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As we discussed in an earlier article, if you want to write a long interactive novel that doesn’t suck, you’ll need to make to make heavy use of numeric scores or “stats.” Indeed, if you merge branches aggressively as we recommend, the entire game will be about the stats; every decision will update the stats and test earlier stats to make earlier decisions meaningful. In this article, we discuss a few techniques for designing great stats.

Writing a game in ChoiceScript is easy, but, like any work of fiction, finishing it can be hard. If you want to try your hand at writing just the first part of a game in ChoiceScript, consider submitting your game to IntroComp 2011, an annual interactive-fiction competition in which entrants submit only the first part of their games. Players vote for the winning game. The requirements of IntroComp are deceptively simple: All entrants must submit the beginning of a new, never before seen work of IF. This can be as short or as long as the author likes, so long

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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.

Many of you have asked whether we have other games besides Choice of the Dragon.  We’re pleased to announce that our next game, Choice of Broadsides, will be debuting by the end of March.  Choice of Broadsides is a 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 as well.  Will you become the hero of Albion, defending its shipping from the dastardly Gauls?  Or will you end up marooned on a desert island by mutineers?  Only your choices can determine the answer. As with Choice of the

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We have now made the ChoiceScript interpreter available through GitHub, a public repository for shared code.  You can download the ChoiceScript interpreter, a very simple sample game that you can edit, and some automatic testing routines for debugging purposes at http://github.com/dfabulich/choicescript/.  Clicking on the Download Source button on that page will download an archive with all of the relevant files.  As we mentioned before, the ChoiceScript Interpreter is available under a free non-commercial use license.  Contact us if you’re interested in a commercial license. We’ve added some more explanation to the Intro to ChoiceScript page that should help explain how

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Many people have contacted us about the possibility of developing their own multiple-choice text-based games using ChoiceScript.  We’re very excited about other people writing games like this. We have a short, incomplete introduction to the ChoiceScript language available at http://www.choiceofgames.com/blog/choicescript-intro/.  We encourage anyone interested in writing a game in ChoiceScript to start by reading that and trying to write a sample vignette or two. We plan on releasing our interpreter on a public repository in the next couple of days– there are just a few minor administrative details we need to take care of first.  The interpreter (and related tools,

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