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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,

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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

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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

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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.

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.

“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

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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

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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

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