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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.

Authorial intent is a slippery concept at the best of times, but it becomes even more so in the context of interactive fiction (IF), whether multiple-choice games like Choice of Games makes or text adventures with a parser.  In a standard book (or a legal document, which is the context in which I’ve had most of my interactions with the concept of authorial intent), it’s usually pretty clear who the author is.  The difficult questions are how do you determine what the author’s intent is and does it matter?  When J.K. Rowling says that a prominent character in the Harry Potter books is gay, does that settle the question of whether that character is gay?  Does it even mean something significant to talk about whether a character “is” gay, as opposed to how we the readers perceive a character?  Those are significant questions, but I’m going to ignore them for now. 🙂  Instead, I’m going to focus on the question of who the author even is in a work of IF.

If “Choice of Broadsides” were a (non-interactive) book, the question of authorship would be easy:  Adam Strong-Morse, Heather Albano, and Dan Fabulich wrote it.  We received a little feedback and editing advice from some friends and family, but we would clearly be the authors, without even the questions of authorship that a strong editor on the one hand or a ghost writer on the other can raise.  But it’s not a book.  It’s a game, and a work of interactive fiction, and the experience on playing through it depends on the choices made by the player as well as the choices we made in writing it.  In a meaningful sense, the designers of the game collaborate with the player to write the story each time the game is played.  This is similar to the reason that I don’t like terms like Storyteller to describe the game runner in a traditional pen-and-paper role-playing game:  the story is the product not of a single “Storyteller” but of a collaborative interaction among a group of participants.  If the player of a game has any meaningful agency, then they are part of the storytelling team.  Not the whole part, not an unrestricted part, perhaps only a very limited part, but nonetheless part of the storytelling team.

So what does that mean in terms of our games?  Here’s the way I think about it.  Our target should be to offer every option that a reasonable player, playing within the norms of the setting/genre, would want to pick.  We should then try to make all of those options play out in a way that is cool–perhaps not victorious, but cool.  We can’t cover every option, of course, and we have to constrain which choices we offer at all–in “Choice of Broadsides,” you can’t choose to be a cavalry officer instead, even though that would (within a certain broad understanding of the genre) be a perfectly reasonable option.  We just don’t present the choice at all.  But if someone could, playing reasonably, want to pick an option, we should make that possible.  Whenever a player says, “I wanted to do X, but the options wouldn’t let me,” we’ve failed a little.  We’ve gone beyond the parts of the authorial role that we need to retain–what happens when you do X?  What sorts of choices are possible at all? and gone into the parts of authorship that are better given to the player–what’s this character like?  What will the protagonist do when faced with a tough choice.  I think that shares the role of author most effectively.

By that standard, we failed initially in “Choice of Broadsides”, because people playing a gay protagonist wanted to have the option of taking actions to pursue a same-sex relationship at a point in the game where it appears appropriate.  In recognition of that, we’ve added some new options and new text; people who played the game when it first came out and were disappointed about this issue may want to try it again.  (The new version is up on the web and out for Android now; it will take a couple of days to show up in the iPhone version, because of their approval process.)

This isn’t the only approach to authorship possible in IF.  Some IF games are intended to be played until the player has explored every last nook, with the later endings intended to be more meaningful in light of earlier endings already seen.  In that paradigm, the game is really a single narrative that unfolds multiple times and the notion of shared authorship is less applicable.  But I think the notion of joint-authorship with the players, while limited, is a good paradigm for our games.  It provides a useful set of tools for determining what should be in and what doesn’t need to be developed, and it provides pressure to keep the choices meaningful and to allow real player agency.

Have you finished writing a game? Choice of Games encourages you to submit your finished ChoiceScript game to us so that we can host it for you publicly; we’ll give you 75% of the revenue your game produces.

Choice of Broadsides is now available as an iPhone app!

We hope you enjoy the app, and we hope that you tell all of your friends about it! Our initial download rate determines our App Store ranking. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better we’ll rank.

Share and enjoy!

… and books are not RPGs.

(By the way—hi there! I’m Heather. I joined Choice of Games as writer #3 just as Broadsides development was starting. It’s nice to meet you, too!)

This post started as a comment to the “Help Us Switch Gender” thread, but I decided not to post it at the time, both because it got way too long and because I couldn’t make my points without risking spoilers. Now I think I can reasonably assume anyone reading this has played the game (but I put the spoilers under a cut anyway.)

The core concept for Broadsides was to write an adventure that allowed the PC to feel like the protagonist of a Hornblower or Aubrey/Maturin novel. The heaving waves, the clash of steel, the opportunities for honor and treasure and fame, the danger of storms and mutiny and enemy fleets…

A core tenet of the Choice of Games philosophy is to make all our players feel as “at home” as possible. There are enough games out there where the player has no choice but to play a male protagonist. There are enough women who have been turned off roleplaying games as a result. There are, similarly, enough games where the only romantic opportunities are with the opposite sex. Enough other people are perpetuating those stereotypes; we’d like to do better than that.

Adam and Dan did do better than that, with Dragon. Some of the most enthusiastic positive commentary referenced the ability to play as female and to acquire a same-sex mate. So surely, we thought, we can do it again. No problem.

Except it turns out sailors aren’t quite so simple to stage-direct as dragons. 🙂

And RPGs are not quite as straightforward to write as non-interactive fiction.

Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you’re writing historical fiction—something like Hornblower, set in the real-world British Navy fighting the real-world French. The worldbuilding is pretty simple to do (though it’s not a trivial task to get it right) because you have a template to work from.

Now let’s say you’re writing historical fantasy—the Napoleonic Wars with Susannah Clarke’s magic or Naomi Novik’s dragons. Here the worldbuilding is less straightforward, but more fun: you change your selected variable, and then map the effects on the world as they ripple outward.

Now take one more step. Let’s say you’re writing fantasy, but you want your world to evoke the feeling of a particular era or type of literature. For instance, a Hornblower novel. From one perspective, writing in your own universe gives you wonderful freedom. It’s suddenly much easier to allow women to serve in the Royal Navy … but now you’ve bought yourself a new problem. Change too many variables, and you’ll wind up with something that no longer feels like a Hornblower novel. You’re free of the constraints of the real world, but if you’re not very careful, you’ll also lose the touchstones.

And here’s one more constraint. You’re writing a game, not a novel. So your scope is constrained—you are telling the PC’s story, and have less of an opportunity to digress into the dark corners of your world and demonstrate how the changed variables affect the people who live there. More importantly, the world you build has to be fun for the player to play in. That doesn’t mean happy-sunshiny-bunnies-and-kittens, but it does mean that the player has to be able to make meaningful choices that affect the flow of the story. The life of the protagonist (the PC) cannot completely suck because of the parameters of the universe. It might be interesting to do that in a novel, but you’re not writing a novel. If historical accuracy means that it is no fun to play, you need to trade off some accuracy to improve the fun quotient.

But not too much, or you’ve lost the feel.

So now every decision becomes one factor in a delicate balance. Is the game, on a whole, historically-accurate enough to feel like a Hornblower novel… and at the same time, does it change enough variables to allow the player to play as a character type with whom s/he identifies? Can the player do most of the things (make most of the choices) s/he wants to? And is it fun when s/he does?

AND—once again, remember you’re writing a game, not a novel, so you have to consider the scope of the project, too. “How difficult will that be to code” is also a constraint. Earlier blog posts (here, and here) discuss the difficulty of balancing realistic decisions with a manageable number of branches.

Broadsides spoilers follow.

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