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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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by Ben Serviss, author of The Last Monster Master; this article originally appeared on his blog at dashjump.com. Writing is hard. Writing interactive, multiple-choice games is harder. Good at turning a phrase? Excellent – now turn seven of them, all equally-well written, that make sense in four different contexts, as said by three different characters.

Are you writing an interactive novel using ChoiceScript? Don’t make these common mistakes! Not Enough Delayed Branching In “By the Numbers: How to Write a Long Interactive Novel That Doesn’t Suck“, we draw a distinction between choices that branch the story immediately and choices that cause the story to branch in a later chapter. It’s impossible to write a story with lots of choices if all choices branch the story immediately; delayed branching solves that problem nicely. When authors try to write a linear story without delayed branching, the result is a game where the player makes minor choices that

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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.

Traditional gamebooks tend to be pretty short. The average story in a 110-page book in the most popular “choose a path” series is only six pages long. It’s not hard to see why. If each page of a choose-a-path book allows the reader to choose between just two options, a seven-page story requires 128 pages of text. If you want eight pages, the author has to deliver twice as much text, 256 pages. And if you want to write a twenty-page short story, you need a book more than a million pages long. You’d never finish writing a “short story”

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I was at the Game Developer Conference this week in San Francisco; on Monday, Michael Todd (@thegamedesigner) gave a short presentation about his personal battle with depression. It was the best presentation I’ve seen all year, and I’d like to use this space to blog my notes about it. EDIT: The video of Michael Todd’s presentation has been posted for free online. Depression is common among independent game developers. Working on a large creative project all by yourself is a huge emotional challenge. Indie game developers work notoriously long hours, often in isolation. You’re constantly facing the outer limits of

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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.