"New Witch in Town"—Make friends and cast spells in your magical small town!

Announcements
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We’re proud to announce that New Witch in Town, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

It’s 33% off until February 2nd!

Make friends, cast spells, and uncover secrets in your magical small town! Will you preserve the forest or let the town grow?

New Witch in Town is a 750,000-word interactive YA fantasy novel by Grace Card. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

When you were a kid, you lived with your grandmother in the small town of Silvertree, on the edge of a magical forest. Grandma is a witch, and she taught you how to use your magic to affect the natural world, too. “Magic is a part of you,” she always told you. “Learning how to use it means figuring out who you are.”

Now you’re 19 and on your own. After years of living in the forest while you perfected your witchcraft, you’ve returned to take care of your grandmother’s house and crow-familiar while she’s gone. Figuring out who you are feels more important than ever - not to mention, figuring out what Silvertree is. A lot is just as you remembered: the friendly generous next-door neighbors with a kid just your age, the proud town council, the quaint little shops with quirky punny names, the gentle shadowy forest full of magic.

But now it feels run-down, with potholes in the streets and overgrown empty lots where stores used to be. A big real-estate developer promises to help the town by expanding into the forest. What’s the best thing for the people of Silvertree and for the magical forest? What mysteries wait to be uncovered in the town archives? And more importantly, where did your grandmother go? Why do you keep having strange dreams?

And how did a tree grow overnight right in the middle of Main Street? Is it possible that you’re not the only new witch in town?

• Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay, straight, bi, pan, or aromantic
• Choose your familiar - a dog, cat, or owl - and bond with her, then go on to pet every single animal in town
• Find love with an earnest dreamy history major, a tattooed stranger with a not-so-secret soft spot for animals, an adventurous aspiring journalist, or your old friend the kid next door
• Become a good citizen of your new town, or break every rule on the books
• Heal old family wounds by bringing together parents, grandparents, and children
• Keep your magic a secret, or use it everywhere you go
• Make your voice heard in local politics: speak up at a town council meeting, join a protest, write in to the local newspaper, or bring Silvertree’s history to light
• Advocate to preserve the forest, or make way for progress and new houses so that Silvertree can grow

Friendship is magic, and so are you!

We hope you enjoy playing New Witch in Town. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

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I’ve always thought I would be a fantastic witch! Time to prove myself right!

Stupid work, never lets me be a witch when I want. Guess I’ll have to wait till I get home tonight, to… witch it up? Get all witchy? Get my witch on? Being a witch is harder then I thought…

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Time to work up your witchiness!

…I’ll leave.

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Witch person thought up the idea of these bad puns?

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Amazing! Congratulations @toeditishuman on a fantastic achievement!

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Congrats @toeditishuman!

I’ve been eagerly awaiting this game since I heard of it, and playing the demo just whet my appetite to experience the entire game.

Also, as a sidebar, thank you for participating in this month’s Writer Support thread. :revolving_hearts:

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This is really cute, I find it very entertaining indeed that the person my plant whisperer non townie witch is going to be bringing home to grandma is the one with piercings/tats/dyed hair lol

EDIT: emailled this to support, cheers

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Thanks for the report. In general, we need these to come in over email rather than in the game’s release thread :wink: Please send it in to support AT choiceofgames DOT com when you get a chance.

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Thank you so so much to everyone who has offered congratulations (I’m still too new to the forums to figure out how to quote other replies lol), and just in general to everyone for your interest in the game and your amazingly kind words. I can still hardly believe it’s here, and I really hope people enjoy the game! (If not, that’s totally fine as well, and anyone should feel free to give any kind of constructive feedback you like - good or bad, please don’t feel you can’t be honest)

I also just wanted to quickly mention that I’ve added a little bit of bonus art to my Patreon, which is free for anyone to see (all the January posts are) - and starting in February I’m going to be adding quite a bit of bonus content relating to the game for Patrons to see, both my own art and writing as well. This is only if anyone is at all interested, please don’t feel you have to check it out or sign up - apart from anything else I just have a lot of ideas and I really wanted to put them somewhere! If anyone’s at all interested, there’s a lot more info already on there about the schedule etc. :slight_smile:

Edit:

Thanks so much!! (I also realised the browser I was on wasn’t letting me do it properly, so now I know!)

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Haha whichever puns you’re referring to it will have been me!

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If you ever want to quote another post, just select the text you want to quote as if you were going to copy and paste it, and a little box will pop up that gives you the option to quote it in your own post.

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I like it a lot so far, but I have to say that I do wish it had achievements. I find that they really help me in games that are this long because they give me ideas of what’s out there to find, how many endings I haven’t seen yet, that kind of thing.

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I really wanted an Achievement for petting all the animals. :laughing:

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I will admit I was hesitant about trying the demo because I wrongly assumed that the MC was going to be a specific gender based on the title.

And there is nothing wrong with gender locked games, I just sometimes struggle playing them because it could trigger my dysphoria.

So I took a chance and tried the demo, and honestly I am very happy did. Because the first part of the demo I played through was incredible.

The descriptiveness, the characters, the writing just all drew me in and I couldn’t hit purchase fast enough this morning when it got released.

And even if it had been gender locked I still would of purchased the story.

Moral of the story never judge a book or in this case a Interactive fiction game by its title.
And if in doubt give the demo a try if you are on the fence about it.

@toeditishuman congratulations
I really liked the option to input your own gender and/or pronouns along with the male, female and non-binary option.

And I also liked how you have an example of the pronouns to make sure the reader selected the right option.

Oh and you had me hooked on being able to pet all the animals.

My wife who identifies as non binary but uses she/her/hers pronouns is going to really enjoy this game. So thank you very much for providing the option to input your own gender and pronouns.

This is an extremely well written story, the descriptions, the humor, the way the MC and NPCs are written all of it is really good.

You very talented writer and I look forward to reading your future works.

Only thing I wished was that we could of had a honey Badger as familiar, but black kitten is just as good.

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For future reference, anything published under the Choice of Games label is guaranteed not to be genderlocked. HC and HG allow (and the former actively welcomes) genderlocked games, but CoG has always had it as one of their guiding principles as a company that gender should never limit a player from seeing themself as the hero of a story. They occasionally publish games in which the PC’s gender is never specified, but every game in which it is allows you to play as either a man or a woman. In recent years, they’ve started to require a nonbinary option as well.

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Thanks for the explanation. I had seen some other WIP in the forum that specifically stated it written for a specific gender so again I incorrectly assumed by the title that this would be one of them.

I pointed out my hesitancy and incorrect assumption so that others don’t make the same mistake I did and to give stuff a try if you aren’t sure about it. And I also didn’t know under which title HG or COG the demo was going to be published under.

Correction: I just noticed either Hosted Game or Choice of Game under the various posts in the forum. I use my iPhone so I didn’t even see that until now

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Most of the WIPs you see in the forum are for Hosted Games. If you look at the tags on the WIP post, it will tell you if it’s a CoG WIP. (You can look at the Royal Affairs Developer Diary to see what I mean.) Most CoG games, including this one, don’t have a WIP thread on the forum, so if you look for one and can’t find it, it’s a safe assumption it’s CoG.

It’s actually pretty easy to tell before you buy a game which label it’s published under. Look at the original post in this thread - the first paragraph tells you this game is part of the “Choice of Games” line. You can know even before that by looking at the pinned Upcoming Releases posts.

And I don’t know where you purchase your games, but HG and HC, although subsidiaries of CoG, are treated as entirely separate companies in the app stores. The name of the developer/publisher should be prominently featured on the page.

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I think there is bit of a misunderstanding/miscommunication.

What I was meaning in regards to not knowing whether it was a HG or COG was that I couldn’t tell in the post that was titled “Coming Thursday: New Witch In Town” that had the author interview and a link to the demo.
That’s where I got the demo from.

I wasn’t meaning post like this or in any of the games in the apps.
I hope that clears up what I was meaning sorry for any confusion.

And I did not notice until now the Hosted Games or Choice of Games under the title of posts the various posts, I access the forum on my iPhone so I tend to miss seeing stuff on the
iPhones small screen. It can be a pain sometimes.

I don’t want to derail this topic, so thanks for letting me know about COG policy on gender locked games and that HC allows them but CoG won’t have them.

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Aw no toad? :pleading_face:

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I’ve been looking at the code while playing the game because I’m a filthy cheater, and I’ve noticed a few times where a stat check will be something like “If x > 60 then y, if x < 45 then z” and my stat will be like mid 50s and it’ll just skip the rest of that scene.

This bit in chapter 2:

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And this bit in chapter 5:

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are the ones the ones that I can remember off the top of my head.

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