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As we’ve mentioned, we’re currently finishing up Choice of Broadsides.  That means that we’re also working on picking our next couple of games for development– whether that’s Choice of the Dragon II, Choice of the God, Choice of the Consort, or something else.  We thought it might be interesting to discuss our method for selecting projects.

The first thing we did was do some brainstorming for some ideas that we thought would be fun to write, fun to play, and popular.  We came up with a long list of ideas–really, any nifty genre with any nifty character type can be the basis for compelling choices.  We also had some suggestions from e-mails we’ve received, which basically provided more support for ideas we already had–various people have suggested werewolf games or vampire games or other ideas that we were vaguely talking about.

So, the question, is which game should we make?  That’s where the interesting choice is.  The first thing we did was to toss up a blog post asking people to vote for their favorite ideas.  We’ve gotten some great feedback, but that’s still pretty limited.  The key step is our next approach:  using Google AdWords to test a bunch of different games.  Google AdWords is a service that serves short text ads to lots of websites on the web.  The key is that AdWords ads can be cheap– we’re aiming to pay about 5 cents per click.  That means that $100 will get us 2000 clicks.  And AdWords can rotate among a bunch of different ads.  So we’re building ads for a bunch of different games, none of which we’ve written yet.  The AdWords robots will rotate our ads for us.  If one game idea gets 500 clicks over the course of the experiment, while another gets 10, we know that there’s more market demand for the 500 click game.  We can also try tweaking the ads as we go– if one ad is doing badly, we’ll pull it and replace it with a variant for the same game.  If it then does better, we understand what aspect of the game to emphasize.  If all ads for the same game idea do badly, it’s probably not the most popular idea.

So that’s how robots will pick our next game.  But they won’t really, because while we’ll take into account demand, we’re also going to focus on which games we most want to design/write.  (That’s how we chose Choice of the Dragon and Choice of Broadsides–those were both ideas that we were particularly excited to write.)

There are a couple of reasons why we’re going to take into account our preferences.  First, we’re writing these games at all because it’s fun.  (That’s also why we encourage you to try writing your own ChoiceScript games.)  Choice of Games isn’t anybody’s main job– it’s a hobby job for all of us, although it produces some real money, and we hope it will make a meaningful part of our incomes.  But more generally, we should be doing things that we like and that are fun–that keeps us motivated, productive, and satisfied.  That’s what we aim for in our day jobs, and it’s doubly true for Choice of Games.

Second, if we tried to write things we weren’t interested in, we would do it badly.  When you care and are excited, your work is better.  We would make worse games more slowly if we were just doing what we thought would get us the most downloads.

Third, if we’re excited about it, we think others will be, too.  The blog voting provides us with some useful information, and the AdWords experiment should provide even more, but it’s still all tea leaves.  There may be many thousands of people who will download our game or play it on the web, but would never click through an AdWords ad or vote in a blog poll.  And some people who click on an AdWords ad may be looking for something very different from our style of games.

So, robots will pick our next game.  But they won’t pick it on their own.  They’ll more identify particularly strong contenders, and then we’ll pick our favorites to do now.  We think that will be an effective strategy, but equally importantly, we think it will be lots of fun, both for us and for you.

As we finish up work on Choice of Broadsides, we’re starting to plan our next couple of games.  We’d like your opinion on these ideas.  We’re also happy to hear if there’s another game that you would really like to see.  We don’t promise to make the game that gets the most votes–our preference as designers also matters–but your votes will definitely influence our decision, and all of the options we’re presenting are ideas that we’re interested in writing.

Let us know what you think of these ideas!

We’re also interested to hear if people would prefer more games that are a similar length to Choice of the Dragon and Choice of Broadsides, or if people would prefer a smaller number of longer games.  Longer games are harder to write, so the choice is probably something like four games the length of Choice of the Dragon or one game that is three times as long.  If there’s a strong preference one way or the other, that will affect our planning.

UPDATE 2010/Aug: Crossed out Vampire and Consort/Romance, since those are the games we already picked.

UPDATE 2010/Oct: Now that we have a PayPal donation button, we’ll give strong weight to votes that are backed by donations. Voting with your donations is worth more than just voting with a comment. (Though voting with comments is always welcome!)

As I mentioned in my last post, we’re working on finishing up our next game, Choice of Broadsides, a game set in a fictionalized version of the Napoleonic Wars.   Of course, the real-world Royal Navy was an (essentially) all-male institution at the time.  We wanted to avoid embracing the sexism of both history and of the source materials we draw on, but at the same time, we concluded that having a mixed-sexed Royal Navy would be both too complicated to implement and would also make the Jane Austen inspired bits of the game very strange.  So instead, we let the player choose the sex of the protagonist, and then that choice defines whether the gameworld is patriarchal or has all gender roles reversed in a matriarchal society.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how it works.  It’s not too difficult to code, it lets us include the assumptions of the day while still letting people play female characters, and some of the jarring mismatches between expectation and practice may be thought-provoking, especially when playing the female version.  But it has created some difficulties with terminology.  Historical gendered terms have a lot of baggage– “Mrs.” does not have the same connotation as “Mr.”, but “Ms” feels anachronistic even in a gender-bent world.

We first encountered this issue with the word “Mr.”  In the Napoleonic Wars Royal Navy, officers were addressed as Mr. So-and-so, ordinary sailors as So-and-so (no Mr.), and midshipmen as Mr. Midshipman So-and-so– marking them both as sort of officers but also distinguishing them from real officers.  This was of course tightly tied to the class system of the day.  The question this presented was, what should the form of address be for female officers?  We toyed with Mrs. So-and-so (regardless of marital status– marital status matters for a sex that derives its status from the opposite sex parent or spouse), but my co-writers didn’t like that, especially finding Mrs. Midshipwoman So-and-so to be a bizarre form of address for a 13-year old.  We settled on Madam So-and-so and Madam Midshipwoman So-and-so.

Likewise, it was fairly easy to agree to make “Master” the equivalent of “Miss”– in the real world, “Master” is traditionally used for male children, and so by extension we used it for adult but unmarried men in the female-dominant version of our fictional world, just like the polite term for female children was also traditionally used for unmarried adult women in the real world.

But we’ve hit a couple of weird cases that we’ve had trouble coming up with terminology for.  In real-world British usage, if John Smith is married to Jane Smith and receives a knighthood, he becomes Sir John and she becomes Lady Smith (instead of Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith, respectively).  There is no comparable shift for when a woman becomes a Dame (again, because of the patriarchal assumptions of the British class system)–Mrs. Smith would become Dame Jane, but Mr. Smith remains Mr. Smith.  The difficulty is how to apply that to our gender-bent world.  The husband of Madam Jane Smith is presumably Mr. Smith– that’s straightforward.  But what should the honorific be for the husband of Dame Jane?  We initially used “Lord,” but that doesn’t work well– “Lord” feels like a higher title than Dame, not a lower/equal one.  We’ve come up with several possibilities, but they’re all strange.  “Mr. Smith” undercuts the importance of the knighthood and makes the game less parallel.  “Sir Smith” is a weird looking construction, and again not parallel.  “Gentleman Smith” or “Esquire Smith” or some other non-real-world construction could work, but the husband of a gentlewoman is presumably already a gentleman– the point of “Lady Smith” is that it marks her social class as higher than the wife of a gentleman or an esquire, not equal, so the male equivalent should do the same.

We also hit a problem with the “Lords of the Admiralty,” which is the body roughly equivalent to the Secretary of the Navy in U.S. practice.  “Ladies of the Admiralty” feels weird–because the term “Ladies” does not have the same implication of power as the word “Lords,” it reads very oddly.  But all of the other terms we tried also seem weird:  “Dames of the Admiralty”?  “Baronesses of the Admiralty”?  “Lady Dames of the Admiralty”?  “Grand Dames of the Admiralty”?  “Peers of the Admiralty”?

Partly this just underscores the degree to which English incorporates patriarchal assumptions, particularly with regard to British class distinctions.  But we still need to come up with the terms we will use.

So, what are your thoughts?

Sir John and Lady Smith, but Dame Jane and ___ Smith?

The Lords of the Admiralty, but the ____ of the Admiralty?

Feel free to express a preference for one of the possibilities we discussed above, or suggest your own possibilities.

Many of you have asked whether we have other games besides Choice of the Dragon.  We’re pleased to announce that our next game, Choice of Broadsides, will be debuting by the end of March.  Choice of Broadsides is a swashbuckling naval adventure, in the spirit of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower or Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books, with a dash of Jane Austen as well.  Will you become the hero of Albion, defending its shipping from the dastardly Gauls?  Or will you end up marooned on a desert island by mutineers?  Only your choices can determine the answer.

As with Choice of the Dragon, we plan to release Choice of Broadsides on the web, for Android phones, and for the iPhone at launch.  Other apps are in the works but won’t be ready until later.

We’re also pleased to announce that we’ve accepted our first ChoiceScript game that we didn’t develop:  “Popcorn, Soda… Murder?” by Pauzle.  “Popcorn, Soda… Murder?” is a different sort of multiple choice game, where you must gather clues and ask the right questions to solve a murder.  We’ll be making it available as part of our new hosted ChoiceScript games section of the website.  The hosted games section of the website should also launch by the end of March.

If you’ve been writing a ChoiceScript game and think it’s ready for the world, you should submit it, too.  We’re eager to host as many ChoiceScript games on our site as we can, and we will split the advertising revenue from our hosted games with the games’ authors.  Anyone who has a game that they would like us to look at should contact us at support@choiceofgames.com.

We have now made the ChoiceScript interpreter available through GitHub, a public repository for shared code.  You can download the ChoiceScript interpreter, a very simple sample game that you can edit, and some automatic testing routines for debugging purposes at http://github.com/dfabulich/choicescript/.  Clicking on the Download Source button on that page will download an archive with all of the relevant files.  As we mentioned before, the ChoiceScript Interpreter is available under a free non-commercial use license.  Contact us if you’re interested in a commercial license.

We’ve added some more explanation to the Intro to ChoiceScript page that should help explain how to start editing the sample game into a real game.  That said, it’s still very rough and incomplete. We’ll add more information over time.

We’ve also set up a GoogleGroup for discussion about coding in ChoiceScript:  http://groups.google.com/group/choicescript We encourage you to ask any questions you have about coding in ChoiceScript there.

We’re very excited about the community’s interest in ChoiceScript, and we’re happy to help you get up to speed.  Good luck with your projects!

Many people have contacted us about the possibility of developing their own multiple-choice text-based games using ChoiceScript.  We’re very excited about other people writing games like this.

We have a short, incomplete introduction to the ChoiceScript language available at http://www.choiceofgames.com/blog/choicescript-intro/.  We encourage anyone interested in writing a game in ChoiceScript to start by reading that and trying to write a sample vignette or two.

We plan on releasing our interpreter on a public repository in the next couple of days– there are just a few minor administrative details we need to take care of first.  The interpreter (and related tools, like an automatic scene tester) are currently pretty rough.  We plan on making available a series of tools to make it easier to use our interpreter when we can, but it will take at least a few months for the complete suite of tools to be available.  We also continue to improve on and expand the language, so we should be able to support some additional functions soon.

We plan on releasing the interpreter under a free non-commercial use license, so people can get to work designing right away.  While the free license is only for non-commercial use, we encourage people who’ve written games to plan on releasing them as commercial apps– whether using an ad-based model like we have with “Choice of the Dragon,” an approach where people pay to download the app, or a “freemium” model.  We’re happy to discuss a paid commercial license, and we think that the terms we will offer will be reasonable even for very small projects.

Finally, we would like to develop www.choiceofgames.com as a premier site for text-based games about choices.  If you write a game in ChoiceScript, we’re interested in hosting it on our site.  Please contact us at support@choiceofgames.com if you’re interested.

We’ll be sure to post an update here when the interpreter is available and as additional coding tools become available.

UPDATE:  The ChoiceScript Interpreter is now available, with a free non-commercial use license.  You can download it from GitHub by going to http://github.com/dfabulich/choicescript/ and clicking the Download Source button.

We’ve also created a GoogleGroup for discussing coding in ChoiceScript, http://groups.google.com/group/choicescript.  Anyone can join, and we encourage you to ask your questions about coding in ChoiceScript there.

Finally, we’ve updated the Intro to ChoiceScript document to describe (in cursory terms) what files to edit and how to make your own game.  We’ll continue revising and expanding that document over time.

One of the questions we’ve gotten most frequently about “Choice of the Dragon” is whether it’s possible to get a mate and, if so, how.  (Actually, we’ve both gotten that as a question and as a complaint asserting that it’s not possible but that it should be.)

To answer the not very spoilery part of the question:  Yes, it is possible to get a mate.  The code provides for it, we’ve successfully gotten a mate in playtesting, and some of our players have as well.  It is difficult, which was intentional on our part– we think that having some things that take a little more effort and are more of an accomplishment adds depth to the game.  But it is definitely possible.

I’m putting some hints about how to get a mate below the cut.

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We discussed the treatment of gender extensively as we were planning our first game.  I self-identify as a feminist, and I’ve worked to promote equality for the LGBT community in my non-gaming professional life.  So I started off with a firm commitment to the idea that our games had to be good on gender issues.

Many video games assume a male protagonist, and I actively wanted to avoid that presumption.  At the same time, our games require a certain amount of identification between the player and the character.  A game that’s written in the second person runs into problems if the player can’t accept that “you” means both the character and the player.

Once we settled on a dragon as the protagonist of our first game, “Choice of the Dragon,” many of the gender issues became easy.  No need at all for us to assign a sex to the player’s dragon—it’s perfectly easy to ask the player what their dragon’s sex is.  Likewise, even the mating scene could be done in a purely gender-neutral way.  Players who wanted to play a straight male dragon could.  Players who wanted to play a female dragon seeking a female mate could.  And people who wanted to leave that whole issue vague could as well.

The next step was simply being conscious about the genders we assigned to the various other characters that the player meets.  We (or at least I, without objection from the rest of the team) wanted to make sure that we didn’t apply patriarchal assumptions about the gender of a knight or a wizard.  We did end up switching around the genders of the dragon’s clutchmate and the evil wizard, but that was just because Dan thought that Axilmeus was more of a male dragon’s name.

The biggest sticking point was really the most iconic.  Dan was committed to the idea that dragons kidnap princesses.  From his perspective, that was a necessary trope in the fire-breathing dragon genre.  I was equally committed to the idea that kidnapping princesses but not princes conveys a message of dependence and incompetence about women that was not acceptable.  We ended up deciding to directly confront the player with it with a choice, which we thought was sufficiently amusing to put into our screenshots for promoting the mobile versions.  Working on balancing the issues between using tropes and avoiding the long and ugly history of patriarchy in fantasy ended up producing fun gameplay.

Handling gender in our next game, where the protagonist is human, is a much more complicated issue.  But that’s for another post…

Choice of the Dragon is now available as an iPhone app! Please download and review it.

Coming soon: Facebook integration. Sign up for other mobile versions here.

While we believe that a vignette-based structure with relatively little branching lets us build strong text-based games, it produces some inherent tensions.

On the one hand, we want choices to be meaningful, but on the other hand, we want to reuse later code.  The urge to reuse code can create pressure to have choices be purely cosmetic.  Sometimes we explicitly make choices not affect the rest of the game.  Those choices are about the player’s imagining of a scene or triggering thoughts about motivations, not about affecting results.  But taken to an extreme, this could destroy the meaningfulness of the choices.  In “Choice of the Dragon,” there’s a vignette where the player’s dragon seeks a mate.  In the original version of that vignette, it was impossible to actually succeed in getting a mate, because the vignette’s author wanted to avoid any downstream effects to having a mate.  We changed that because it seemed too frustrating for players and because it made the vignette less meaningful.  Now, your dragon can get a mate, although it remains challenging.

Likewise, the more we reuse code and avoid branching, the less replay value the games have.  Imagine a game that begins with a simple binary choice and then uses entirely different text and subsequent choices for each option.  The bad thing about that is that players who choose choice A don’t see any of the work that went into the results of choice B.  But the good side is that a player can play the game a second time, choose B instead of A, and find a whole new game.

The flipside is that some of our individual vignettes have a lot of branches, and some then set variables that affect later vignettes.  Taken to an extreme, branching within a vignette and then using a variable to condition later vignettes can cause the same problem of proliferating options that makes a simple branching structure undesirable.  It can even result in writing essentially dead text—text that nobody ever sees in play but that’s there to cover the outside chance of a series of strange choices.

Ultimately, we think we struck a pretty good balance in “Choice of the Dragon.”  In part, that’s because Dan always pushes for simpler models, with more cosmetic choices, whereas I always push for more complexity to make the choices more meaningful.  He tends to rein in my efforts to make the game ever more complicated, while I make sure that choices in the mating vignette actually affect outcomes.  But at the end of the day, it’s a balance that we wrestle with and discuss over and over again, and we’d love to hear your thoughts about it.

–Adam