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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

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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

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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

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One of the focuses of this blog is discussion of design decisions within the course of making our games.  I’d like to begin by talking about one of the core design philosophies embedded within the ChoiceScript framework.  ChoiceScript seeks to minimize wasted design effort by recording variables instead of branching. Many of us had our first experiences with text-based games controlled by choices in a totally different format:  the various multiple-choice books of the 1980s–the “choose a path” style books.  In a typical multiple-choice book, each different choice takes you to a different new page, which then offers you a

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Choice of the Dragon is now available as an Android app! Please download and review it. iPhone and other smartphone versions are coming soon. Sign up for other mobile versions here.

The first game from choiceofgames.com is now live!  In “Choice of the Dragon,” you play a powerful dragon that likes to kidnap princesses and sleep on a hoard of treasure.  Dominate the local kingdom, loot and pillage, and inspire terror in the hearts of your enemies! Like all games on choiceofgames.com, “Choice of the Dragon” is free to play.  The web version is currently available.  iPhone and other smartphone versions will be available soon. –Adam