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Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of Paranoia, by Kie Brooks! Play it on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version.

When you think your doctor may be trying to kill you, life gets complicated. Survive this multiple choice game, if you can.

We hope you enjoy playing “Paranoia” 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 “Paranoia” will rank.

Finally, a shameless plug: “Paranoia” is the fourth 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 75% of the revenue your game produces.

One of the hardest tasks in learning to write a ChoiceScript game is figuring out a process for writing vignettes that works.  We all have experience writing stories, essays, and other prose forms.  And many of us have written computer programs before.  But a ChoiceScript game isn’t like a normal story, although it needs to tell an effective story, and it depends far more on text and storytelling than a normal computer program, although it is a computer program.  So how do we go about writing a vignette?

In previous posts, I’ve talked about how we plan a ChoiceScript game and how to pick a vignette to start writing.  Today’s installment in our series on game design discusses ways to write an individual vignette.  Unlike the previous two topics, I don’t have any clear choice to advocate as the way that I think is “best.”  But I can describe several different approaches that I’ve seen used, and talk about some of the advantages and disadvantages of each.

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Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of What Happened Last Night?, by Kie Brooks! Play it on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version.

“What Happened Last Night?” is a dark but occasionally humorous action murder mystery multiple-choice text-based game.

We hope you enjoy playing “What Happened Last Night?” 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 “What Happened Last Night?” will rank.

Finally, a shameless plug: “What Happened Last Night?” is the third 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 75% of the revenue your game produces.

Based on number of comments on this topic, clearly the next game should be Choice of Romance. 😛 – Jake Forbes

Yeah, the thought crossed our minds, too. The Great Villeneuve Debate, aka TGVN (thank you, Jake, for coining a term that will make me grin for the rest of my life) demonstrated among other things that there was room in the Choice of Games stable for something that relied more heavily on personal interactions and less heavily on hitting things with swords or crunching them with your dragon teeth. (Don’t worry, we haven’t given up on those games. We’ll be doing those, too.)

While I of course cannot comment on what we might be working on next, setting a romance plot in a world we built ourselves would remove many of the aforementioned constraints. It would be much easier to code said plot to work equally well for male-courting-female, male-courting-male, female-courting-male, and female-courting-female. – Me, on April 5th

Looking at our market research data confirmed the impression. I was genuinely surprised at the number of votes (via the blog and via the AdWords test) for Choice of the Consort. Okay then! Adam and I settled down to write a game based on the concept, “As a lovely young courtier who has caught the monarch’s eye, will you gain a crown or lose your head?”

Henry VIII’s love life provided a reasonable starting point for our research, since the six wives and three-at-least mistresses of that unstable ruler demonstrated a variety of paths a lovely young courtier might take to a monarch’s bed… and/or the throne… and/or the executioner’s block. We figured that if we could achieve something partway between a Tudor court intrigue and a drawing-room comedy of manners, we’d have the right atmosphere.

Except we also knew we wanted to set the story in a gender-equal world where it was equally possible and equally interesting to play male or female, straight or gay.

Which meant we had just deprived ourselves of all the usual building blocks of a Tudoresque court intrigue or an Austenesque comedy of manners.

A gender-equal world eliminates the tension around needing to have a male heir… the tension around a woman needing to marry at all. A gender-equal and same-sex-friendly world makes unusable the rituals of courtship that impart the flavor of a late medieval or early modern romance. How do the formalized roles of suitor and courted work now? What would make a relationship ‘scandalous’? How does a same-sex couple have a legal heir in a world without modern technology?

How do you impart the flavor without using any of the traditional ingredients?

It struck me as not unlike adapting traditional recipes for a vegetarian audience. After all, a lot of things taste like chicken. More to the point, a lot of things have the texture of chicken, serving just as well in the role of “protein thing that absorbs the flavors it is cooked with.” There need to be rules of courtship that the player can choose to obey or flout; there need to be obstacles to a happy union; there need to be markings other than gender that indicate who is the courted and who the suitor in any given encounter; there need to be constraints on what sort of person the monarch may take as a consort; none of these things need to match their counterparts of this world as long as they serve the purpose equally well.

So we went back to the very beginning, made the building blocks, and then used them to create an Austenesque romance within a Tudoresque court intrigue. Or, at least, we hope we did. The initial feedback is promising. In a about a month, we figure, you’ll be able to tell us if we pulled it off.

In the meantime, we could use your help! In Broadsides, if you recall, we were at a loss for titles in the gender-flipped universe. In the game-currently-known-as-Consort (we may change the working title before release) we’re struggling with the title for the monarch’s spouse. The monarch can be a reigning King or a reigning Queen, and his/her spouse can be male or female.

Help us title the spouse! Choices beneath the cut!

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Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of The Nightmare Maze, by Alex Livingston! Play it on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version.

“The Nightmare Maze” is the story of a 19th-century Bostonian plagued by strange nightmares. Lose yourself in the depths of a tormented psyche and try to find the logic to the night terrors in this haunting text-based multiple-choice game. It’s part of the Waking Cassandra series.

We hope you enjoy playing “The Nightmare Maze,” 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 “The Nightmare Maze” will rank.

Finally, a shameless plug: “The Nightmare Maze” is the second 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 75% of the revenue your game produces.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about what games we’re working on and when they’ll be released.  I thought I’d give a quick run-down of some of the games that we have in progress.

We have two games that are fairly far along.  Choice of the Vampire by Jason Hill is in beta testing currently.  We hope that it will be ready to release soon–maybe by the end of June–but we’ll keep on working on any of our games until we’re satisfied with them.

“Choice of the Consort” is the tentative title for our game about romance and intrigue in a late medieval/early modern fantasy court, written by Heather Albano and Adam Strong-Morse.  Depending on the choices the player makes, you can end up as the monarch’s consort, as the monarch’s unofficial lover, happily married to a noble, or executed in disgrace.  It’s a different style of game from our previous games, with less action and more focus on personal relationships.  We’re about to start beta testing for part I of the game.  Depending on the feedback from our beta testers, we may finish part I and release it with part II as a later expansion or we may finish part II and release the two parts together.  So we can’t predict a release date for “Consort” yet–it could be as soon as in a couple of weeks, or it could be a month or two off.  We may also change the title before release–there are a lot of aspects of the game that are still in flux.

In addition to our games that are nearing completion, we have several more games that are in development but where the development process has been going more slowly for various reasons.  By popular demand, both Choice of the Dragon 2 and Choice of the God are in development, as is Choice of the Wizard.  None of those games are near beta testing, however, let alone release.  For various reasons, those have fallen a little behind.

We also have some great games in the Hosted Games pipeline–we expect to release our second hosted game soon, and we know of several other games that are approaching that point as well.  We’ll make announcements about those as they come out.

Hello world! My name is Jason Hill, and my old friend Dan recruited me to join the Choice of Games team earlier this Spring. Being between jobs as I am, I’ve had plenty of time (some might say too much!) to devote to our next release, Choice of the Vampire.

While our audience hasn’t expressed overwhelming desire for a vampire game, my personal interest in the genre lead me to write this. So, I know that you’re all looking forward to Dragon II and God and some of the other games we’re thinking about, but I hope you’ll deign to enjoy this one in the meantime. Right now, we’re almost finished testing the first portion of the game, and we estimate that we’ll release it by the end of the month.

CotV has some radical differences from the other Choice of Games to date. First, it has a very different relationship to history and our world. This is not set in Albion and Gaul, nor a world of dragons, but rather in the Antebellum South. Thus, while you can certainly play a woman or an African American, the rest of the game-world does not change for you. Instead, the character will have to confront the very real forces of tribalism and discrimination that have defined so much of America’s history. (I will discuss the philosophical and aesthetic choices behind this in a later blog post.)

Another immediate difference is that, put simply, being a vampire sucks. (Sorry, it had to be said.) Being a vampire is something tragic… perhaps Romantically so (specifically big-R “Romantic”, not little-r “romantic”)… but still tragic. The way I’ve drawn vampires, they’re miserable, back-biting monsters who squander their immortality by making the lives of their fellows miserable. Some of our early testers have criticized the game for setting up a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation, but hopefully, if you trust in the narrative, the longer arc of the game will justify any early feelings of frustration.

But that brings us to one of the great things about the game: its scope and breadth. Vampires don’t die of natural causes, and that leaves me with two hundred years of rich history to play with. Of course, that’s also meant that I’ve had to do my research. (Uncovering the antebellum street names of the French Quarter was no easy task, let me tell you!) Really, that’s a large part of what made creating this game so enjoyable: the history of these times and places is rich with moments ready to be mined for drama.

I’ve designed this game with expansions in mind. The first portion spans 1815-1863; later installments will feature Chicago in the 1920s and Boston in the present day. I’ve already sketched out parts of these future installments, and we’ll try to release them on a regular schedule over the next few months. In theory, the game can tolerate any number of expansions, and I hope that I will have an opportunity to continue adding to the game for some time into the future.

When writing a ChoiceScript game, it’s tempting to think that you should write the game the way that it will be played:  start with the first vignette (maybe with some character-generation questions), then write the second vignette, then the middle vignettes, and finish with the concluding vignettes and epilogues (if any).  That can work, of course, but I don’t think it’s the most effective way to approach a ChoiceScript game.  In this post, I explain why and give my suggestions for how to pick a vignette to start with.

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Some people who are starting up the process of writing a ChoiceScript game have asked how to plan/outline/storyboard/etc. a game before writing.  I don’t presume that we know the best way, let alone the one true right way to do things, but I thought people would be interested in how we plan our games.  This is a monster length post, so I’m going to put it beneath a cut.

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“Villeneuve is way cooler than any of the boring boys at the dance! We made such a good team.”

Quoth my friend Becky, explaining her surprise that it was not (at that time) possible to pursue a same-sex relationship with Villeneuve. A common sentiment, as it turned out.

“I think there’s such an interest in this aspect of the story,” wrote Spider in a comment to an earlier blog post, “because Villeneuve is the best-fleshed-out character. You don’t have the same level of interaction with the three marriage interests, and relationships with them feel rushed…”

And Spider is quite right about that. We didn’t design the possible spouses to be less interesting than Villeneuve… but the fact that many players viewed them that way says something about modern (visceral, not intellectual) reactions to 19th century courtship rituals.

Nowadays, we tend to want partners for our spouses. We seek out a member of our preferred gender with whom we share values and interests, with whom we can talk and upon whom we can rely. “We make a good team” is something you expect to be able to say of your spouse. Nowadays.

This is not the case in a Jane Austen comedy of manners, because it was not the case for gentry of the early 19th century of whom Jane was writing. The Season, as ridiculous as it sounds to us now, was a real thing. Upper-class young men really did meet young ladies at balls, court them under strict supervision and in highly artificial circumstances, and propose marriage after three to six months’ acquaintance. The spheres of men and women were so profoundly divided that for a wife to have full partnership in her husband’s world would have been an absurd thing to contemplate. It’s an unfortunate side effect of putting women on a pedestal: it’s kind of hard to be partners with them afterward. When they’re all the way up there and you’re not.

So of course most players were going to have a more genuine emotional reaction to Villeneuve than to the boys at the dance. Villeneuve is like them (like their characters, I mean, and of course depending upon choices made) in a way that the boring boys at the dance just aren’t. It’s possible to have a full partnership with Villeneuve.

The trade-off appears to be (again) between genre conventions and instinctive emotional resonance. A more modern relationship between the PC and his/her spouse might have been more emotionally satisfying… but then again, might have felt less true to the feel that Broadsides was attempting to evoke.