My hopes for CoG in the future

General
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Greetings everyone,

I have been a proud fan/member of this community since 2016/17, when I first stumbled on a game called Choice of Kung Fu back in high school.

It was the 8th grade. I remember it vividly. I was around my desk looking for a new game to play and was scrolling endlessly through GP until my eyes landed on this game.

At first I was like, “meh, skip,” as it had no graphics or gameplay. But I decided to just read the description to see if it’s something I could get into(maybe it was the writer in me). Something about it pulled me to download this game, and I immediately fell in love with it after that and went on to try more and more CoG/HG works. From that point I became a diehard fan.

My favorites: CoKF, Choice of Dragons, Creme de la Creme, Here or Villain, Life of a Mercenary, Life of a Mobster, War for the West, Aether, The Great Tournament 1 & 2, ITFO, FH, Infinity Series

Fast-forward to now, I’m able to write IFs similar to the ones I grew up playing, and now I have one that’s about to release next month(July 2nd​:wink:). I can’t put into words how excited I am. Even if it becomes a massive hit, or even if bombs terribly. I’ll still feel proud that I was able to not only complete and publish something professionally, but also learn a new programming language. My attempts to learn choicescript has even led me down paths to learn other coding languages and I’m all the better for it.

As a result, I’m extremely grateful to everyone here:

:saluting_face:The team/staff running things before and behind the scenes

:saluting_face:My fellow writers who gave me insight and advice

:saluting_face:The readers who gave me amazing feedback, even the ones who were critical

:saluting_face:The curious eyes who gave my projects a chance

:saluting_face: And everyone else who liked, shared, commented or enjoyed my works

I appreciate you all and it’s been a wonderful ride. I hope to continue to be apart of this community and give back in whatever way I can.

I want to see the company grow even more and expand outside of just text-based IF. I would like to see CoG taking over the IF space, over others like Choices, Episodes, etc…

I would like if we could do more with choicescript, get built in saves, maybe have another branch where we can make exclusively Visual Novels like Choices and Episodes. I get that the core theme of CoG is to “use your imagination” so no sounds or images. But with a separate branch VNs could get its own room to breathe without affecting HG, CoG or Heart’s.

I would love to see CoG invest in this, maybe even have their own game studio and make videos game too. Lol That’s probably a stretch. But I would love to see this.

What are your thoughts?

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It would be so nice to have a chart in the stats screen that shows your branching paths.

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That would actually be a great idea. I think we could code that ourselves but it might be quite the task.

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Big congratulations first of all!

Absolutly, growth would be good for everyone. I know not everyone will agree with your thoughts on graphics becoming a part of the games or even want that. But I think when you follow a company for so long it’s hard not to want them to try more things in hopes it expands their audience and reach.

Checkpoints were added: New in ChoiceScript: HTML Exports, Checkpoints, and Achievements
But that might not so exactly waht you are looking for. As the author has to decide where these checkpoints are.

I’d love to see more technical improvements myself, being able to add headings in text and underline words. I’d love for more visuals to be added, even changing the colour of the stat_chart within ChoiceScript would add some variation. I actually would love if they had some stock images commisioned of basic graphics of simple emoji-like images. I know some people use emoji’s anyway in their choices, but I’d love if they had their own set that could be easily added to any of their games.

Edit to add: I think if someone’s Hosted Game is picked to go on Steam, the company should offer to commision the cover art :stuck_out_tongue:

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Many congratulations on the impending release!

I’m personally of the opinion a ‘visual-focused’ or game-focused branch of COG would be impractical. The amount of additional dev time you’d need for UI and functionality expandions, plus the additional costs associated with works that need artists (even if that cost is time for the writer/artist multitalents amongst us) - all to compete with a more mature market with established players.

Personally my main hopes for COG/HG are that they’re actively thinking about and working on ways to expand the visibility of the current IF medium and retain the audience they get from any such expansion. And that any such expansion of marketing doesn’t neglect the HG side of the business.

From a tech perspective - the checkpoint system is actually decent if you use it right. I think it’s possible to use it to set up a reasonably good save system (e.g. setting up a checkpoint for each chapter you complete, so as you run through the game you can jump back to the start of any chapter you’ve already played).

My biggest gripe by far is the lack of ‘message history’ / back button. I don’t care as much about being able to redo choices, but it’s a bit painful to have to work out where I am midscene if I took a break in the middle of an IF. I have dropped IFs because of this, through no fault of the IF itself, and seen several IFs get negative reviews on steam on the basis of lacking this feature or something like it.

More visual customisation options would be great too, especially for stat menus!

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I’m a broken record about this, but I’d love to see a way to record a playthrough that you can save and re-read. Not only for players looking to explore different avenues and to pick out amazing quotes to share or to answer questions about what happened back in the mid-game, but also for testing and quality control.

I know there are testing programs which run through dozens of randomized games and spit out the output, but that doesn’t help the author see if a beta reader, for example, is getting the intended result from a choice, or is seeing *if sections they shouldn’t. It would be great to be able to record a single, intentional playthrough for review, maybe with oddities highlighted.

But, also, yeah, it would make an amazing souvenir of the game. And imagine if you could get a print-on-demand service going, too, to have it as a physical book!

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I am not sure that is technically feasiable :thinking:

I know thst when renpy does it thd game shift from vn modd to a different mode and most of my vn with history has something like that. I also think it would mess with the temp variable function.

But a rollback should be possible. (Though agsinst company policy)

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They’ve explained before why they don’t do this.

CoG is so great at what they do because they’ve spent over 15 years finding and creating their niche. Dan Fabulich developed, basically just for fun, a programming language perfectly suited for choice-based IF, and was surprised to discover there might be a profitable market for that. ChoiceScript is the foundation on which they’ve built everything they’ve done. They have over two decades of experience in that niche. Two decades of trial and error, both artistically and as a business. And they decided early on what their values and priorities were, and they’ve stood by them.

If they wanted to start doing visual novels, they would have to learn a whole new art form. Visual novels are very different from longform text IF: different pacing, different tropes, different expectations, different replayability. They’d have to develop, or acquire and learn, new programming tools, learn a new market. They’ve built their brand around customizable characters and inclusivity, while character customization in visual novels is extremely limited at best. They can’t afford to hire a dedicated team of experienced visual novel developers, so they would be doing all this themselves. That means at least some of the world’s foremost experts in longform text IF would have vastly less time to work on longform text IF, so their main product line would suffer while they were trying to break into a new market.

I think that, for the foreseeable future, it’s wise that they’ve chosen to stay small and focus on excellence, rather than getting topheavy with ambition.