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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

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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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Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of Choice of Broadsides!  The web version is now live, as is the Android version.  The iPhone version is currently under review at Apple and will presumably be available soon. Choice of Broadsides is a multiple-choice 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. We hope you enjoy playing Choice of Broadsides as much as we enjoyed writing it, and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter,

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The hardest thing about writing a multiple-choice game in ChoiceScript is creating interesting choices for your players. Here are five rules you can follow to make decisions you write more fun and engaging. Rule 1: Every option should have real consequences If my decision has no effect on anything, why am I even making a decision? This rule is pretty uncontroversial, but in practice it’s hard to follow consistently. It’s easy to write a collection of choices where nothing really happens; the player moves from place to place pointlessly. If you catch yourself doing this, consider just deleting those false

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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

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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. Choice of the President Choose your goals and political decisions as you strive for re-election as the president. Will you sell

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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

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