Hello there everybody!
You may know me from TV shows such as “Leave it to Baker,” “The Good, The Bad, and the Baker,” and “Writer, Coder, Baker, Spy.” Or my personal favourite, “The Baker Team”–I love it when a flan comes together!
But did you know that when I’m not playing a Baker on TV, I’m a Baker in real life too?
Okay, maybe not. Maybe all of that is fake. (spoiler: all of that is definitely fake.) But perhaps you’ve played The Bread Must Rise or Spire, Surge, and Sea?
With spooky season just around the corner, I’ve decided to convert a game I wrote several years ago for the short-lived Storyloom platform to ChoiceScript as a Hosted Game.
The game is called Five + One = You and it’s a puzzle-based adventure in the style of Myst and Riven, with other yet-to-be-revealed-in-game influences including Eternal Darkness (a 2002 Gamecube game) and Undertale (sort of).
This is not the final cover, but it is what appeared for the Storyloom version.
Five + One = You
After waking, you find yourself in an unfamiliar house. Who are you? How did you get here? Your only clue is a crumpled piece of paper with the number 5 printed on it and a handwritten warning—”watch yourself, you’re not alone.”
Can you find out who you are? What secrets will you uncover as you explore the house? Will you befriend the strangers you meet there or keep them at arms’ length? Why is there a beast in a cage? And most importantly of all: can you escape your ultimate fate?
For now you can play the first two chapters as well as three unnecessarily fatalistic minigames that literally nobody asked for, with the total demo at about 20,000 words. I’m not sure how often I will update this thread or how long the final version will be, but my goal is to have the draft finished and ready for a full public beta by the end of January.
Note that, unlike most choicescript games, there are no stats in 5 + 1 = You. Instead, the focus is on solving puzzles and exploring the setting to advance the story. The Storyloom version didn’t really have character interactions/relationships either, but I do plan to build those in at least to some degree.
Although you can select aspects of your appearance, gender/sex is not one of those aspects. But the game isn’t really “gender locked” either? It’s more that spoilers spoilers spoilers. I dunno, I haven’t 100% decided how to deal with that yet, for reasons. I may end up just explicitly gender locking it later, as I get closer to the end of the draft and firm up my decisions on how other parts of the game and its endings are set up.
Have feedback?
Leave a comment in the forum or let me know here! The feedback form is also linked from the top of the game itself.
AI Disclosure:
No — This project does not contain the output of Generative AI
Yes — This project contains the output of Generative AI
(To be as explicit as possible, I do not use generative AI in any way, ever. All my work, no matter how unhinged, is entirely the product of my strange, squishy human brain.)
