As a little Philosopher, creating stories both fictional and real is more than second nature, it’s a lifestyle. So the prospect of a willing audience is very appealing. However, a brief but detailed look around the website seems to indicate that coding the games is relatively easy, albeit story mapping displays tendencies of becoming overly complicated with increasing ease as the story grows. That however does not trouble me nearly as much as the subject to which this thread is named.
Choice of Games has been around for a while now, but only 36 games are hosted on this website. Is this due to a lack of interest in actually publishing games for sale, implying that User created games that aren’t published are released elsewhere for free? Or is it that the standards by which Choice of Games chooses to host a game are dauntingly high?
As someone who is interested in adapting some of their previous works to this interactive style, I’d be very interested in knowing if my efforts would be worthwhile or not. After all, time is a precious commodity, one I would see well spent.
Actually I think it might be closer to how much time and effort is needed to actually create an interactive story. I’m currently working on one right now for nearly a year now and I’ve written more than 500k words at this point. This only translates into 6 chapters done and the start of the 7th chapter at this point of time and I don’t think I’m even at halfway through my work at this point. Every action chosen will have its own outcome, whether it’s successful or not and the more variables thrown into the game, the more you have to write.
Neither. The fact is, we (the users) generate hundreds of WIPs on this site. About ninety-nine percent of them die well before publication, and many of the rest spend years in development because the writer is ultimately writing them as a hobby or a side project.
Given that fact, it’s probably more amazing that we have 36 completed projects.
This. It’s the time and effort and the willingness (or ability) to make your project one of your priorities for a year more. Think about that. That’s a LOT of time to devote to something. Life gets in the way, day jobs, school and family obligations come around, and process is stalled or lost completely.
I’ve devoted hundreds and hundreds of hours to CCH and its not even ready for beta yet. And look how much work Grapefruit has devoted!
It’s definitely not COG’s high standards. If it passes QuickTest and RandomTest and is written in basically comprehensible English they’ll host it. (It also can’t infringe IP or be “highly offensive,” but I don’t believe CoG’s turned down anything on those grounds yet.)
But as you say, time is a precious commodity… and as everyone else has said, finishing a game takes a lot of it.
I think most of the problem is that people whack out the first couple of chapters and underestimate the level of commitment needed. The first two can be fun, and don’t take too long. The next two are work, much like a full time job. The two after that are a headache that never stops until you drag yourself over the finish line. Given that you have no guarantee of selling more than one copy (assuming your mother buys it) thats an awful lot of your life dedicated.
I personally am deeply impressed that so many people have already been committed enough to see a project through. It may be harder to get a regular book published, but in my opinion writing one is considerably easier.
Great contributions to thread so far, very polite and to the point. You’ve provided good solid answers the questions I asked, along with some that I didn’t but would have asked, which again is great.
Thanks a lot.
(Also, I noticed that double spacing doesn’t work here, that’s a shame.)
As others say, the biggest impediment is definitely time which has other side effects. Enthusiasm can only carry you so far, but to make it to the finish line, it then becomes a job. You can easily love it, but it still requires a lot of time and work (not to mention bug hunting, editing, etc.)
And while I haven’t done anything with ChoiceScript, I actually am working on some writing for a couple small indie companies with RenPy, so I can relate on the time front.
Quality can be very subjective, and there are a few Hosted Games I don’t really care for, but even then I can be appreciative of how much time and work someone really puts in.
My current project is close to a year worth of work with it being restarted three times, and I have at least another year to complete the project. Time and commitment plus real life kills many, many wips sadly. I wrote two novels in the same amount of time it has taken me to write the first quarter of my game system lol so a considerable more effort goes into writing a game system.
I think not many know this site exist. And some people rather play video games with ultra graphics then settle down and read a good interactive series. I only found this site earlier a few months ago. I bought almost every hosted game. I really enjoy making choices in games and seeing the different outcome. I enjoy the overall story telling. To my knowledge there’s not another site that has this type of games and where people can post their own interactive stories. I find them to be quite entertaining.
