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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.

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”

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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

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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

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A few people have asked, so now you can follow our blog on Facebook and Twitter. Just click the Facebook Like button and/or the Twitter Follow button on the left side of our blog.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 1, 2011: Choice of Games, a quirky independent games company, has released their newest interactive novel, “Choice of the Vampire,” for Amazon Kindle. At more than 160,000 words, “Choice of the Vampire” is one of the longest works ever written in the “choose a path” style, allowing players to choose their gender, sexual orientation, ethnic background, and feeding habits. Play as a young vampire, from the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 through the end of the Civil War in 1866. You’ll meet (and possibly feed from) Andrew Jackson, Marie Laveau and Jefferson Davis along the way.

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We’re going to try something that (to the best of my knowledge) has never been done before: we’re going to try to play some interactive fiction in a combination online/offline event. Every Saturday at 11am Pacific, ClubFloyd meets online to play interactive fiction together in ifMUD. On Saturday, June 4th, the San Francisco Bay Area IF Group will meet in person (location TBD) in front of a big monitor and a streaming webcam; we’re going to try playing Choice of Broadsides on ClubFloyd, together with everyone playing online. Will it work? Will it be a catastrophe? Nobody knows. That’s why

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