Long time reader who exclusively uses choiceofgames.com to browse and purchase the game/stories. Wanted to request a feature that I think many people would find helpful.
My suggestion is to add a hyperlink on Author’s name on the page that gives the teaser and features the game has. The hyperlink would tell you a list of other gamebooks the author has written.
In the past year or two, the settings for the books have been getting more and more diverse and less cliche. While the teasers are always written in an interesting way, I sometimes am hesitant on whether some of the more peculiar settings will be to my taste. At that point I look at the author to see if I recognize his/her from previous books, but there have been so many I have a hard time keeping track of them all. I would be much more likely to purchase these ones if they have written books I have enjoyed in the past. I understand why you would want to keep all the gamebooks under the “choice of games” author for the app stores, but I think this feature would be nice for your hardcore fans who just come straight to this site.
Not really. The teasers themselves are fine in my opinion. And I’m not sure if any changes really need to be made to the appstores since the majority of people who are browsing there for your games are less “hardcore” fans. I think it would be helpful to those customers to have the author be “choice of games” as it is currently (or last I checked) so the more casual fans can browse the choice of games brand in the appstore. But I think those that come to the website know they want to purchase and play a “choice of games” type of game already, it would be a nice feature to let them connect new works to the authors of previous works they liked.
When you first click on the game, it gives an exciting blurb about the setting, what you can expect to encounter through the game, etc. For some of them like Choice of Vampires, or Choice of Romance, Ninjas, Tin Star, Heroes, Zombies, etc, they are fairly tropy settings (even though they all have their little nuances) that its easy for a reader like me to determine whether or not I am interested in that type of setting. But some of the others are less tropy so its harder to get a feel if its going to be to my tastes and I’m unsure. The “play the first part free” helps get a feeling for the author’s tone, characters and settings before I buy, but sometimes I’m so unsure as to what it is that I’m hesitant to even try the prologue (possibly due to time constraints). But when this happens I always look at the author’s name since I definitely would be interested in it if he/she had written something before I really liked. But having been reading stories on the site for years from many different authors its hard to connect the games to each other unless they are in the same series.
Sorry if it seems like I’m picking on you, I’m just wondering if what it is your asking for isn’t already provided.
Minus the author links to other works, which I really do think is a great idea.
Yeah, that’s why I was thinking maybe the blurb is kind of serving the purpose he suggested (the “xxx,xxxx word adventure” listing all stuff you can do in the game), in which case…problem solved?
But the author thing still seems like a useful bit to add to the web. Of course, I also have no knowledge of how much effort would be required to add such a thing, especially when the current focus are the omnibuses.
An author page would be very nice to have, since writing style and tone is one of the things that helps me narrow down which of the many available games I want to try next. However, I don’t know how the data about games is stored for COG’s website (hard-coded HTML?) so I don’t know how simple or difficult it would be. Sure, there are some repeating authors who have large back lists, but not all the authors are recurring. I think. Probably.
I’d be interested in something of this nature, as once I like an author, I’m often interested to see what else they’ve done, and this could boost interest in other works. (E.g. I was interested in Zombie Exodus due to having liked A Wise Use of Time, and Tally Ho due to having liked Midsummer Night’s Choice.)
I guess this would raise the question of whether authors who’ve written for both CoG and HG would get everything on the same page, which I would find useful, but would be different from the usual separation.
Well, huh Omnibus is already a plural form in Latin so I don’t know how one would go about pluralizing it further
Omnibus is already a plural form in Latin so I don’t know how one would go about pluralizing it further