#also I'm really enjoying choicescript

[delucadarling]

;v; Thank you omg. It's very rough still and I wasn't 100% on sharing it to begin with, so I'm glad you liked it! I do plan to flesh it out more. I really love interactive fiction, both playing/reading and writing.

WIP Wednesday

I got tagged by @serenpedac! And thank god, I actually have something to share!

Sort of.

I've previously done some interactive fanfic for the Zombies, Run! game/audio drama/fitness app/etc, but I'd done it all in Twine. Which is fine and fun, but it doesn't have as many baked in features that I really enjoy when playing choicescript games. I decided to give learning choicescript a shot (not bad, though the indents give me a bit of trouble) by writing out a fanfic with mine and Emma's OCs, Kira and Barbie.

If you want to take a look yourself, I've put it up on itchio here. It SHOULD play in the browser.

I'm going to tag...@mysterycyclone @swordsandspectacles and @tigeri102. Show off your WIPs!

[hpowellsmith]

The Earth Has Teeth Progress Report: March #1

This fortnight I sort-of finished drafting Chapter 3, and outlined and coded Chapter 4. Playing through is now roughly as long as playing the whole of Noblesse Oblige.

Other Recaps

I'm really thrilled to have shared Chapters 1 and 2 on my Patreon for £6+ subscribers! I've updated the Patreon chapters today with a host of tweaks and improvements, some of which involve expanding options and adding new things, and some of which involve making the early difficulty less harsh (there's plenty of time to go harsh later on).

The Fiore/MC/Savarel bonus story also went up, as did the Nikita intro and the March Q&A post.

Next up on Patreon

11th March (£11): Rys story

12th March (£6+): Fourth Earth Has Teeth RO reveal

19th March (£6+): Fifth Earth Has Teeth RO reveal

About that sort-of-finished drafting Chapter 3: I had to cut 7000 words of writing today which I don't feel brilliant about. I'll move a lot of it to a couple of chapters later... but still, it's easy to get stuck on numbers going up and seeing that as the most valuable metric of progress, and I need to write something to replace it. I've made a start on that and it's already feeling more natural, so I think my instincts are right for this.

Hopefully I'll be feeling more cheerful about how things are progressing next time I do one of these. Looking at the numbers themselves, I have done a lot - it's just hard to focus on that when a lot has needed to be removed, and I'd always prefer to be driving forward.

(Which it still is, I know, just in a different way.)

-

I do have a favour to ask - if you've enjoyed any of my games, and especially if you've played them on Steam, please leave a rating or review!

Honor Bound didn't pick up as many Steam reviews during its early release as some of my other games, and people posted a few early transphobic ones that obviously take up space; now that it's hard to see Android reviews from other regions, Steam reviews are a major way in which players decide whether to pick up a ChoiceScript release.

So if you have a minute and would like to show Honor Bound in particular some more affection on Steam or on whatever platform you bought it on - it’ll be a huge help, and the more sales I make, the more likely it is that I can keep making these games, which I very much want to do!

And I always, always love hearing about your characters' journeys through my games and your experiences along the way! Please don't hesitate to send asks about what you think of my writing - I truly love reading them and although I'm slow to answer, I try to (eventually) reply.

Thank you for reading and I hope you all have a lovely weekend!

[serpentineif]

Happy New Years Eve!

I have a small update! I made a lot of small changes to the past choicescript draft. I'll still be working on rewriting the rest of the chapter today, so it's possible I might have another update up later! I also tested it on mobile and it works pretty well for me, but if there's any glitches I find I'll fix them ASAP. I know Alastair & Viktoria seem pretty unlikeable at first, but I'm sure you'll end up loving them. Viktoria and El are the characters I've enjoyed writing the most!! I'm really excited to rewrite meeting El in the next chapter. 🤭

And I hope you all have a great New Years Eve!! 🎆

[friendlybowlofsoup]

Another Update

Hello Friends,

I have a rather long (but optimistic!) update to share with you all today. As many of you are probably tired of reading these kind of posts, I have a TL;DR here, but I did want to share what has been on my mind in that past half-year that I haven't been here.

It has been rough, and busy as always, but I think I'm finally facing myself and my project for the first time in a very long time.

TL;DR (it's actually long, I have a lot to say (*_ _)人)

I soul-searched and decided to stop compromising on my own feelings with regards to this project. I gave in to everything I wanted to do.

Plot changes, which means some character changes, which means some of the demo is outdated.

GotRM will be switching over to Twine.

----

OH MAN DID I SUFFER THE LAST FEW MONTHS

After my previous update, I hunkered down and really analyzed how I wanted to proceed with GotRM as a project. Because even prior to that post, I had already been going through long periods of hiatuses (which you are all aware of), and while I didn't lie about school taking up my time, I was also harboring a growing dissatisfaction with my own writing that really killed my progress for a long time.

So after everything had settled, I sat down and forced myself to peel apart my work. I know I said I would answer asks, but I uninstalled all of my social media and put aside this blog to focus. I made a note of all the things I liked and didn't like, and I made a list of things I wanted to change or improve on. The biggest point was that I also looked at my efficiency during actual writing sessions: how much of my time was spent writing vs. fighting with code? How could I change that?

And after a lot of deliberation, I figured there were a few things I had to change from the ground up, summed up in four points:

My working style was super incompatible with grad school. I can't spend 20-30 minutes scrolling up and down CSIDE checking code or looking for narratives while also jumping between chapters to make sure events line up. As this story grows, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of all the branches, so I needed an alternative working method, which I am adhering to now, and it prioritizes efficiency.

I hated the way I was tracking and coding stats in-game. I have griped so much about coding stats, and I have adhered to such a rigid style that I really felt trapped whenever I was confronted with balancing them out. So I'm throwing that to the wind and redoing how I utilize and convey them. Player-side, this decision doesn't change much since I never fully utilized stats in the demo anyway, and the stats page with indicators will still exist, but I'm getting rid of stat bars and how I treat stat checks.

The story I want to write now is different from the one I started out with. I've known for a while that GotRM was becoming far more than the tiny, wishful novella that I wrote as a teenager. I held onto that old story for a long time, but there's just so much I want to change that I realized I'd been clinging to a story I no longer enjoyed writing. So I spent the majority of the last few months rewriting GotRM from scratch. I redid some worldbuilding, I changed a lot of plot points, and I fixed a lot of characters' backstories accordingly. This meant scrapping stuff from even the demo, but that turned out to not be the biggest issue because:

I wanted to branch away from ChoiceScript. Honestly, I never really cared about getting officially published, but the camaraderie in the forums and on Tumblr were why I committed to CS and CoG. However, ultimately, I really want the functionality that other tools can offer GotRM, and so after a long internal debate, I will be switching over to Twine. Fortunately, since I was rewriting everything anyways, this has been relatively painless, and passage mapping has made everything so much neater. I am trying my best to make it up to chapter 2 before I release the new demo, so please look forwards to that!

And so yes, I am still here, chugging along.

I love this game and this story: it's been my creative escape for as long as I could remember, and you can imagine how frustrated I was when I realized I was starting to dread working on it.

I am forever learning more about myself and my writing style, and this is simply more of that journey. Thank you everyone for sticking around, for joining the discord, and for checking up on me--that I have all of you has truly been a dream.

Hopefully more updates to come soon! I understand that there may be questions about these new changes, so please ask away! I will (try) to release some asks that I've been working on in the drafts too, but I will wait until at least tomorrow to release them so that this post doesn't get drowned out immediately.

And as always, with a lot of love,

FriendlyBowlofSoup (Mei)

[taintedsoul-if]

I'm glad you're writing more IFs that you enjoy. It's much better to write something when you actually enjoy what you're writing than, when you don't. And I really like the way you write 🥹💓

(and also because I'm a little suspicious to speak, since my favorite genre is romance and fantasy Imao)

I just want to know how the updates will work. Tainted Soul will still be the main IF right? And will DG be something more sporadic? I'm very interested in both, but Tainted is more important to me, since any crumb of Cadmus, I'll be accepting.

I hope this doesn't come across as some kind of charge, as that's not my intention. In fact, one of the things that makes me happiest is that you are very active both in writing IF and in answering any questions people have about the lore. Which is one of the things that usually frustrates me about some IF writers. So when you post chapter snippets and progress updates, I'm very grateful. Since, you know, I don't have to worry about whether IF was abandoned or something like that.

So yes, any IF you write, I will be reading 💃✨

(And I don't know if you remember, but previously I said that I would draw Cadmus and my MC. I'm still going to do it and send it to you!)

Taking a step away from the writing scene these past few years wasn’t a bad thing. Sometimes, it’s not that we fall out of love with the stories we’re telling—it’s just that we need a change of pace. And that’s exactly what I needed. I’m glad my writing has improved to the point where readers can follow along more easily now. I still have a long way to go, though—lol.

Tainted Souls will always be at the forefront for me, but working on Dangerous Games has opened up a new horizon in how I approach writing TS. I even figured out a major plot point recently! And honestly, it was thanks to DG that I was able to break through a standstill in Chapter 3 of TS—I’d been stuck after T chased the MC outside and Yesenia interrupted them, unsure of how to proceed. Now, that chapter’s sitting at 8,000 words.

Surprisingly, I’ve made steady progress on both IFs. I completed the prologue for DG in just two days, along with setting up my ChoiceScript and startup file. Then out of nowhere, my mind kept nudging me to revisit Chapter 2—I ended up adding new scenes and dialogue that really brought it to life.

Lately, I’ve been writing from 6 AM to 6 PM, splitting my time evenly between both projects.

Anyway, I’m rambling now 😵‍💫.

Tainted Souls will always be my main IF—this story is my first love. I’m even a little reluctant to write certain scenes because once I do, it means we’re moving closer to the end… and that’s such a bittersweet feeling.

Dangerous Games will be more sporadic in terms of updates, while with Tainted Souls, I’m aiming—if all goes well—to update the public demo every eight weeks. If everything stays on track, we might even have an update ready by midmonth. I’ve also been toying with the idea of releasing the prologue for DS alongside that demo, but I haven’t fully decided yet 🥱.

As for spoilers—oh, love, you don’t even know the half of it. Any spoiler I share is just the icing on a very layered cake. For every one I drop, there are twists and turns you’d never expect… unless you’re breaking into my house and flipping through my notes while I sleep. Please don’t do that—I’m timid by nature.

But seriously, I love feeding my readers lore. Vathilia is such a beautiful, complex world, and the relationships—bittersweet, angsty, heart-wrenching—make it even richer. I’ll always share what I can… the only time I hold back is when the question asked feels like stepping on a minefield of spoilers that’ll explode into even more spoiler-heavy questions.

I’ll never abandon this IF, not even if it takes me a thousand years to finish. Tainted Souls means that much to me.

Today’s fully dedicated to TS. I just finished writing the original host’s backstory for Dangerous Games, and my brain is officially fried—so it’s back to my first love for the rest of the day.

Also, I’m really looking forward to that chibi drawing of yours! I’ll proudly add it to a master list I’m planning to create in the future. Even though I babbled a lot, don’t hold it against me 🥲. Thank you for the ask, anon.

I’ll be off now.

[allieebobo]

I just played through CTOS for the first time, and it was BRILLIANT. You're a master of tension — every match had me on the edge of my seat even in tutorial mode, and the wins and losses had me full of emotion, and I don't even know how to describe how much I've enjoyed the cast and relationships. It's been nearly impossible to set the story down — I've only really done it once, and that's because I was so badly in need of sleep that I wasn't able to read anymore.

I also loved how the character creation was spaced out — gave me time to really figure them out and come up with someone unique and real. And your game has hands down the best use of stats I've ever seen in a ChoiceScript story.

Anyway. I just finished gushing about CTOS to my friends and then thought, hey, why don't I tell the author too?

So: thanks for the game. I really enjoyed it.

AHH thank you!! Really high praise (the part about the stats makes me so happy! Honestly the games always take me more tinkering that I expect HAHA but I think I could still improve and refine- it's nice getting more and more comfortable with the code)

I'm so honored you're telling your friends about ct:os!! Hahaha. Hope you enjoy the new update :)

[eyesofshan-if]

hey!! absolutely adore ur if - i found it a while back (only thing available to play was the prologue and maybe ch1 iirc) and i just finished playing all of it now!!!

i wonder if i'm remembering wrongly but when we go to see the emperor right as we're leaving was there an option to "turn around" and you would get an achievement for seeing past the mask or smth? is that still there HAHAHA also this is most likely my wonky memory but was the emperor genderlocked male at the start? on my very first playthrough a while back i remember that but i might've just selected the option too fast

reading thru ur asks it's really interesting that there are 5 random events that can just occur (i didn't even know choicescript could DO that) anyway take care!!

the emperor was gender locked male at the start but is now gender selectable, yes! as for looking past the mask, i realised that yongsun's relationship with the commander isn't quite there yet, so i would rather not reveal so much about their internal workings atm :D im glad you found your way back to this if 💓💓 hope you enjoyed the read!!

[rathatgames]

An Introduction of Sorts

While I'm not quite ready to type up an intro post to my project (I don't really believe in doing big fancy introduction posts for IFs that don't have a demo) I figured I would say hi regardless! So, hi, hello. I'm Heather and I'm an aspiring ChoiceScript author/developer. At the time of posting this, my first project - The Chaos Cataclysm - is chugging along nicely. I hope to have Chapter 1 out by the end of this month/start of the next.

I also have a bunch of other IF ideas that I am choosing not to work on, because if I started all of them, I'd get none of them done.

I will most likely begin posting devlogs and snippets here as I near the release of v1.0, and potentially some love interest things too, although I'd prefer to wait until I can get official art done of them.

Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy what I (eventually) have to show you!

[barbwritesstuff]

i loooove blood moon and cant wait for your future ifs. i know you mentioned that you were planning on a mermaid/siren if (pls correct me if im wrong) but i was wondering if you plan on a sequel for blood moon?

Okay. I'm glad you asked this anon, because it's all a bit messy, and I think it would be good for me to explain this. Bear with me, as my brain is a bit disordered right now, so this may or may not make sense.

Will there be a sequel to Blood Moon?

I dunno. Maybe. I want there to be. But I don't know, which is frustrating (for me, as well as you).

See, it's not that I don't have ideas or anything.

I have this idea for a Blood Moon sequel that I really like. It's titled 'Thicker Than' and focuses on the vampires of the city, rather than werewolves. The MC would be a new vampire with a mission from the Night King: solve a series of murders targeting members of the Night Court.

Here's the problem:

I haven't been paid or seen any sales data from Blood Moon, in part because the Australian Tax Office is taking months to organise a document that they said would only take two weeks.

So... without any data, and with everything in life just getting more and more expensive, I literally just can't financially commit to another large project set in this world. I don't mean to be dramatic, but that's the honest truth.

I need to know how many people bought Blood Moon before I can consider writing a sequel (because a sequel is probably not going to sell better than an original). And I just don't have those numbers. I don't know when I'll get them either.

I'm really sorry about that.

Will there be a dark mermaid thing?

Again. I don't know.

I have this really cool idea for a dark mermaid thing that I think people would really enjoy. It involves pirates and ancient sea gods and cannibalism.

It'd also be another full length thing. Eg, around the same size as Blood Moon.

However, I'm holding off on using Choicescript for the reasons above (I need to have sales data).

I've been experimenting with some shorter Renpy games, the first of which I'll release next month on itch.io. If people like the style of those, I'll consider using Renpy as a tool to make the dark mermaid game... if no one buys the short games, then I'll reconfigure and try to come up with a new plan.

*

I'm sorry if all that was a bit blunt. I'm really trying to be forthright and honest about all this. I want people who read my stuff to know what's going on, and I wish there was more to say, but everything has a lot of 'hurry up and wait' energy, which is all a bit stressful.

I'm also querying a prose novel right now (asking literary agents if they want to help me sell it) which also has a lot of 'hurry up and wait' energy, which isn't helping. 😅

Despite all this admin-y stuff, I am still drafting and writing, but it might not be stuff that you get to see for a little while.

I really hope that all makes sense.

[ramonag-if]

hullo! um- this is my first time sending an ask so sorry if i just start rambling lmao. i really, really love your IF it’s amazing (also, irus has me straight up cackling at the worst times lol) <3

anyways, i love creative writing and stuff like that and i’ve only recently found IFs so i was curious about what it would be like to make one. i didn’t think it’d be that hard 🥲 it is a struggle. i’m still trying to figure out coding, then my laptop broke. so. yeah :)

anyways (i feel like i’m saying that too much…), i had two questions. sorry if you already answered them already -v-‘

how do you do the music? do you create it yourself or download it?

do you have any tips for coding? little nuggets for beginners or something?

thank you! i hope you have a nice day/night! :3c

Hi Anon 😊 There is no right way to send an ask, and the way you've asked is perfectly fine 🌼

Thank you so much for playing and I'm really happy to know that you're enjoying Irus 💖

Gosh, writing IF always seems easy at first then you start writing one and you think, crap, I was so wrong.

1. For music, I download it from Pixabay - the music is free and you can use it for commercial use as well - mix it, edit it etc and it's fine. What I've done is search through the different songs available and went for atmospheric music (rarely do they contain voices) and stuff that pertains to the story (a lot of the songs for Crown of Exile have Middle-Eastern or Indian themes).

2. As for little tips, I'm not nearly as experienced in coding as others - I only started in June last year to use Twine Sugarcube and I did dabble in Choicescript a few years before that 😅 But I'll try my best to help.

Choose the coding language that fits you best. There are a ton of different ways to code an IF game - I use Twine Sugarcube because it let me customise the way the game looks (and I've always wanted to learn how to use it).

Learn to code the basics. It's quite daunting to start off when you're new to coding (I didn't even know how to offer custom names to players or figure out why I kept getting errors when testing the game). If you're using Twine Sugarcube, i suggest this guide. It explains everything quite simply and it's what helped me a great deal when I started using Twine.

Do a test game - learning to code means actually using the code in a game. Start with small things - creating a link or stats and then testing them. It doesn't have to be fancy, but once you get the hang of basics, you quickly realise it's not nearly as hard as you think and you'll slowly build your confidence up to actually figuring out how to add music to your game 😅

Don't be afraid to ask for help. There's a ton of people online who are willing to help or have already put up guides. Also don't be afraid to do a search online for answers - the internet can save you hours of time because someone out there has already had the same question as you and it's been solved.

I hope this helps you and if you do have anything specific in mind you need help with, you can always ask 😊 I'll do my best to help.

[llamagirl28]

Hi, I have to be honest, my knowledge about the Arthurian legend is almost nothing, I've barely seen the Disney movie, I didn't know who Mordred was so I had to look him up 😅

But I was interested in your story so I wanted to read it, and I did like 2 days ago lol

And I have some questions...

From what I have seen —and my little knowledge— Merlin is usually represented as a good old man, but your story presents him as someone more suspicious, what kind of Merlin are you going to show? If not too much spoiler.

I also wanted to know if you could recommend me books and stuff to learn more about this whole world of Camelot. What should I read?

And what sources do you use as a reference for your story? Series and movies or original sources?

That's all i thing xd

Ah! And I love the story ^^ even if I'm not familiarize with the legend, and i think that speak well of it!

All my love to you~

First off thank you so much! 💕 Secondly, don't worry about not knowing anything about the Arthurian Legends - one should be able to enjoy the game without any knowledge of them. Honestly, it's inspired by the myths but the game has become very much its own thing, to the point that the world of Boc is not inspired by Britain in geography, but continental Europe - with Camelot's landscape being based on Austria, lol So yeah, the world, the characters - they're my own interpretation and you can enjoy that on its own.

As for my sources - the internet! Lots of browsing articles and sites about Arthurian myths. Also, not Arthuriana, but my love of dragons must be attributed to How to train your dragon! (It's a cute series of movies, if you wanna watch them.)

I initially got into Arthuriana thanks to the choicescript game Guenevere, which is amazing 💕 (Note: it's supposed to be a series of books, and the first one is completed while the second is about half-done. The author hasn't had the time to work so much on the game but they've kept players updated with the fact that they still love it and intend to continue it at some point.) You can also find them on tumblr at @/jeantownsend

Not a book nor game but when coming up with the concept of BoC I kept playing the song Mordred's Lullaby by Heather Dale. It's really good. Plus, she's got more Arthurian themed songs, if that's up your alley!

A bit random but I really enjoyed Kaz Rowe's video on queerness in The Green Knight, even if I haven't read the poem or watched the A24 movie. Also on YouTube, some vids summarizing the myths: here and here.

If you do want to read more, here's a compiled list I found of some Arthurian titles, older and newer: link

Regarding Merlin, you're right that I'm going for a more suspicious interpretation. I haven't been shy about saying he's an ambitious, cutthroat individual who's done unsavory things, but it'd be a spoiler to get into more!

[oscararcane]

hey! i sometimes get an itch to try another interactive novel but i don't know much abt what's available out there so if you have a moment to share your recommendations that would be awesome!

Hiii! I would love to share some recommendations! Was just waiting for someone to ask my opinion lmao.

Altho tbh I haven't read that many finished interactive novels, but I have a lot of WIPs to recommend. Lately reading finished stories has been a bit difficult for me, I put a lot of my energy into writing my own story so following WIPs is a bit easier for me.

With that in mind, here are a couple of finished stories I did read and enjoyed:

- Blood Money, by @hpowellsmith. It's a mafia story, but a fantasy one, which I found very interesting! I love the premise and the world-building.

- Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road. It's the first one of the three VTM interactive stories they planned to make. I think the second one came out some time ago? But I've only read this one. I enjoyed it, I liked the story and the characters but the game mechanics were not my favorite. They get a bit in the way of the narration, imo. But in the end, I did like it.

And now for the WIPs, lol:

- Diaspora, by @diasporatheblog. A big favorite of mine! And even tho it's a WIP, it's getting pretty close to being finished so there's a lot of content to read! It's a fantasy adventure/political intrigue and it's very immersive and fun and the characters are really cool. I really love this one and can't recommend it enough!

- The Golden Rose, by @anathemafiction. This one is also fantasy but set in an alternative medieval Europe. It's very interesting and immersive! The first book is actually finished and I think it is planned to be released in April next year?

- Wayfarer, by @idrellegames. Another fantasy adventure! I guess I do love those, lmao. Another very immersive one! The game mechanics are really cool too. It really feels like playing a text version of a c-rpg!

- A Tale of Crowns, by @ataleofcrowns. Another fantasy story, but more of a romance/political intrigue. It's set in a fantasy world based on Kurdish culture. I really like the world and the characters — including the MC who can be very fun!

- The Northern Passage, by @northern-passage. A gripping fantasy horror story, with a vividly described world and great characters! It's darker than my usual but it's very well written and I love it! For now, the demo is using ChoiceScript, but the author is working on a Twine version, so the demo will move to itch.io at some point.

- When it Hungers, by @roast-ifs. It's another horror fantasy story, but for this one, the setting is inspired by the 1910s and I really love that! You also play as a 'monster' so to speak which is very fun. The story is also going to move from ChoiceScript to Twine and the demo is going through some rewrites at the moment, but the current demo is still great imo! (The demo still has its old title: Smoke & Velvet)

- The Nameless, by @parkerlyn. Another big favorite of mine. Another fantasy story, oops. In this one, you play as a Sheevra, who are inspired by the fey among other things. The dynamics between Sheevra and humans are very interesting and I'm very excited to see where the story is going. The world is also very vibrant and I get a Ghibli vibe when I read it, which I love so much!

- Virtue's End, by @crimsiswrites. Another fantasy horror, also going through some changes and rewrites. The premise is really cool and there's a large cast of very cool characters! I love it a lot and look forward to seeing how it will evolve.

- Project Hadea, by @nyehilismwriting. This one is a sci-fi story, I swear I read other things than fantasy, lol! It's a found family story, but in space, so I'm all about it. The writing is great and the characters are *chef's kiss*. And the MC is a lovable dumbass.

- Attollo, by @attollogame. This is a cyberpunk horror/mystery story with a very unique and interesting setting! The vibes are impeccable and there's a large cast of fascinating characters.

- Body Count, by @bodycountgame. It's very different than most of what I read, but god is it fun! At first, it's a love island type of game, where you take part in a dating reality show, but then murder happens and it's great. ❤️ The demo is also going to move from ChoiceScript to Twine.

- Exiled From Court, by @beeanca-writing. It's a court intrigue story, set in a fictional country inspired by 19th century Brazil. I really love the choice of setting and the very flawed MC, who is very fun to play as!

And I'm gonna stop there for now because it got longer than I expected, lol. I could recommend a couple more but those are a great start I think.

Oh damn, I forgot to plug my own story, lmao.

It's The Eight Years Revolution, for those who haven't seen it already. The blog is @eight-years-revolution.

[jamesshawgames]

So, I had the idea that, now that the trilogy is ending, I could write a retrospective on each game, reflecting on he intent behind them and on what elements did and didn't work. I'm putting Part 1, on the first Relics game, under the cut. I'll prob do one for 2 and 3 as well, with about a week between them!

Relics Series Retrospective Part 1: Relics of the Lost Age The idea for Relics of the Lost Age came to me, like most of my best ideas, in the pub, some time in 2018. I was talking to my old friend Pete about how, when we were children, we had both really enjoyed old-fashioned colonial-era adventure stories, things like Around the World in 80 Days, King Solomon’s Mines and, above all, Indiana Jones. But also about how it became much harder to like these stories as we got older and more aware – specifically, as the colonialism that underpins these stories became more and more obvious (do those artifacts really belong in a museum, Dr. Jones?). I spend a lot of time in my real job thinking about colonialism, history and archaeology, about how they intersect and have shaped the modern world, and it’s very difficult to be committed to the idea of decolonization while also being a fan of something like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom! I started to wonder, over the course of that conversation, if it might actually be possible to save that kind of story in the modern world, to keep all the things that childhood me had loved about Indiana Jones (the adventure, the thrills, the sense of wonder about travel and the world, the romance, the humour) while also getting rid of the stuff that wasn’t so desirable (the covert and not-so-covert colonialism, the racist and patronizing depictions of non-European cultures, the white savior shit). Perhaps even to go further than that – to write an archaeological adventure which actually questioned and challenged the role of both archaeology and adventure stories in advancing colonialist narratives. That’s when Relics was born.

It took a while for me to realize that Choicescript might be a good vehicle for such a story, but once I did, it all started to come together quite quickly. I wanted pretty much every chapter, every major moment of the story if possible, to relate to the central theme of colonialism and its legacy, and I think I did make that happen. I also wanted it to be fun (after all, Indiana Jones is fun, and if I just let it turn into some kind of heavy political meditation on empire, there probably wouldn’t be much joy in it). In order to keep readers interested, I decided that each chapter should feel distinct, and be very different both in terms of setting and in terms of genre. The idea of making this a globe-trotting adventure helped too, both in terms of keeping the chapters varied and in terms of exploring the theme of colonialism. What I really want readers to get is a sense of is how connected colonialism is to pretty much everything, how so many of the issues of the modern world go back to that period. So I wanted chapters set in Africa (the starting-point of the colonial slave trade) and America (one of the final destination of that trade); in Europe (to think about how empire affected the colonizing nations, as well as the colonized) and Asia (to acknowledge that, though Europeans might have “perfected” colonialism in all its shittiness, they’re not the only ones to have ever practiced it). I want readers to see that everything – from the roots of Nazi ideology to the source of modern global wealth inequalities to the febrile racial politics of the modern-day US and Europe – can be traced back to that period in time.

Chapter 1 was designed to be a very classic Indiana Jones story, to set the scene and establish the book’s primary influences. It ticks all the boxes: Middle Eastern setting, Nazis as the bad guys, biblical treasure, lots of light-hearted action scenes. I also like the fact that the treasure being hunted, Urim and Thummim, connects back to a period of ancient imperialism (the Roman occupation of Judaea) – a nice reminder of just how old this shit actually is and how far back it goes.

Chapter 2 was supposed to be a “humans vs. nature” story with a bit of a Moby-Dick vibe, highly tense, as well as an exploration of Chinese imperialism.

Chapter 3, controversial though it was, is super-important to the project. One of the ways that old adventure stories sold colonialism was by establishing “home” (usually the US or Europe) as a safe, civilized space, and overseas territories (usually in Asia and Africa) as savage and dangerous and wild places. I wanted to flip this on its head by heaving a chapter set in the US, and showing how savage and unsafe it was at that time. The phrase that kept going through my head as I wrote this chapter was “American savagery”. We all want to cheer when we see Indiana Jones punching a Nazi, but it's easy to forget that large swathes of Jones’s own home country were, at the same time as he was punching Nazis, implementing laws that were flat-out fascist and that in fact inspired Hitler. Nobody who reads Chapter 3 can persist in the illusion that the United States was “safe” and “civilized” in the 1930s. Also, it was nice to have a chapter with someone other than the Nazis as the main bad guys – I’ve always been a sucker for secondary villains! Generically, it’s a Southern Gothic mystery with elements of the supernatural, which makes it very distinct from the other chapters.

Chapter 4 was meant to be closely connected to Chapter 3 (hence it featuring the same RO, and having related Relics). It shows you what was happening at the other end of the Atlantic slave trade. It contains a whole-plot reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and is meant to evoke older types of colonialist literature, 19th Century adventure stories of the type that influenced Indiana Jones. Both of these chapters were pretty grim and dark – I expected that readers would need a bit of levity after the end of Chapter 4. Which is lucky, because…

Chapter 5 was a chance to explore what colonialism did to the colonizing nations (as well as an excuse for me to get a few digs in at the British Museum!) It’s a nice break from the dark tone, as it’s pretty light-hearted, and it introduced the series tradition of having one “comedy” chapter per book. It also introduced Maxie Gianturco, maybe my favorite villain: he has a real Heath-Ledger-as-the-Joker vibe, which makes him quite different from any of the other bad guys. Generically, it’s a knockabout crime caper.

Chapter 6 was a mash-up of espionage fiction and Hong Kong cinema. There’s not too much else to say about it. I think it basically works.

What Worked: The Congo Siege. Everybody seems to love this part. It was a real feat of coding for me back then, but I think it all came together and is a real highlight of the book.

Chapters 2 and 5. I think these are the most successful overall in terms of what they set out to achieve. Chapter 2 is tense, Zhu’s introduction is very memorable, and even players who hate Stevo (and I did write him to be irritating) tell me that they ended up caring a lot about his survival. Chapter 5 is actually funny, is well-paced, has a great villain, good action scenes and a memorable cameo from the Amazonian too. The one part that doesn’t really work that well is the sealing of the Esme/Abdul relationship. The fact that the chapter takes place all in one night probably means that you don’t really have enough time with them to make this fully convincing. But the tight timeline adds to the chapter in other ways, so it’s probably worth it ultimately.

María. Probably the standout character, certainly the one who gets the most comments. People seemed to react very strongly toward her, either positively or negatively. As a writer, I love it when one of my characters does that to people!

What I’m Unsure About: “Too Much Politics!” It’s a fairly common complaint in the reviews. I’m unsure. To some extent, there are people out there who’ll make this complaint about literally any game / book that has anything to say, and I’d rather be a little too heavy-handed than take the coward’s way out of just saying nothing. The whole thing did start off as a politically-minded project after all. But there are some moments when I could probably have dialled it back a little. I think I do a better job in the later two games of being politically engaged without it being so intrusive on the narrative.

What Didn’t Work The ethnicity lock. I actively regret this now. I did this because I wanted the depiction of the Jim Crow South in Chapter 3 to be true to the actual conditions of the time, and the conditions of the time meant that a person’s ethnicity could determine really major things, like what job they could do. I felt like I needed the MC to be at least “white-passing” so that they could have a job at Tulane, which was, at the time, a white college. Having the grandfather ethnicities helps a little in terms of representation, but in retrospect I think that it might have been possible for me to find ways to accommodate non-white-passing MCs through, for example, varying the MC’s workplace according to player choice. (It might have been fun to be able to be a colleague of Cleo at Xavier, the Black college, for instance). At the time, when I was starting out in ChoiceScript, it felt like that would probably involve too much variation and just be unmanageable. Now, however, I’m a bit more experienced with the language and I’m pretty sure that it would have been possible, if difficult, to manage that variability. But hey, I have all kinds of ideas for future projects in ChoiceScript, and none of them require an ethnicity lock, so at least I know I’ll never need to do that shit again in the future!

The flashback structure. I wanted a framing narrative, and I thought that it would be cool to start in medias res. But those scenes of getting tortured by Paulus ended up becoming quite repetitive, and I think the unusual structure put some readers off. I’m all in favor of formal experimentation, but perhaps not with ChoiceScript: readers of Hosted Games seem to like having a beginning, a middle and an end in that order! I’ll probably lay off the experimentation in the future.

[leftski-if]

So genuine question after seeing that ask about customization, I completely understand what you mean about choosing taking time and pulling people out of the story. I was wondering tho about how some IF games have the option to type in your own answer, yours does it with choosing a name I think, wouldn’t that be a solution for customization? Like, you just give the ability to type out the color of things or length of something & it sort of covers all the bases? Not trying to come off as rude or anything, just wanted to get your thoughts on that being a possible option

Original ask can be found here for reference

No worries, I'm always happy to explain my thought process in more detail ^^

And I went into a lot of detail, so I'm gonna put it under a cut lol

First I should clarify: when I say I would feel the need to include a "large enough variety of options to feel sufficiently inclusive of the various possible interpretations someone could have of their MC" and that it would be a lot of work, I don't mean that it’s difficult to include a variety of options within a given choice (although it is a decent chunk of work). Rather, I’m referring to the number of distinct choices involved, and the fact that the work doesn’t end once a choice is made; you then have to actually make use of those choices in the writing going forward.

I don’t know if you have any experience coding with ChoiceScript, but basically, each choice the reader makes needs to have its own page*, and each choice that’s made and is going to be called on later is saved as a variable. For character customisation, skin colour, eye colour, hair colour, hair length/style, and hair texture would be the bare minimum to be included, in my mind, and that's already at least five additional pages dedicated to making these choices, each with their own variables to keep track of and take into account when writing the actual story parts.

-

To more specifically address your point about manually entering text to customise a choice, it’s definitely something I would make use of, were I to include appearance customisation. I think it’s a great feature that allows for a ton of freedom. However, I feel it's best utilised alongside a handful of predetermined choices. I would never want to only have an input field for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, I feel having some choices supplied beforehand really helps to contribute to the worldbuilding. By seeing what kinds of options are presented, it may help to form a baseline and inform the choices of anyone who wants their MC to be well-suited to the world in which the story takes place.

As someone who strives to make MCs who make sense within the canon of the world they live in, I hate being asked to input a choice without having any examples to base it on. The default names in RotC change depending on the MC’s race and gender for exactly that reason, for example, and I’d want to do the same for any appearance customisation. Otherwise readers might feel restricted by preconceived notions and miss out on some of the more unusual options that would be totally valid within the setting (eg: red orcs, purple hair).

There’s also the fact that custom-entered text can’t account for everything. If a reader wanted a character with, say, heterochromia, the game wouldn’t be able to acknowledge that unless they entered something vague like “odd-coloured” without actually specifying the colours they were. While technically functional, I don’t think I’d find something like that very satisfying.

Finally, and this is entirely down to personal quirks, but I just really don’t enjoy having to enter text manually in CYOA games. I almost always go with a default name and default appearance options for my MCs because taking the time to type something out myself just feels like a slog and really breaks my immersion.

I don’t know if there’s a single other person in the world who feels the same way, but since these are my games, I’m going to prioritise making something that I would want to play myself. Naturally, I want to enjoy my own work haha

-

So those are my thoughts on the manual text method of choice customisation. While I definitely agree it’s got some fantastic utility and it’s something I make sure to include where I can, I also wouldn’t consider it a catch all solution to the problems presented.

And, of course, I still stand by the points made in the original Ask as well. It would be an interruption of the story and its pacing to take the time to make these customisation choices, regardless of whether they were done via predetermined options, manually entered text, or a combination of both. An interruption like that should contribute to or elevate the experience enough that it justifies its inclusion, and as it stands right now, appearance customisation just isn’t something that would see a lot of use in my games. I’d rather have characters react to the MC’s words and actions than their looks, and I just don’t think there’d be any value in including customisation options when those choices would come up rarely, or more likely, not at all.

So yeah! TL;DR: Including character customisation is, on a technical level, doable; it just isn’t an appealing use of my time and energy, nor do I think my stories would make effective use of it, thereby rendering it not worth the extra effort.

Sorry this got so long, but I hope it made sense and helped to clarify my perspective/thought process, or at least provided a bit of interesting insight 😅

-

*technically it is possible to include multiple choices on one page but the code looks complicated as heck and I ain’t touching that; from what I can tell the one choice/page method is far more approachable and probably the one I’d choose to stick with

[scribble-games]

Hey there! I hope you don't mind, but I just had a few general questions about making a game like The Aegis Project! Did you have a background in coding coming into it? How challenging/complicated was it to plan and execute all of the different paths? Was there any particular resource you used if/when you got stuck on something?

So sorry if this is unwelcome or too many questions! I'm thinking of working with choice script for a project of my own and I was hoping I could pick your brain a little if you're ok with it, since you made a phenomenal game that I really truly enjoyed :)

I don't mind at all! This turned out pretty long, but I hope it's helpful! Good luck with your project and feel free to ask me any more choicescript questions.

I had a very basic knowledge of coding beforehand (back then I think my only experience was like, MatLab and maybe a teeny bit of VBA). So I knew about the concepts of conditionals and loops and string/boolean/numeric values, but I'd never made anything complicated. When I started in Choicescript I basically just learned as I went - I worked on a few WIPs before Aegis Project (I'm pretty sure if you look at the first few chapters of Awoken you can track my coding learning curve!)

For coding resources/tips:

The Choicescript Wiki and the Choicescript pages on the CoG website are a good reference point for all CS commands, and provide examples of how to use them.

https://choicescriptdev.fandom.com/wiki/ChoiceScript_Wiki

https://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescript-intro/

Lynnea Glasser's tutorial is a great intro to ChoiceScript

http://www.maderealstories.com/games/ChoiceScriptTutorial.html#.1g

It can also help to take a look at the actual code of other games! If you didn't know, you can look at the code for the demo chapters of any game on the CoG site by adding "/scenes/startup.txt" to the end of the game URL (which will show you the startup file) and then replacing 'startup' with the names of any of the chapter files. You can do the same in Dashingdon by replacing the bit after 'mygame' in the URL with "/scenes", and then clicking on any of the chapters.

For example:

https://www.choiceofgames.com/aegis-project-180-files/scenes/1_coldopen_v3.txt

https://dashingdon.com/play/scribblesome/awoken/mygame/scenes/

I know a lot of people like CSIDE for coding (personally I found it a bit awkward to use and I prefer keeping it basic in Notepad++). But they are both free programs so try out and see what you like!

https://choicescriptide.github.io/

Honestly, one of the best ways to learn coding is through trial and error! I'd advise having a 'scrap' game project that is just one scene, where you can paste in any bits of code that you're having trouble with or that are particularly complicated. That way you can quickly tweak, reload and repeat until it's working.

Planning/Writing

To answer the question of how challenging it was to plan and execute the paths - well, it didn't seem that bad at the time! I'd say my best advice when working out branching is to start out simple and then build up in complexity. I think it's almost more important to figure out the overall story beats and the chokepoints (where the branches tie together) when you begin and then sort out the branches.

So, taking Chapter One of Aegis Project as an example. It's got four main stages:

1: You're downstairs, trying to get upstairs.

2: You're upstairs; you meet Angel there.

3: You're in the back area of the casino, snooping around.

4: You're dangling over a crocodile pit, about to make a daring escape!

You always get upstairs somehow; you always get backstage somehow, and you always get knocked out by Angel.

So once I've laid out that, I cam think about how I want the branching to go in between these points. What options could there be for getting upstairs? What impacts might that choice have later on? And then you add more into that - now I've decided that you can get upstairs either by winning a lot of money at poker or by impressing the German lady, so how are you going to do those things? And so on.

Of course, this is just how I do things! There are games that branch from the first page and then never join back together, and those would need a different approach to plotting, but it's all good.

Do remember though that it's easy when you're planning to say that you'll have branching for eight different magic types, and much harder to figure out eight different versions of a scene! Watch out for that scope creep.

And my most important tip is (if you're using stats) to figure out the main stats you want to use early on. Rewriting to change the stats is a MASSIVE PAIN. Don't do it.

[allieebobo]

hi! do you have any if recommendations? and if you know any other ifs that take place in a college / university etc, could you let me know? i love your if and would love to read more ifs that have an 'ordinary' setting like this, since most ifs i've read are very much centered around fantasy (and i'd love to get a break from that).

Hi!! :-) Sorry I took a while to get back on this, I really appreciated the message and am really glad you like the IF!

Let me give the recs a shot. It's a p small list and I've included some established/finished games as well, hope that's OK. (And yeah, I haven't come across a whole lot of 'ordinary'-setting IFs, but I tried my best!)

Disclaimer: I'm still relatively new to the whole IF scene - been playing COG/HG for 2-3 years or so, but never realised there was a whole flourishing community of people making their own games until recently! (one of my fave discoveries of 2021)

WIPS:

1. Citadel | @bouncyballcitadel I can't rec this enough! I really think it's one of the best "realistic"/ordinary-setting games out there. Everything about it is so well-done, it feels real. But like, real in a fun, living vicariously through my MC way. My mom's obsessed with kdramas, so I thought I'd reached the threshold for medical-dramas, but I was WRONG.)

2. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - An affair of the heart |@doriana-gray-games The writing/dialogue/characters etc. are so good - really transports you to Victorian London and sucks you in (I love snarky british ppl and truly enjoy Lestrade so far). Also, the mystery is actually so legit?! Or maybe I'm a little air-brained. haha. Also. There are actual pictures between the pages. Production quality A+.

3. A Long Weekend This is a little different from the games I usually enjoy - I generally get sucked into character-rich, world-rich games with lush writing, but this one is compact and packs a punch & is worth a try (look out for the trigger warnings though!)

Other considerations: Ear Candy | @earcandy-if (this one has no demo yet but it’s on my to-play list for sure. Other than sports IFs, musician-IFs have been top on my IF-wishlist for ages.)

Relics of the Lost Age series You play as an archaeologist (for all your Indiana Jones fantasies)! Not exactly ordinary, but... set in the real-world (ish) I suppose? I've only played the first game but there's a demo out for the third game now, and the second game just came out.

Finished games that I really enjoyed:

1. Slammed! I know nothing about wrestling, but this was everything I need/expect from a realistic / ordinary-IF. Good writing. Good plot. Many branches. 'Nuff said?

2. The Parenting Simulator I was a lil shook by how much I enjoyed being a parent, I really don't think I'd feel the same with a real baby in my arms.

3. Choice of Broadsides (the OG game that got me into choicescript games).