Originally published at: Author Interview: Brian Rushton, “Star Crystal Warriors Go!” - Choice of Games LLC
It’s tough fighting evil by moonlight and being an ordinary 90s kid by daylight! Can you save your city’s dreams from monsters, halt a magical plague in its tracks, and still help your new club prepare for the best school festival ever?
Star Crystal Warriors Go! is a 250,000-word interactive retro magical girl anime novel by Holly McMasters, with additional content by Brian Rushton. It releases next Thursday, August 28th, and you can wishlist it on Steam today. (Even if you don’t plan to buy it on Steam, wishlisting really helps!)
You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Choice of Games, including having played every game in our catalog (at least up through 2021). Can you share a little about that process and whether you’ve continued to play every release?
I’ve been a heavy reader my whole life, and I enjoy diving into new genres and reading the best they have to offer. Before I worked with Choice of Games, I reviewed hundreds of interactive fiction games, from 80’s parser games to Porpentine’s Twine games and everything in-between.
I played a few early Choicescript games and got hooked. Choice of Robots and Slammed! were my early favorites. I was really taken with the way Choice of Robots lets you take such divergent paths (I’ve replayed it many times!) and I thought the twists and choices in Slammed! were really gripping, especially with the main NPCs.
So I was excited when, after working with Choice of Games, I was offered the opportunity to get review copies of the catalog up to that point. It was fantastic; playing the whole back catalog revealed so many hidden gems. Besides the super-famous games like Creme de la Creme and Choice of Rebels, I really liked games like Heart of the House and The Tower Behind the Moon and even scrappy, unusual games like Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck.
But I think I learned more from the less-popular games than the great ones. The best games make it all seem natural: the stats, the choices, the branches, you barely notice them as you’re engrossed in gameplay. But when a game goes ‘wrong’, it usually has something that sticks out like a sore thumb: tests that are too hard, too many stats, not enough branching, too short of a conclusion. And, playing more games, I saw that a lot of lower-rated games had issues in common, which became the body of the essay I wrote.
I should say, though, that this is all a matter of degrees. Compared to the amateur interactive fiction I usually play, every published Choicescript game is at least 4/5 stars for me. And even ‘bad’ games have their own charm. A good example is Gilded Rails. It’s one of the lowest-rated games, but I think that’s mostly due to how unusual it is, focusing on intense resource management and multiple romances over traditional plot.
I haven’t played every release since then, mostly due to money issues. The early 2020’s were pretty rough for me. I did pick up a lot of games I knew I’d like, though, like several Vampire: The Masquerade games, Stars Arisen (I’m looking forward to that author’s upcoming game!), and Restore, Reflect, Retry. I’m doing a little better financially now, though, and have started going through more games, starting with the cheapest Hosted Games.
Your first game with us was In the Service of Mrs. Claus, which is a really fun romp and a unique take on a Christmas story. What has been your experience coming back to ChoiceScript with SCWG having both written a game yourself in the past, and done this heavy analysis of our games?
Some people say the first book is the hardest, and that’s definitely true for me. I loved the concepts and themes of In the Service of Mrs Claus, but I was pretty overwhelmed while writing it. Due to family circumstances, I had to hurry the writing process, and I also suffered from extreme writer’s anxiety, so much that I’d spend hours just trying to overcome my writer’s block, only to write a few hundred words. The game ended up pretty short.
I also struggled with overall design, and so many of the most egregious examples of ‘stat disease’ and other common author problems in my essay were taken from my own game! Fortunately, editing and beta testing reduced a lot of issues and I’ve really enjoyed the positive responses I’ve gotten for Mrs. Claus over the years. But I definitely felt like I could have done more.
With SCWG, I had a much better grasp on both how to make good games and how to overcome writer’s block. I had just come off of writing a 350K-word parser game called Never Gives Up Her Dead, which I had written in just over a year, and I had a lot more experience with Choicescript games. More importantly, I didn’t have to rush. I came on after 100K words were written in the project, and only contracted to write 50K, but I wanted to do the very best I could to flesh out this game and fulfill the first author’s artistic version. I ended up adding 150K words instead of 50K, and made sure to do frequent check-ins with beta testers while writing and at the end. I especially wanted to avoid stat confusion, and made sure to change stat names to be distinct, allow the game to use the full stat bars and not stay stuck down low, added a ‘stats explanation’ guide and a visible stats mode, and included end of chapter saves. Everything I could think to add to the game mechanically, I did. Every plot thread I could resolve or character I could develop, I did. But, of course, writing isn’t an exact science, so I’ll have to see how readers respond to this game and learn from that response.
What did you find surprising about things this time around, given that you were adding work to another author’s project?
Well, my biggest surprise was finding out how similar my own writing is to Holly McMaster’s! Reading the draft project, I varied between, “this sounds like I could have written it” and “I wish that I had written this!” We both have a love for magic powered by creativity and dreams, with terrifying monster opponents and multiple worlds.
Working with another author was both challenging and rewarding. The biggest benefit, to me, is the original author’s skill at writing character relationships. Many people who’ve played the drafts and the final version have commented on how much they love the character arc of Polaris, your animal companion. It also helps that the first author writes good dialogue, something which I often struggle with and have to refine through multiple drafts and rounds of feedback. On the other hand, I was able to contribute to the fight scenes and spicing up the location descriptions, skills which are important in the parser games I wrote before working for Choice of Games.
The challenges were in working with a pre-existing setting and characters. My biggest goal was to fully realize the original author’s concept and not to replace it with my own plans. If I had written it from scratch, then I probably would have designed it differently, with my own take on the branching and scene structure. But this was someone else’s project first. I loved the initial draft I played (I even made fan art of the characters) so I’ve thought, “How can I make a finished version of this game that others can enjoy?” instead of, “How can I make this my own?”
The most significant additions I made to the author’s vision came from beta testing. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that if multiple beta testers ask for something, you should definitely give it to them, even if it’s not what you originally intended. Comments from beta testers led to more romance scenes and options as well as a deeper exploration of the loss of the main character’s mother.
Overall, my experience with this collaboration has made me want to collaborate again. I’ve even talked to my sister about working on a Hosted Games concept based on a Brazilian Jiu-Jutsu gym as a fun side project for us to write casually over the next few years; she loves Jiu-Jitsu and the stories she tells about the people there could work well in Choicescript format.
What do you think our readers will enjoy most about SCWG?
To me, this game feels like an animated movie you’d watch on a Saturday morning. Some of my favorite Choicescript games are simulationist, where you replay over and over again to test your ideas and maximize your rewards. Other favorite games have characters I feel like I can really get into and roleplay. And others, like Slammed!, have great plot with characters that I end up connecting with and which have left me with a satisfying narrative experience. SCWG is the latter, for me. When I played the first draft, I felt really invested in characters like Kit (your alluring nemesis) and Polaris (your mysterious animal friend) and the ways that my character could influence them and bond with them. Everything I’ve added to the game myself has just been to build on those characters, to help others read about them and get to know them, and to give them a rewarding ending. That’s where a lot of the extra writing went; each of the main characters has around 12 different possibilities for how they can end up and their relationship with you, and each of those branches has some variation of its own.
Do you have any new favorites in the COG, HC, or HG catalog?
Well, in the last year I played Wayhaven, and I finally get why everyone enjoyed it so much. I’m a big mystery fan and I love the variation in the 4 romantic leads. It’s definitely influenced the way that I think about and write romance in games. And Stars Arisen was a lot of fun for me. I like being powerful in games, so being the child of a goddess and using high-level magic was definitely fun.
What advice do you want to offer prospective authors of a ChoiceScript game?
I would offer two pieces of advice:
Get feedback early and get feedback often! If you put off compiling and playing your game or letting others try it until the very end, you have no time to fix anything. And there’s no telling how things will go over until you actually try it. For instance, beta testers and my editor found that Star Crystal Warriors Go had extremely difficult challenges in a lot of places (some with a success rate of less than 5 in 10,000!). With their help, I was able to tone it down. Other testers noted that the game started off rough but really took off around chapters 5 and 6, so I went back and gave a lot of extra care to early chapters. The more feedback you get, the better!
Find a writing rhythm that works for you. In my first game, I shot for writing 1000 words a day. I ended up not being able to reach that, and would feel bad, and do worse the next day. Now, I set really small milestones. If I write 300 words, I get to listen to one podcast or beat one level of a game. Then I write another 300 words. That helped me quadruple my writing rate. Everyone is different, so feel free to experiment and try different styles until you find something that you feel comfortable with!
Look forward to playing this one.
