It would also lose a huge chunk of accessibility, I’d imagine.
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I’d assume they’d run it as a completely separate branch with a different focus if they ever branched into more VN territory. It does seem like CS tends to works generally ok with screen readers overall because of the lack of bells and whistles.
Edit: I would love to see some Inkle style stuff from some of the authors here though if they ever did. 80 Days is a masterclass in how to do a text based game with simple choices that matter well. It’d be interesting to know how games like that play with screen readers.
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I wasn’t suggesting they turn into an Episodes clone, nor would I want that. But I agree, if that ever happened it would be better to put it in its own label.
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Just for clarity, the term for what Episode Interactive makes is “visual novels” (VNs). VNs are cool; they’re just not what we do.
Episode makes VNs with pretty aggressive in-app purchases. In Episode, players pay extra to unlock romance scenes, outfits, and other features. Some people hate that; others don’t mind. Episode tends to make more money per player than we do, because a few players (“whales”) spend tons of money on their games. A player can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a single game in Episode.
We don’t approve of aggressive in-app purchases, especially when you have to pay to unlock stuff each time you play. We think the only way to be fair to players is to sell them products with one-time non-consumable purchases at a fair price. (But we’re clearly leaving money on the table by not catering to whales.)
In my opinion, for small teams (maybe just one author + one artist), the best way to make visual novels is to use Ren’Py. https://www.renpy.org/
(Or, if you want to write for Episode, you can use Episode’s own editor thingy, but I think you’ll find that writing for us tends to be a better deal, unless your Episode game gets popular, and you become an employee at Episode.)
If you’re building a choice-based game inside a more traditional video game using the Unity game engine, Ink is a good fit for that; Ink was designed to be embedded in Unity games. If you’re an experienced programmer, you can make pretty much any kind of game with Unity.
In general, writing games in Ren’Py and Unity+Ink requires more programming expertise from the author, compared to ChoiceScript. In my opinion, ChoiceScript is easier to learn for authors with little/no programming experience.
There’s never going to be one perfect game-development system that suits everyone. The more things a system can do, the more you need to learn in order to use it. Unity can do anything, and that’s what makes it so hard to learn.
So, as everyone else is saying, I don’t think it would make sense to try to turn ChoiceScript into an alternative to Ren’Py. (It’s not clear that the world even needs an alternative to Ren’Py. Ren’Py works fine!)
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I think CoG has built a brand on things that are difficult or impossible to do with visual novels: customizable PCs that invite as many people as possible to see themselves as the hero of any story, accessibility to screen readers, and narratives with depth and literary merit. And in that niche, CoG is by far the best at what they do - they’ve spent over 15 years studying what works in longform choice-based interactive fiction. If there’s anyone out there consistently producing work that even comes close, I sure haven’t heard about it.
Visual novels, although they are a kind of choice-based IF, function very differently than CS games. I haven’t played many, so I’m no expert, but I’ve copyedited enough articles about visual novels in ChoiceBeat that I know a little about them. They have a different focus, different pacing, different replay value. I don’t know that any of the CoG editors has ever worked on a visual novel. They’ve all worked on dozens of longform text games. They are world-class experts in editing longform text games. To produce visual novels of comparable quality, they would have to either master a different medium or hire people with relevant experience. Even if they wanted only to make it possible for people in this community to create visual novels rather than producing their own, they’d still be taking on a lot of work for themselves that they may not be entirely equipped to do.
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I was browsing the Upcoming Hosted Games Releases and it’s around 1-2 releases a month? That’s much fewer than I was expecting. Do they have a backlog and are releasing it at this pace so that readers won’t be overwhelmed?
Just thinking of, like, is there a huge backlog and if you finish a game, it might be years until yours floats to the top of the queue.
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They don’t have a huge backlog, no. They release games at about the same rate people submit them. Games that don’t get a Steam release are usually available for sale a couple months after they’re submitted. Games that do end up on Steam take longer because they go through copyedit, which can take awhile for a game on the longer side, but in that case it’s still a matter of months.
If anything, their release schedule is designed to make sure we have new games to look forward to at a regular rate. When they’ve had enough games to justify two “big” HG releases in one month, they’ve done so. But aside from keeping enough in the queue to make sure that there is a queue of new releases to look forward to, they are absolutely not sitting on a huge cache of finished games and parceling them out slowly.
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Ah, I see! That’s good in one way, it means a game will hit the market within a few months of completion. I am surprised there are so few games released though, would have expected much more authors. The barriers to entry are very low!
The failure to complete a WIP rate is VERY high. Combine that with only really long games now being popular and it compounds the issue as people are trying to tackle 500+ word games from the outset and burn out. People who are writing are generally doing so as a hobby as unless you have a very popular game you can’t afford rent just being a writer. Numbers of games completed also seem to ebb and flow as people get the time to finish them up. So yeah, that’s why the list is likely not extensive at the moment especially for HG. COGs tend to get a bit more planned in.
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Apart from being more familiar with choicescript 
this is partly the reason, I would have liked a Choice-VN type thing since a number of writers have also pointed out in other threads that cogames terms are way better than other platforms, including trad publishing.
But I see the amount of moving pieces that it’ll require:
Truly appreciate the amount of people that responded.
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Oh yeah. That makes total sense. I’m writing as a hobby, too. Keeping it realistic though, aiming for 150k total words. Can’t write that much, you know?
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Just wondering. GOG hosts a collection of text-based games. Could this be a future outlet for CoG, HC and HG titles? GOG CoG.
EDIT: Some of their titles are somewhat spicy, too.
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I wonder the same, I’d love to see CoG, HC and HG games on the GOG store!
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What even is GOG?
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I’d love to see it. GOG seems to be going from strength to strength. Although they have stricter requirements than Steam.
Good Old Games is a website similar to Steam. It used to specialise in selling old games, modified to work better on modern systems, but has grown and now sells newer games too. It has games from the 80s all the way to now, including a selection of text-based games, like Roadwarden.
Also, it often has deep sales to scoop up lots of the golden oldies.
EDIT: I only started using it a couple of years ago, but I prefer it to Steam. You get the digital copy of the purchased game to own, not just play, runnable without a net connection. You need no special file permissions or whatever, leading back to GOG’s master server of doom. With small games, like ours, I can see this being an issue in terms of piracy…
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As @NumberedEntity said, the biggest advantage of GOG is that it sells only DRM-free copies of games, so you don’t need a launcher (like Steam), you can play your games offline and keep a backup copy of them in case that GOG or the publisher one day stops their services.
I have peace of mind when I buy from GOG because I know I’ll be able to play my games in the future and I don’t have to depend on an external launcher or service!
As a side note, many games on Steam are DRM-free too (especially those from indie publishers) and can be launch directly from the executable; however, keep in mind that they’re just the minority, while GOG sells only DRM-free versions of games.
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I would be thrilled to have these games on GOG. I’ve been using them as my primary PC gaming platform for almost 10 years now and I consider them the only serious competitor to Steam at this point.
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I’m infinitely late to this topic, so my apologies for dredging up old stuff, but does it feel a bit like the HG pipeline might be thinning a tad when it comes to submissions?
It’s really interesting to see @dozendietcokesaday’s post from Aug-25 noting that HG’s pipeline was ~1-2 releases a month, and then since that post I think between 16th August and today about five HG games have come out (going off the new games listed after Saturnine on the official page, then adding the new ZE drop which I think counts).
Counting the next SoH which I think is due in May, that’s 6 (I think 4 of which got / will get a Steam launch, counting SoH) games in 9 months which I thought was interesting. Especially with everyone having a great discussion about marketing in the other thread that’s active at the moment.
Though it does feel like there’s a lot of well-progressed WiPs still being worked on, looking at threads (and H.Powell’s super helpful end-year report), so that’s something and I certainly don’t know if it means anything big-picture - maybe it says more about everyone drifting to longer and longer-form content (I say, entirely hypocritically…)
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This is an inevitable consequence of word count inflation I think. Games get bigger, so they take longer to put out. A game more than every other month is still a pretty good rate.
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For real. I remember when I put out Werewolves 1 in 2018, a 300k word book was considered quite big. Now I see readers calling 400k books too short, lol.
Werewolves 1 was 280k
Werewolves 3 is 680k
And folks wonder why it takes me so long! 
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