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Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of Dilemma, by Matt Pirrodi! Play it now on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version.

In “Dilemma”, you make difficult moral decisions in a modern drama. You take the role of Alex, an average guy having a not so average day. Juggle relations with your friends while you puzzle over choices of right and wrong. Explore what it means to be a good person. Determine if the law is always right. Choose between yourself and your friends. Decide between romance or friendship. And ultimately hold the life of another in your hands. One day can be packed with enough drama, tension, and death to change your life forever. But at the end of that day you’re faced with the question: are you a good person?

We hope you enjoy playing “Dilemma” and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our App Store ranking. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better “Dilemma” will rank.

Finally, a shameless plug: “Dilemma” is another game available as part of our hosted games plan. If you’d like to write a multiple-choice game of your own, give it a try! If you host our game with us, we’ll share a portion of the revenue your game produces.

For a variety of reasons (mostly legal and technical reasons) our hosted games releases have been on hiatus for quite a while. But now we’re ready to pump these games out almost as fast as you can submit them to us. Expect half a dozen games or more over the next month or two!

(Artwork is used under a Creative Commons license, courtesy of Alex Proimos.)

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 game to us; we’ll host it for you publicly and give you a share of the revenue your game produces.

Choice of Games wishes all participants of NaNoWriMo the best of luck. Happy writing!

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!

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.
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Traditional gamebooks tend to be pretty short. The average story in a 110-page book in the most popular “choose a path” series is only six pages long.

It’s not hard to see why. If each page of a choose-a-path 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!

It’s hard to tell a great story in fewer than eight pages. (You can tell children’s stories, which is perhaps why choose-a-path has traditionally appealed to kids.) You’ll have to write longer stories if you want grown-ups to read them.

But how?
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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!

SAN FRANCISCO, July 18, 2011: Have you ever wished to be the heroine of a romance novel? Think you could have run Anne Boleyn’s life better than she did? Want to walk a mile in Princess Kate’s gorgeous shoes? Now you can. Choice of Games, a quirky independent games company, has released their newest interactive novel, “Choice of Intrigues“—giving you the chance to star in your very own royal romance.

“Choice of Intrigues” is a sequel to last year’s popular “Choice of Romance,” and is available as an In-App Purchase on iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. Choice of Games is also releasing “Choice of Romance” and “Choice of Intrigues” as an omnibus edition on Amazon Kindle, entitled “Affairs of the Court.”

Play as a young noble who comes to court looking for love… and catches the monarch’s eye. Plunge into court politics and change the course of history, or pursue a love affair that rocks the kingdom to its foundations. Match wits with the schemers of the court, or play your suitors off each other. Seek wealth and power, or seek true love.

“Choice of Romance” has been critically acclaimed, with AppSafari calling it “a wonderfully fascinating and addictive experience that will leave you playing it over and over again as you attempt to discover each new ending” and Jezebel approving the “sexually liberated update” to the choose-your-own-adventure style of storytelling. “Choice of Intrigues” and the combined Kindle game “Affairs of the Court” continue the story begun in “Choice of Romance” while exploring the political machinations within the royal court.

“In these games, you control the story,” said Dan Fabulich, co-founder of Choice of Games. “You can choose to play as male or female, gay or straight. You can choose to pursue the King or the Queen of Iberia. Or you can reject the monarch entirely and marry someone else. Or focus on political intrigue rather than intrigues of the heart. Every ending is a direct consequence of your choices, and every ending is meaningful.”

“Affairs of the Court” is Choice of Games’ fourth release for Kindle, following the successful launch of “Choice of the Dragon,” “Choice of Broadsides,” and “Choice of the Vampire” in 2010. “Choice of Intrigues” is Choice of Games’ first sequel available through In-App Purchases.

Back in May we posted a link to IntroComp, an annual interactive-fiction competition in which entrants submit only the first part of their games. Players vote for the winning game.

The introductions are now available and can be found here in a single zipped file:
http://www.allthingsjacq.com/IntroComp11

There are 5 games in ChoiceScript this year; it’s easier to play them online than in the zip file, so I linked to their websites below.

There are thirteen entries this year. They are as follows:

• Bender, by Katz
• Choice of the Petal Throne, by Danielle Goudeau
• Choice of Zombies, by Heather Albano
• Chunky Blues, by Scott Hammack and Jessamin Yu
• The Despondency Index, by Ed Blair
• Exile, by Simon
• Gargoyle, by Simon
• Of Pots and Mushrooms, by Devi and Maya
• Parthenon, by Charles Wickersham
• Seasons, by Poster (MT)
• Speculative Fiction, by Thomas Mack
• Stalling for Time, by Dominic Delabruere
• The Z-Machine Matter, by Zack Urlocker

The voting deadline is midnight Eastern time on July 17, 2011. You’ll need to register before you can login and vote online.

Please vote for your favorite intoductions! May the best game win!

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