I seem to be unable to find that curator’s review, but by the sound of it I would carry that particular one as a badge of honor.
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Think of the chud curators as a blessing. They wave off people you really don’t want in your fanbase anyway.
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Unfortunately, I think the way some reviewers go about things could dissuade the right kind of players, too. There are some games where the reviews had me expecting a preachy slog, a gender-studies class with a plot, and that’s not particularly fun even though I assumed I’d be largely in agreement with the author’s views. And then inevitably such games turned out to be awesome. Some included social justice themes in a thoughtful and entertaining way, and some just had a couple of nonbinary characters and none of the other characters thought it was weird, but the reviews misrepresented the content so drastically that it sounded like bad design, rather than a different opinion.
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Normally, I allow the curator “Beauty vs Woke ugliness” to make all my decisions for me, but in this case I’ve ignored him and wishlisted your game on Steam. I’m sure I’ll regret it.
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It’s a combination of two things.
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First I made some edits to cs.tmLanguage.json (part of the extension itself) to categorize some of the different parts of ChoiceScript the way I wanted them. You can most likely find this at: Users/[MyUserFile]/.vscode/extensions/stephengranade.choicescript-vscode-3.1.1/syntaxes.
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Then I added some custom settings in VSCode itself–specifically, tokenColorCustomizations rules–which can use the syntax to colourize the different parts of the text. Here’s a brief reddit thread that explains how to do it. (My rules were set to my workspace rather than my user settings because I use VSCode for non-ChoiceScript things from time to time, but otherwise I mostly followed this example.)
It’s not super clean and I’m not an expert with these things by any means, but I like the way it’s turned out. It remains to be seen if I’ve broken anything in the extension by editing the syntax directly, but it seems fine so far. If you do make edits though, do it at your own risk! It might be worth making a backup of cs.tmLanguage.json before editing it. I had to revert some unintentional changes but didn’t have a backup and had to go to Stephen Granade’s github to get the original raw file. You can tell I’m very much an amateur programmer, can’t you? 
I also want to incorporate colouring for a few more commands that I haven’t got to yet, namely arrays and params, but that’s for another time I think!
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Might be the same reviewer who tagged my game as “woke crap” or something to that effect. And, indeed, I consider that a sort of compliment.
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Thank you so much, I’ll try and see if I can do it without messing up (at my own risk naturally - Which might be a bad idea cuz I’m not exactly a pro either xD)
Also, thanks a lot for reminding me of keeping a backup of the file, I would probably have forgotten about that until too late.
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Some of the ‘curator’ reviews like that are bonkers. You have to ignore them, they’re just nutters with an agenda. The real reviews are people who play the game, although, even then, they can be disheartening. The truth is the one that really destroys you is how fast the game will be pirated. My first game was pirated within 2 hours, and people were praising and paying the pirate who copied it.
But Steam isn’t a big stream. And ultimately it’s not what your game will be judged on. Best not to look but, of course, it’s hard not to.
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Ok, I have a totally random request. I can’t pick a name for one of my characters. I have a few options I like, but I’m not sure which one would work best. If you don’t mind, could you tell me which one you like more. It’s totally subjective, but I just don’t know which one to pick.
The character is the bastard son of a King. He’s a rogue who’s charming, adventurous, and reckless. And in the end, he becomes the ideal leader and the new king.
The names are: Gawain, Aldren, and Tiernan
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Well, my game has been available in full for over a year for free on COGDemos. I’m sure there already is someone pirating it. I wouldn’t know how to look for pirating anyways. So I’ll remain ignorant of that.
EDIT: Aldren @Anna_B
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Aldren!
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Also a vote for Aldren. Gawain sounds too much like the knight from Arthurian stories.
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People are really liking Aldren! Thanks! I was torn between a lot of different names, but I think Aldren works well. Other than being the third A name, but that probably doesn’t matter as much as it does in my brain
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I see now how you spent 4.5 hrs on this.. hehe..he oops.
Took me a bit figure out the specifics and VSC deciding to switch the default color theme unprompted somewhere in-between, confusing the heck outta me, wasn’t helpful in the slightest. But Honestly it’s kinda fun once you get the hang of it.
So Thanks Again!!
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Today’s problem #1: I fear the culprit in my detective story may be too obvious.
Today’s problem #2: I’m having the MC interrogate a suspect who’s co-operating, and now I’m wondering if that feels entirely pointless.
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ooh this is tricky. why do you think it’s feeling pointless?
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A suspect who’s co-operating? Sounds sus. Let’s double interrogate them!
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Because why would anyone want to play an interrogation where they’re not even trying to stonewall you?
Case on point…
To make things worse… they’re a supervillain.
(They honestly feel bad. They’re very bad at being a supervillain.)
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Well I don’t know the specifics but that sounds adorable (?)
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I’m not at all experienced with interactive fiction, or writing in general, so you may want to take this with a grain of salt, but here’s my thoughts:
On #1, your culprit being obvious isn’t really a problem. Firstly, authors aren’t great at judging how obvious they’re being with their writing, and it’s usually better to have the culprit be too obvious than have them come out of nowhere. Secondly there’s plenty of great detective fiction where the culprit is obvious (or even shown doing the crime at the beginning as in Columbo), what makes detective stories enjoyable is usually the characters along with the formulaic process of solving the crime.
#2 might be more of a problem, but I think it’s definitely workable. Maybe there’s no conflict between MC and the suspect in this scene, but you can make other sources of conflict. Maybe the suspect is being too verbose and the MC has a time constraint or they have to sift a small piece of relevant information from a bigger pile of irrelevant facts. Maybe a fellow interrogator is pushing the suspect too hard. Maybe there are longer term impacts of the interrogation, for instance on whether the suspect turns back to supervillainy or becomes a hero.
Even if you can’t find a good angle of conflict for the interrogation, the scene can still serve other purposes. E.g. reinforcing the story’s themes, or providing a humorous break in an otherwise serious story.
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