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We’re proud to announce that Choice of the Petal Throne, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire. It’s 25% off during launch week.

In the Empire of the Petal Throne™, will you find glory, or a knife in your back?

“Choice of the Petal Throne” is a 124,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Danielle Goudeau, 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.

M.A.R. Barker’s world of Tékumel™ is a fantasy universe like no other, where South American, Middle Eastern, and Indian cultures collide. The princes and princesses of the Tsolyáni empire vie for their father’s mystical Petal Throne, tearing the nation apart with civil war and political intrigues.

As a captain in one of their armies, will you play as male or female, gay straight or bi? A brave and forthright soldier, a hedonistic intriguer with a heart of gold, or scheming double agent?

(Tékumel™ and Empire of the Petal Throne™ are trademarks of M.A.R. Barker and are used with permission of the Tékumel Foundation. For additional information, please visit http://www.tekumelfoundation.org.)

Why Tékumel?

Author Danielle Goudeau explains,

Tékumel is an amazing setting that encapsulates both the history and the future of table-top gaming. Published in 1975, it blends sword and sorcery, dungeon crawls, war gaming, and meticulous detail with a non-Eurocentric setting, alternative sexuality, and a role for women that manages to be empowering while not blithely ignoring historical reality. Because of this, it lies at the intersection of both the Old School Renaissance movement, and the call for more diversity in gaming.

There is so much to love here. The human society, drawn from India and South America, eschews the standard rugged-individualism of most adventuring parties for a world in which every PC is caught in a web of obligations between their family, their clan, their temple, and their career. The morality springs from an honest exploration of what it would be like for humans to live in a world where incomprehensible omnipotent gods interfered in daily life. The alien races are truly alien, not just humans with some features changed.

What I love most, though, is that this game, the first published RPG setting, has so much of what I see people calling for in modern games. Not just that the PCs all have black hair and brown skin and don’t live in Ye Olde Europe. Homosexuality and bisexuality are discussed openly in the books and accepted within the cultures, as is polyamory. The role of women, is in my opinion, portrayed brilliantly, with women pressured into traditional family roles, but legally allowed to declare themselves the equals of men. This lets me play the female general, governor, or bad-ass scholar-priestess, while showcasing the more rigid gender roles in historical societies.

For all these reasons, and because any game with a table discussing regional variations in architecture is just awesome, take time this year, on the 40th anniversary of its publication to play some Tékumel. Find a game at your local convention, or buy a source-book and run a session for your friends. Play it using Béthorm or Empire of the Petal Throne or your rules-light system of choice. See where our roots are as a hobby and think about where we’re going.

We need your support to continue delivering our games on Steam. Our goal is to release our entire catalog of interactive novels on Steam. Based on the extraordinary performance of Choice of Robots and The Hero of Kendrickstone, both which made it onto Steam’s front page this year, Valve has allowed us to ship a handful of additional games. We’ll need to continue to deliver outstanding results to prove that interactive fiction can be successful on Steam.

We’re asking all of our fans to follow us on Steam. Even if you don’t use Steam that much, it will be a big help if you sign up to follow us there, because the more followers we get, the better visibility we get on Steam’s curator list. (Our goal is to hit 3,000 followers for our Steam curation page; we’re about 40% the way there as I write this!)

When you follow us, you’ll see our games and our recommended games right on your Steam home page. It’s free, and it’s a big help to us, so follow us today!

We hope you enjoy playing Choice of the Petal Throne. 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 store ranking. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

There’s a new game in our Hosted Games program ready for you to play!

Stranded by a breakdown, you explore a nearby abandonded house only to find that you are not alone. A creature not of this world lairs within the walls. As the sun goes down, so do your odds against the Shadow Horror.

The Shadow Horror is a 533,000-word interactive horror novel by Allen Gies, 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. Allen Gies is the author of Marine Raider, Apex Patrol, and Tin Star, the biggest interactive novel ever made.

Allen developed his games 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 we’ll publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

This post was written by Danielle Goudeau, author of Choice of the Petal Throne, which released on April 10th.

I have a game coming out tomorrow, and for a long time I believed it would never be finished. The history of Choice of the Petal Throne is about four years long and consists of a series of punctuated equilibria. The first third of the game took three of the four years, written in bursts whenever writer’s block, depression, self-doubt, and life all managed to get out of the way at once. Then, in 2014, I found my stride and managed to write the rest. I wanted to share my journey and my solution with anyone out there who’s 1/4 or 2/3 through their game, but having trouble seeing the end.

I began writing my game because I really adore the setting of Tékumel, which my husband introduced me to, and wanted to do my part to help it reach a wider audience. This is a game world that is unique and thoughtful, and a man’s life’s work, but which very few people have heard of.

I was neither a writer nor a coder, and learning ChoiceScript while also trying to come up with a plot and a story was very intimidating. I had only done two types of writing in my life: a very dry science paper, and various characters for one-shot LARPs with my husband. These last are sort of like writing a single scene from a dozen or more points of view. There’s no movement of the plot and the writing is of the info-dump variety.

Still, I pretty quickly wrote what would be the very first scene of the game, a short intro using an in medias res stat building scene. A few weeks later, my husband got into college across the country and we moved, and I didn’t really touch the game again for a year.

In mid-2011, Dan, long-suffering and infinitely patient patron that he is, suggested I try to write the second scene and enter the pair into IntroComp. I rose to the challenge and spent a productive few months turning out a game intro that managed to snag third place, which was pretty exciting at the time. I was now poised to build on that success and finish the other 80% of the game, but in the background things were falling apart for me. Moving across country, struggling with a new job, and living off a single income–not to mention some inherent faults in brain chemistry–lead to severe depression; I wouldn’t touch the game again until I moved back to California in late 2012.

I’m now going to skip ahead a bit, past more cycles of brief progress and lengthy setback, to early 2014, which found me only one scene ahead of where I’d been in late 2011.

2014 was the year I told myself I was either going to finish this game or delete the whole damn thing. With eight scenes left to write, I was plagued with self doubt, and probably had more aversion to working on my game than I had ever had to doing anything. This was the cycle:

1. Decide to work on my game.
2. Experience frustration, and remember all the other times I’d failed to make progress.
3. Avoid the game because it was a symbol of my failure.
4. Go do something else.
5. Start feeling happy, but also guilty about being unable to persevere.

How did I break that cycle? I would credit that with four things.

The first was an actual “Eureka!” moment. I was reading an article by an author I really like and had two realizations. The first was that I felt like a fraud because here I was, in my mid-30s, with no training, trying to write a game without any previous experience. I had been pre-failing myself, but this author I admire was talking about starting to get serious about writing in her 30s, and in the other room was my husband who had just changed his career in his early 40s.

The article also touched upon the process of writing and revising books, and it made me realize that I was always comparing my first drafts to other people’s published work. I’d often be writing my game and then go read a book by Terry Pratchett or some other luminary and feel inadequate. I would set unrealistic expectations for myself and then use my failure to meet those as evidence that I wasn’t competent to write anything. By confronting these feelings, and comparing them to other people’s experiences, I learned not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and to accept what I wrote for what it was and move forward, trusting future-danielle, editors and beta-readers to help me fix it.

Second, I got some very helpful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is sort of like getting user training for your brain, and dealt with my actual depression. Since depression adds huge inertia to accomplishing anything, healing was crucial.

Third was an astute lesson from a therapist: I can’t just expect to power through things. When I associate failure with something it hurts to do it, and when I try to just push through and then stop because it hurts, I just build up more negative associations, increasing the pain and perpetuating the cycle.

At this point, typing on my game was like making myself stick my hand in a fire, and every time I tried to do it, it got harder and harder. The solution was to slowly and methodically build up positive associations. The way I did that was to work on the game in 20 minute bursts. Even if I was on a roll, I would stop after 20 minutes, so that my last thought was “Yay! I completed my goal!” This sounds silly, but really worked. The only thing I counted as a failure was not sitting down. Even if all I did was correct typos for 20min, I marked it a victory. After a few weeks I was at 30, 60, 90min. That 90 minutes per night, four nights a week pattern became the stride that would let me finish the game, and making a commitment to work at a moderate pace, but without protracted breaks kept momentum.

The last thing I did was reach out to more people for cheerleading and emotional support. I would ping Choice of Games about my progress, or talk through plots and setting details with my husband. I’d ask him to read over what I wrote, or help me outline a scene. Weirdly, having progress check-ins for the game (Finish X scene by Y date) did not help, but only increased my sense of dread and failure once I fell behind. However, having “what I did last week” conversations really helped me feel like I was making progress, and that feeling that I was doing well created allowed me to do well.

Crisis in my life outside of writing didn’t go away, but with a new outlook and a method for working, I turned writing this game from an obligation and a burden that I dropped when life got hard and I was out of fucks to give, into a routine that I could use to gain a sense of accomplishment and progress when everything else felt like it was falling to pieces. Writing became such a source of personal fulfillment that when I handed over the finished version I found myself unable to stop the habit of weeknight work. Now, as I write this, I can glance down at my iPad to see the app icon for a game I wrote, and I feel a mix of pride and trepidation and determination. It’s amazing.

We’re proud to announce that The Hero of Kendrickstone, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire. It’s 40% off during launch week.

Can a wanna-be hero like you rescue the city of Kendrickstone, held hostage by an evil wizard and his troop of black-clad soldiers? Face down fierce foes with spell, sword, or silver tongue. Outwit cunning rivals, cement your fledgling reputation, and maybe, just maybe, make enough money to pay your rent!

“The Hero of Kendrickstone” is an epic 240,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Paul Wang, 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.

Step into the shoes of a fledgling adventurer in a world full of magic and mystery! Master physical combat, magic, stealth, or diplomacy. Choose to befriend–or betray–sorcerers and knights, bandits and baronesses.

Will you spend the last of your silver on a bed for the night, or potions for your next adventure? Will you spend your evenings studying ancient secrets, or prize-fighting for extra coin? Will you seek a mentor to help hone your skills, or strike out on your own? Will you prove to be a paragon of compassion, or a callous mercenary? Will you die forgotten and un-mourned, or will you become the Hero of Kendrickstone?

We need your support to continue delivering our games on Steam. Our goal is to release our entire catalog of interactive novels on Steam. Based on the extraordinary performance of Choice of Robots, which landed on Steam’s front page in January, Valve has allowed us to ship a handful of additional games. We’ll need to continue to deliver outstanding results to prove that interactive fiction can be successful on Steam.

We’re asking all of our fans to follow us on Steam. Even if you don’t use Steam that much, it will be a big help if you sign up to follow us there, because the more followers we get, the better visibility we get on Steam’s curator list. (Our goal is to hit 3,000 followers for our Steam curation page; we’re about a third of the way there as I write this!)

When you follow us, you’ll see our games and our recommended games right on your Steam home page. It’s free, and it’s a big help to us, so follow us today!

We hope you enjoy playing The Hero of Kendrickstone. 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 store ranking. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

There’s a new game in our Hosted Games program ready for you to play!

An action-packed firefighting game, filled with humor, heartache, adventure, and romance! Fight fires! Save lives! Do you have what it takes to be a hero?

The Volunteer Firefighter is an epic 130,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Stefanie Handshaw, 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.

• Walk in boots of a volunteer firefighter!
• Immerse yourself in more than 120,000 words of dramatic adventure, humor, romance, and heartache.
• Be a member of either the Truck Company or Engine Company.
• Experience realistic firefighting scenarios.
• Make life-and-death decisions to determine the course of the game.
• Fight fires, rescue victims, and save the day!
• Play as male, female, or choose not to conform to binary gender roles.
• Opt for a gay or straight romance.
• Maybe adopt a cat!

Stefanie 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 we’ll publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

There are two more games in our Hosted Games program ready for you to play!

The Lost Heir: The Fall of Daria — Take back the throne that was rightfully yours!

When demon-summoning usurpers assassinate the king and queen, the right of rulership falls to you, their only child. Develop your own unique prince or princess, discovering a world of fantasy, magic, mystery, and adventure.

The Lost Heir: The Fall of Daria is an epic 145,000-word interactive fantasy novel—the first of a trilogy—by Mike Walter, author of Life of a Mobster, Life of a Wizard, and Paradox Factor, where your choices control the story. The game is entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Develop your own unique prince or princess, for good or evil! Become a noble knight, a greedy thief, an evil priest, a nature-loving druid, a charming bard, a deadly assassin, a wise monk, a well-traveled ranger, a martial cleric, a kind priest, a brutal thug, a steadfast guard, a powerful wizard or any combination you choose.

Your highness, the kingdom of Daria awaits you!

• Play as male or female, gay or straight.
• Pursue love interests, make friends, or be a loner.
• Uncover the mysteries of demon summoning.
• Uncover and collect legendary magical items and treasure.

Seven Bullets for iOS — Action-packed assassin adventure!

In Seven Bullets, by Cloud Buchholz, you’re a skilled assassin ready to retire, but before you can call it quits, the Boss kidnaps your little sister, and now you need to use your arsenal of deadly skills to get her back.

Will you make the choices that bring her home safely? Or will you get caught in a web of intrigue, assassins, and deadly combat? Only you can decide how this story ends…Do you have what it takes to survive?

• 260k words
• 470+ unique choices
• 80+ endings
• 35 Achievements

You can read Seven Bullets for free on Cloud’s website. If you enjoy the story, please support the author and purchase a copy on iOS or Android, or as an eBook on Amazon, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, or itch.io.

These authors have developed their games 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 we’ll publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

Today, we released a new version of Eerie Estate Agent that renames the game For Rent: Haunted House, and makes it free to play on iOS.

For Rent: Haunted House is a hilarious interactive novel by Gavin Inglis, in which it’s your job to rent out a haunted house before your tyrannical boss has you fired. On iOS, you can play the whole game from beginning to end for free; the game is supported by advertisements. We also offer a one-time in-app purchase to disable the ads.

Anyone who purchased Eerie Estate Agent for iOS can continue to play the game without advertisements; just tap on the “Restore Purchases” link next to the “Buy It” button.

On the web and Android, we can’t offer For Rent: Haunted House for free. On the web, we don’t have any advertisements, and haven’t had any since Google banned us from their AdSense program in 2010. On Android, we have no way to “Restore Purchases” for players who purchased Eerie Estate Agent; if we converted the Android version to a free version, our existing customers would have to pay again to disable advertisements, which isn’t fair to them. We offer the first three chapters of the game on the web for free, and we charge for the rest of the game past that point.

Over time, we will continue to experiment with ways to offer our games at low prices and even for free, without chiseling our loyal customers.

We’re happy to announce that one of our bestselling games, SLAMMED! is now available on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Buy it today for 26% off the regular price!

SLAMMED! is a 275,000-word interactive professional-wrestling novel by Paolo Chikiamco; it’s the greatest text-based pro-wrestling RPG in the world.

In SLAMMED!, you’ve always dreamed of becoming pro wrestling’s biggest star…but the wrestler’s world is fraught with hardship and betrayal, in and out of the ring. Become a powerhouse, a technician, a high-flier, or focus on your promo skills. There’s more than one road to success.

But none of those roads will be easy. This is a world where your biggest fans are your harshest critics; where the front office is more dangerous than the squared circle; where friends can become enemies with a single heel turn; where, sometimes, the only way to win is to lose, spectacularly.

This is professional wrestling. And you’re about to change it, forever.

Plus, there are new endings! Paolo took the time to add in three new endings and 70 unlockable achievements. The new endings are also available now on our other platforms; existing customers can upgrade to the new version for free. (iOS users will have to wait a few days for Apple to approve the upgrade.)

We need your support to continue delivering our games on Steam. Our goal is to release our entire catalog of interactive novels on Steam. Our last game on Steam, Choice of Robots, was a tremendous hit; it was even featured on Steam’s valuable front page for a short time. We’ll need to continue to deliver outstanding results to prove that interactive fiction can be successful on Steam.

We’re asking all of our fans to follow us on Steam. Even if you don’t use Steam that much, it will be a big help if you sign up to follow us there, because the more followers we get, the better visibility we get on Steam’s curator list. (Our goal is to hit 3,000 followers for our Steam curation page; we’re about 30% of the way there!)

When you follow us, you’ll see our games and our recommended games right on your Steam home page. It’s free, and it’s a big help to us, so follow us today!

We’re proud to announce that Lords of Aswick, the latest in our Hosted Games label of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for iOS, Android, and, via the Chrome Web Store, Windows, OS X, and Linux.

In this interactive novel, follow the life of a nobleman from childhood to death. Become swept up in the affairs of a medieval realm. How long can you put them off until you have to pick a side and (hopefully) live with the consequences?

• Over 250,000 words!
• Take control of a young boy and mould him into a knight worthy of legend.
• Establish a noble house, rise from an upstart to hold a seat next to the Throne.
• Ride alongside knights, experience great battles and lead sieges.
• Even defeat may not be the end, find a new life fighting for God!

We hope you enjoy playing Lords of Aswick. 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. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better we’ll rank.

by Ben Serviss, author of The Last Monster Master; this article originally appeared on his blog at dashjump.com.

Writing is hard. Writing interactive, multiple-choice games is harder.

Good at turning a phrase? Excellent – now turn seven of them, all equally-well written, that make sense in four different contexts, as said by three different characters. If nothing else, writing non-linear text game dialog and narrative is an exercise in constraints, creative reuse, and conviction.