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As part of our support for the Choice of Games Contest for Interactive Novels, we will be posting an irregular series of blog posts discussing important design and writing criteria for games. We hope that these can both provide guidance for people participating in the Contest and also help people understand how we think about questions of game design and some best practices. These don’t modify the evaluation criteria for the Contest, and (except as noted) participants are not required to conform to our recommendations–but it’s probably a good idea to listen when judges tell you what they’re looking for.

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This position has been filled.  Thanks for your interest.   Choice of Games LLC is hiring!  We’re looking for a part-time customer service representative.  If you’re interested, please send your resume to jobs@choiceofgames.com. Here’s the full job listing: Employer: Choice of Games LLC Location: Telecommute (US resident) Part-time, flexible hours (15-30 hours/week) Choice of Games LLC was founded in 2009 to produce high-quality, multiple-choice text adventures. Choice of Games has a strong commitment to diversity of authors and representation within its publications.  Its games are feminist and inclusive, and it has been featured positively in press for its embrace of

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With Congress considering whether to repeal the Affordable Care Act (the “ACA,” sometimes called “ObamaCare”), the partners and staff of Choice of Games feel the need to strongly state our support for the ACA and to explain its importance to the creative community. The ACA enables our work in two important ways: Choice of Games is a small company, with 6 staffers, spread across 5 different states. It’s essentially impossible for us to get group health insurance for our partners and employees at a reasonable price. We’re too small and distributed. The ACA allows for an effective affordable individual market

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As part of our support for the Choice of Games Contest for Interactive Novels, we will be posting an irregular series of blog posts discussing important design and writing criteria for games.  We hope that these can both provide guidance for people participating in the Contest and also help people understand how we think about questions of game design and some best practices.  These don’t modify the evaluation criteria for the Contest, and (except as noted) participants are not required to conform to our recommendations–but it’s probably a good idea to listen when judges tell you what they’re looking for.

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Paolo Chikiamco, author of Slammed! and resident of Manila, is participating in Authors for the Philippines to raise money for the relief effort after the typhoon. Support a good cause, and you could get your name featured in Slammed! http://authorsforphilippines.wordpress.com/2013/11/17/439-a-name-of-your-choice-in-slammed-the-pro-wrestling-interactive-fiction-game/

Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of Choice of Romance, by Heather Albano and Adam Strong-Morse! Play it on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version. Play as a young aristocrat who comes to court looking for love… and catches the monarch’s eye. Will you find true love? Gain a crown? Lose your head? Choice of Romance is a text-based multiple choice game of romance, deception and court intrigue. We hope you enjoy playing “Choice of Romance” and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon,

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One of the hardest tasks in learning to write a ChoiceScript game is figuring out a process for writing vignettes that works.  We all have experience writing stories, essays, and other prose forms.  And many of us have written computer programs before.  But a ChoiceScript game isn’t like a normal story, although it needs to tell an effective story, and it depends far more on text and storytelling than a normal computer program, although it is a computer program.  So how do we go about writing a vignette? In previous posts, I’ve talked about how we plan a ChoiceScript game

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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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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.