Hello, I’m a big fan of the choose your own adventure genre, and have been since I was a kid. I still have my Batman Choose Your Own Adventure books, Young Indiana Jones one, and a few D&D Choose Your Own Adventure books. When I found Choice of Games and the Choose Your Own Adventure games offered here I was thrilled. It’s like playing a choose your own adventure book! Finally now though after playing so many of the amazing games offered here under the Choice label and Hosted games alike, I’ve decided to start putting some serious work into one of my own.
Elemental Discordance is based on an idea I had some years ago, though it’s gone through a number of changes to fit my current idea for this story. In my vision of this there will be multiple games, with the first one following the main character, a young man, as he’s given the chance to make his dream come true, becoming a mage. He’s faced with the realities of that decision, what really comes along with using magic. The realities of a world outside of his small town, and those of society as well.
This first game in the planned series will place a lot of emphasis on the classes he takes and the magic he seeks to learn, yes, you’ll actually play out multiple classes. I plan to make learning fun! Well, pretend learning anyway. The rest of the focus will be on the dynamic between the main character and the other students at the school, and the separate dynamic between him and the people he meets in the town.
I hope to have a demo ready within the next couple of weeks, but I wanted to make this post to sort of push myself to do so since with this I’m “advertising” the game in a sense.
I really like the premise of this game, it’s very interesting. Though I would recommend not having to many classes unless you want to overwhelm the readers.
Yeah, the classes will be something I’ll be careful of, it’s a careful balancing act, but it’s one I intend to undertake. Since the classes you take will be based primarily on choices within the game, hopefully that will keep from overwhelming the player.
I wasn’t intending on there being an option for a female protagonist, if only because this is my first foray into Choose Your Own Adventure versus simply writing out a story. So I’m trying to dip my toe into the pool so to speak, keep it somewhat centered on the story I originally had in mind. If there’s enough interest and call for it though, once I’ve finished writing it to a certain point I might look at adding in that option. I was actually thinking on it and it might not be too difficult. It’s a learning experience adapting from writing a Novel to writing a Choose Your Own Adventure game.
Also, thank you for fixing my post and letting me know about that issue with the indentation.
I think most people who’re creating games on this site, it’s their first foray into writing Choose Your Own Adventures.
I do know that the genre itself has a tendency towards male protagonists and I think it’s important to ask yourself if the protagonist needs to be male. Does the story require them to be so? Is it important that they are male? Why are you choosing to have a solely male hero?
I’m not asking you to answer those questions here, just think about it.
I’d say choosing gender is by far the most requested choice, if that option’s not there. It is important to people and there are people who won’t play a game if they can’t play a female character. Or just those who’ll be disappointed that it’s not an option.
If you decide to put in a female protagonist, it’s surprisingly not that hard once you’ve got the hang of the coding. A lot of the text can be fixed with fairygodfeather’s coding where instead of writing he, him, his. You code it with ${he} ${him} ${his"}
If the MC is female, you type:
*set he “she”
and so on so it will change the text to a female form. Obviously sometimes the story may need changes depending on whether you’re playing male or female (ie appearence, character interactions etc) so up to you if you want to go there Good luck, keep us posted.
Yeah, it would be relatively simple to just give the same choices for male or female, but if I were to include both genders I would want to go a little further than that. There’d be some differences to the story if you were male or female, maybe not huge ones, but differences.
well these classes be basic like destruction( pyromancy, cryomancy, etc) or will there be more obscure or different classes like necromancy, voodoo, summoning
The classes won’t be setup in a typical manner with schools of magic like that. Rather they’ll be geared toward the elements themselves and how to control them in certain situations. There will also be some on the responsibilities of a mage.
Good luck, keep us posted.