Can I record player's choices to "an outside source which controls the game mechanics"?

Choicescript can work with random events, but I don’t think it is going to be the best thing for what you need, particularly for integrating it into some other type of game.

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How do you mean? It seems like you might be asking if ChoiceScript lets you make a multiple-choice game, and if so, the answer is yes.

What do you mean by “outside source”? You control game mechanics by writing them in ChoiceScript so they work out the way you envision.

EDIT: You might want to have a look through this thread.

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A creative idea, and I think it has great potential of becoming a great game if you can pull something of that sort off. Especially since you want it to be connected to an outside source(which by the way I’m not even sure if it’s possible), there’s going to be a ton of things to work out.

If it was me, I would write in some random events, but refrain from the outside source, only using choicescript. Choicescript has great potential too! :slight_smile:

Hope my input helps.

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Basically, I want the players to be able to have a political issue such as gun control. They make their choice, the choice is recorded or can be exported to a spreadsheet which calculates the overall effect on their nation.

To my knowledge, that cannot be done. At least not without some fancy supplementary scripting that probably wouldn’t be able to be published under either label. You can keep track of player choice through variables and display them on the stats screen, though, for example.

EDIT: There is no need to have a spreadsheet for calculations. Variables can be calculated/manipulated with ChoiceScript.

EDIT 2, THE REVENGE: Story-games made with ChoiceScript do this all the time (both of my games do, too) to give players different endings or gate specific story paths behind a stat check. It’s totally possible to, for example, have a player trip some “you are a conservative” story beat and prevent them from getting the “you are a liberal” ending in a political game.

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Well, this can be done in choicescript as well, assigning values to variables and calculating isn’t too hard of an action.

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Some of the calculations such as budget, new industry, power plants are already being done in the spreadsheet. I would just need this as a way to record issues and events that happen. But the way it’s sounding, it isn’t possible in how I want to use it.

You can do that through ChoiceScript with boolean variables/checks. Set a “built_power_plant true/false” and only have text that says “you built a power plant” display on the stats screen or wherever you want it if the player makes a specific choice. A lot, if not all, of what you’re proposing seems doable with ChoiceScript, to me, but you would need to work within the language.

I edited my post up there with a link to a thread for beginners. It might help to envision what I’m explaining if you read through some of the links on that thread.

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It is all possible in choicescript, as Writing_Fever already stated.

It seems that you want to record the information, so that you can see it? As far as I know there isn’t a function in choicescript that does that, but correct me if I’m wrong, choicescript does allow Javascript.

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Oh yeah, did you mean that you want it so you personally would be able to see player choices on a spreadsheet somewhere, jalue2002?

I’m pretty sure you’re correct, but if they’re looking to have some sort of information-gathering script added onto a published game, that’s probably not going to be allowed.

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Being able to personally see it in a spreadsheet could be an option.

How do you mean, though? When I said “you, personally”, I meant you and only you and not any given player having a personalized spreadsheet for their own game experience. The answer is either: “No, that’s probably not going to work” for the former or “No, but you could do the same thing with ChoiceScript” for the latter.

The players would not have their own spreadsheet. They can see their nation by selecting it the appropriate cell. And once they select it, they can see the different stats of their nation which are all based on predetermined data on the backend.

ChoiceScript has a stats screen that you can write to show players what you want them to know and where you want to put it. It kind of sounds, to me, like you already have a very concrete idea of what you want to do and that Frankenstein-ing ChoiceScript into it won’t work like you’ve envisioned. Like I said before, most of what you’ve already proposed can be done in ChoiceScript without the need for a spreadsheet. There are some political and nation-building/management games already published, maybe it would help you to check out those?

Are those games on here?

Are you saying you want a database of all players’ (all on different accounts, devices) playthrough stats, which they could then compare to each other’s stats? Like, idk, a MMORPG, where data is continually uploaded?

Hi @jalue2002, welcome to the party.

If you want to break the abstraction and write some Javascript, you can send events to an external server and/or read data into a game. I have done both for some of my experiments (e.g two-player Lamurloq THREAD HERE), but it is not officially supported (and actually discouraged).

I will be happy to give you more info, but you won’t be able to publish your game (and there are probably better tools than Choicescript for an interactive strategy game).

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It wouldn’t have to be that advanced.

Thanks Choicehacker

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As others have said, INSIDE ChoiceScript you can track hundreds of variables, but it’s all contained inside each player’s “bottle” i.e. not in contact with other players/external data.

If that is something you want to do, look into tools like DialogFlow that are marketed as being for “chatbots” but are actually just CYOA set-ups with a lot of more flexibility. For instance you could make a game where TWO human players compete head-to-head, but not in ChoiceScript.