced and the batter was safe. Except, the umpires decided he should have easily caught it, so that’s an infield fly and the batter is out. And this was in a decisive moment in a winner-take-all playoff game. So the fans did the logical thing and threw a bunch of garbage on the field to make their displeasure known. Ah, memories.

The infield fly rule is tricky and complicated for sure, like trigonometry. But the balk rule is like quantum physics.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

In this sequel to The Great Tournament, continue your quest to defend the kingdom of Magincia. Play as a Knight, Lord, or Prince in this medieval fantasy where every choice you make affects the story. Lead armies in battle against powerful foes or use diplomacy to resolve conflicts. It’s 25% off until February 16th!

The Great Tournament 2 is a 300,000 word interactive low fantasy novel by Philip Kempton, 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.

• Character generation and random events ensures no one game is the same.
• Play as a devoted knight, honorable lord, or ruthless tyrant.
• Multiple storylines with over a dozen different endings.
• Use diplomacy or war to resolve global conflicts.
• Raise and train an army to defend the kingdom.
• Conqueror territories and expand your kingdom.
• Manage village and kingdom finances.
• Fight waves of barbarian armies in Survival Mode.

Philip Kempton 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.

The Choice of Games Contest for Interactive Novels submission deadline has come and gone! We want to thank everyone for participating. We received 25 entries, which is a wonderful result for our first contest.  Here is the official list of entries:

While judging will not be complete for some time, we expect to begin our first round of review next week, and we’ll have a better sense of how long it will take to judge the contest in full, in a few weeks’ time. We are a small staff, and have a limited amount of time for publishing games, keeping the lights on, and reading contest entries, but after our initial review we will have a better sense of how long it will be before we can announce the winners.

Once again, congratulations to all the entrants. Writing a full game in ChoiceScript is a stunning achievement, and we hope you will find a way to celebrate this weekend.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Are you prepared to lead the Revolution Of 1917? It’s the fall of the Czars! How will you build The Motherland!? It’s 25% off until February 8th!

Comrade or Czar is a 60,000 word interactive novel by Albnoob, 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.

• Lead armies to conquer the world!
• Build and reform Russia!
• Embrace Communism or stomp it out!
• Lead your side to victory!

Albnoob 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.