Advice for someone starting out

As a fellow beginner who began Choicescript a year ago, I think there are several things I learned through trial and error that could help you become more eased into this world a little faster than I have:

  • As mentioned Choicescript Wiki and this forum will be your best friends, but all in all, practice is the only way to learn like anything else. I personally ended up just writing short stories or scenes for the sole purpose of getting practice and honing in the basics, and trying out advanced sequences to see what works and what doesn’t, before I finish something a little more serious. For example, I wrote simple scene about an MC playing a MOBA game with a bunch of friends, and filling the choices with dialogue, personality/stat choices, and a lot of cussing just for practice and some stupid fun.

  • If you haven’t followed the advice in a previous post, get CSIDE.

  • From trial and error (which includes me falling asleep reading my own works), I think you need to really keep in mind that an IF is in a grey zone between a literary work and an RPG game, and that you will pretty much be doing the work by yourself. You are the Lead Game Developer of your own IF, who likely will have no one but yourself to take on the role of author, game mechanic designer, programmer, and quality assurance beta-tester (until your work gets some attention). Like any novels, the story and its contents need to interest your readers, but as it is also a game, the gameplay mechanics (mainly meaningful choices, but also stats, skills etc.) need to complement and support your storytelling since it is an RPG. If the story is boring, your coding skills won’t matter. If you are Ernest Hemingway reborn, but your stats and choices are clearly an afterthought, then it might as well just be a traditional novel. It is a lot of planning, and maybe daunting to create an IF, but once you more or less figure out how Choicescript works and get your foot in the door, I can promise that planning becomes a lot more clearer, since you can spend your time worrying about the plot and how to make your choices fun and interesting, rather than why your game runs into an error from the first page. And read this post once you get the gist of the basics, it is one of the best posts on this forum which offers insightful advice for beginners and veterans alike: What I learned from playing every Choicescript game (patterns in good/bad games)

  • All this in the end has to be tempered with how realistically you can finish your work - as you may know, there are many ambitious games and books that never materialized because the developers/authors tried to bite off more than they could chew. From what I observed, that tends to discourage more than the opposite.

I was bored and needed to write something, hope it helped.

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