(Choice of Games) Have any of you made a game using the ChoiceScript?

[VCAckerman]

Choice of Games is a website where you can play text-based "choose your own adventure" style games. ChoiceScript is the program used to make these games. I'm just curious if anyone on here has made a game using this system. I've always thought about making a game with ChoiceScript but never have.

Here are a few examples of games if you want a better idea of how they're like (you can play the first few chapters for free):
A Mage Reborn
The Parenting Simulator
Samurai of Hyuga
Apex Patrol

 

[VeryBigBeard]

Haven't used ChoiceScript, have used Twine, which is similar but entirely open-source. Choice of Games is essentially a publisher of Interactive Fiction or IF; there are several out there, though they are probably the biggest.

 

[VCAckerman]

Haven't used ChoiceScript, have used Twine, which is similar but entirely open-source. Choice of Games is essentially a publisher of Interactive Fiction or IF; there are several out there, though they are probably the biggest.

I heard Twine is a bit difficult to learn. Is that true?

 

[ChaseJxyz]

Twine isn't that bad. If you know HTML, you can Twine. The "problem" with Twine, IMO, is that it spits out a huge fucking mess of an HTML doc so you can't really embed it into a webpage. There's this one project that uses Twine beautifully and I would share it but it is incredibly NSFW lol

I made a shitpost story in Twine to try it out, and it was fine. I will eventually evolve that shitpost story and render it in ren.py, because the inclusion of "talk sprites" and audio cues will make it even funnier. But otherwise I have precisely 0 interactive fiction stories that are simple enough to be rendered in Twine or something like ChoiceScript. My IF ideas are reliant on the medium and do stuff when, say, you generate the PDF for the story. Or when you use the dev tools of your web browser to alter the HTML of the file. Or the branching is being done via GitHub version control. I WISH I had an idea that was small and simple enough for Twine lmao

 

[VeryBigBeard]

Twine's a really good prototyping tool because you can use it fast and the format is a bit incomprehensible so it's actually fairly good practice for adapting to scripting challenges and such.

But yeah, I don't know very many people who actually like it. It's less difficult to learn than just idiosyncratic. It's not even hard so much as slightly counter-intuitive. Like a lot of scripting languages, once you understand its quirks, you can actually do some pretty nice stuff.

I think once you get to the level where you want to start really controlling the way the story looks/feels/etc., you're probably better off getting a more games-specific tool where you can rip out and replace parts of the engine you don't want and customize the parts you do want. Which is itself more work and a learning curve. Any kind of game-dev is always a learning curve.

 

[Cobalt Jade]

Are then any others than Choicescript or Twine?

 

[VeryBigBeard]

Ren'Py is the other main one, as Chase mentioned.

Beyond that, my advice would be to get RPG Maker / GameMaker if you're into visual novels or start learning Unity. Both will do interactive fiction with a lot more tools and a lot more audiovisual capability.

Depends a bit what you want to do on the market end, too.

 

[ChaseJxyz]

Yeah, it really depends on what you want to do.

You don't need to know how to program to use Twine. What you end up with is text on a screen in an HTML document.

Ren'py is for visual novels and you program with a version of Python. You end up with an .exe that you can open in Windows. Doki Doki Literature Club (at least the OG steam version) was made with Ren'py, so it IS very powerful, if you know what to do with it.

Unity is a game engine, which is very good if you want to make 3D games (like all those PS1-era graphics horror games). But you need C# to program in it, which is statically typed, AND you gotta deal with memory management????? Who has time for that????? But you can export what you make into all sorts of formats, like mobile and game consoles.

Unity is WAY too much for making a visual novel or interactive fiction that is more fiction than interactive. I'm gonna actually do Ren'py at some point because I DO have a visual novel idea, but I'm going to need a lot of art/music assets and other stuff that I myself can't make, and I have no budget rn to procure them lol. tbf I just make shit myself in HTML5 when I do IF, because I know what I'm doing and I like things looking web 1.0-y. I'm kinda biased tho I hate ye olde zork era if, because it is not fun and doesn't actually read like a story. It reads like console print outs, which is what it is, and that's not the type of experience I want to curate. It also has a very hard divide between what is diegetic and what is exdiegetic and I think that is incredibly boring.

 

[VeryBigBeard]

Unity has some spectacular problems, some of which are very much self-inflicted, especially recently.

But it's one great superpower, as sort of suggested by the name, is that it's plug-and-play. So yes, while it's technically a game engine, if you want to do a visual novel, you install a plug-in built for that kind thing, which may well be extendable, etc. Much more powerful, but yes, learning curve.

You do have to deal with licenses, but that's a cost of doing business when you hit that kind of level. I'm loathe to do the whole cliche "let's argue about engines" thing because it really, really doesn't matter--you use what you're comfortable with, make something, extend it, iterate, try something else, and so on.

My point is more that the line between IF and "game" is blurry and I like it that way.

 

[ChaseJxyz]

I constantly flipflop between "player" and "reader" and "you" (both in reference to the reader/player and the MC) in my gdd lol.

IF is a wonderful medium to tell stories and create wholly unique experiences you can't get elsewise. Of course, you gotta pick the right way to do it. Zero Escape would hit totally different (in a bad way) if it was ye olde black text on a white screen IF a la Infocom. And it hit totally differently (in a bad way) in the Steam re-release; the original used the Nintendo DS in such mind-bending ways that it keeps me up at night thinking about it lol

But also I have a much wider definition of IF, I consider any game that is more on rails-y and the majority of your playtime is reading to be IF, so visual novels count, but also choose your own adventure books. The one academic book on IF I read said that it has to be on a computer and the way the user interacts with the story is via an interpreter, which I think is a very dumb and narrow definition, as it implies that IF is pretty much dead since no one makes games like that anymore. What people want out of playing a game is not the same as what people want out of reading a story and, I think, that's the big difference between a "video game" and an "interactive fiction."

So Danganronpa is an IF, I guess. Ace Attorney, too. But not Undertale, though it toes the line.

 

[CWNitz]

Unity is a game engine, which is very good if you want to make 3D games (like all those PS1-era graphics horror games). But you need C# to program in it, which is statically typed, AND you gotta deal with memory management????? Who has time for that????? But you can export what you make into all sorts of formats, like mobile and game consoles.

If static types and memory management are your main objections, you should try Phaser some day!
Although, I like making games but I don't enjoy making the content for some reason, so I've only ever made prototypes with it.