One of the things I always enjoy about games on any platform is the chance to play minigames.
I see a thread of (frankly amazing) “game-like” choicescript projects in this thread from 2021, but they all seem to be in the hosted games category, and I’m curious if any of the Choice of Games titles give players an opportunity to engage in smaller “games within the game” that don’t affect major outcomes and are just fun to play with.
James and I tried this out a bit with The Bread Must Rise (as well as its IFComp-released tie-in), where players had to participate in a cooking competition as well as advance the story in a more typical Choice of Games way, but I’m not sure how successful we were at the “fun to play with” part.
Would love to see examples of fun side-bits in other titles that are more on the game-like side of the spectrum, or hear ideas about how these might be reproduced in choicescript without being annoying for the reader!
In quite a few of my games I have a gaming casino where you can play roulette or dice games… Fairly easy to implement and allows player to play with their money (and sometimes influence the result of they have dinner powers)
I guess i would only be down with “side quest” if there was some kinda save system…even if only at start of chapter …would reeeeaaallllly upset me if something random derailed my story after a cpl hours of play…
I’m planning to put these in as an (optional) part of the story the first time around, and then am wondering if they could be built into the stats screen for casual replay any time. I built out a pretty involved stats screen in The Bread Must Rise, and suspect things could be hidden in there with a gosub_scene in a way that wouldn’t affect the main story.
I don’t know if this would work or not, but I might play around and see!
Whenever anyone asks about minigame stuff in CS, I always suggest to check out Missing Wings. It’s a bit of an obscure game that came out five years ago, and it can be a slog to go through at times, but the number and scope of the minigames is beyond compare. If that sort of thing interests you, definitely check it out.
But yeah, like most experimental stuff, it’s more prevalent for HG than CoG. Nature of the beast.
I had fun sliding numbers! I like that playing it in text didn’t feel more tedious than playing it graphically would have (as compared to, say, slidey puzzles in a point-and-click).
Occasionally I found the game wasn’t recognising a valid move – I had previously slid 4 upward – so I wasn’t able to finish the moderate difficulty iteration. I tried the easy version after and was able to finish without any issues.
It’s almost certainly a bug. I’ll fix that, thanks!
The code works by swapping a number with the _, but sometimes I messed up and replaced the wrong variable with _, so it results in things like that.
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ETA: I fixed the problem–it was a holdover from when I was using "" instead of "_" for blank sqaures, and I failed to replace the value for the bottom left being blank.
Love mini games in the games I play. I’ve tried to dabble with adding them into some of my CS hobby project games, though for the most part that has been a bit of a failure so far. Sort of wish there was a timer for CS - as far as I’m aware there isn’t though?
I don’t think there is a native timer function, although it looks like there is something called *delay_break which (ironically) achieves almost the opposite effect of what you’d want in a minigame–it makes the user wait a number of seconds before they can hit “next”: Delay break | ChoiceScript Wiki | Fandom
You’d probably have to use a JavaScript timer that you add to the exported HTML as an additional JS file, and then figure out how to trigger it at the appropriate times somehow. But you’d have to get pretty hacky!
(I had to do a little light CSS editing here to add the borders and remove the spacing, so unfortunately it wouldn’t be exactly the same in vanilla Choicescript…)
Beautiful work, but your move counter increases every time you select whether to move a god or spirit and when you actually move them, so the move counter increases by two for each move
