Today I am starting with ChoiceScript for the first time. So fun! It’s been forever since I did basic coding and it’s so rewarding to work through the logic, build, debug, get it right, and then watch it all flow in the narrative. I can see how this can be addictive!
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I’ve finally released Lily Adventuresses! Episode 1 after some last-minute bug-fixing. Enjoy.
Also, because I’m taking a temporary break from game dev until next month, there will be no snippets from me this month.
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I’ve gone ahead and updated the wiki with your examples and a link back here for credit, along with my efforts at explaining how and why it works for people like me who take a little while to understand e.g. how modulo works. Let me know if any of it could be better said.
One problem: I don’t speak array, like, at all. And I haven’t been able to get the last bit of code working in my CSIDE. Should it have *temp_array stat_descriptor... rather than just *temp stat_descriptor...? That’s what a quick skim of the forum and wiki suggest, but it’s not working for me regardless, and the web CSIDE is telling me the commands *create_array and *temp_array don’t exist, so clearly I’ve got the wrong end of the stick somewhere fundamental…
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Happy October 15th everyone!
Excerpt sharing time!
Remember that excerpts shared here are not intended to elicit proper critique and feedback, but if anyone does have an opinion, feel free to contact the author in a DM (also making sure they are ready for the feedback would be a good idea.)
These sharing exercises are to help build up confidence, and some authors may be at the point where the act of sharing is still overwhelming to them.
For this month’s excerpt, in the spirit of Halloween and @poison_mara’s jam, I am going to share the introductory prologue I wrote for my jam entry:
October 2024 Excerpt
Dateline - February 14th 2003.
Jimmy Lane
48 hours ago
Local Crime News
Earlier this week, construction workers preparing the basement of a Brooklyn building for demolition made a gruesome discovery: the skeleton of a young woman hog-tied with an electrical cord, rolled up in carpet and buried in a concrete tomb.
The police say that they found a gold engagement or wedding ring engraved with the initials “PMcC” within her remains, along with a 1969 dime, a green plastic toy soldier and a hickory wooden stake, again within her remains.
“The workers were hammering on the dance floor in the rear of the building when a skull rolled out.” Detective Hutch said. “They then unearthed the rest of the woman’s skeletal remains nearby.”
Decades earlier, around the time the young woman was believed to have been killed, the building housed a nightclub called The Scene. The disco venue, run by a young entrepreneur named Chino Tabasco, was a celebrity hotspot in the 1970’s and hosted jam sessions by bands such as: The Bee Gees and The Village People.
Detective Hutch and his team of investigators are asking the public for their help in identifying the victim. “Anything they remember from the time frame back then, anybody who worked in the disco … anyone who can give us some more background on the young woman or what her ties to the disco club were … any sort of information that we can follow up on.” Detective Hutch said.
“I am a father of three daughters, so I can only imagine what type of life this woman had back then, to where she ended up being murdered.”
“Once the woman’s identity is finally known,” Detective Hutch asserts, “We, the police, have a clear-cut next step: Finding out who killed her.”
Here is my mid-month update:
I am continuing working on my first pass – the next two weeks will be very busy for me once more, so I will not make any predictions as to further progress being made.
I hope everyone’s week has started out well.
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Here’s a little Honor Bound excerpt:
Excerpt below
The train draws into the station beneath vast leaded glass buttresses and slows to a halt, settling with a hiss of steam. ${varenn} signals a porter for your cases and you disembark together. The crowd swallows you up: commuters heading home, visitors, tourists, all busy and few looking where they're going.
*fake_choice
#I feel energized again.
#It's a little overwhelming.
#I can't stand it here.
#Being in Ozera these last months, I'd forgotten how the city felt.
*if hb_pc_height >= 3
You spot Field Marshal Alva at the same moment that ${varenn} does: your height makes it easy to see over the crowd. Together, you hasten down the platform, and
*else
${varenn}, taller than most of the crowd, lifts ${var_their} head and quickly spots Field Marshal Alva. "There she is," ${var_they} ${var_say}.
Together, you head down the platform.
Alva waves as you approach.
She's not wearing a uniform today: instead, she's in a moss green skirt-suit and white shirt, with pearl teardrop earrings and a matching necklace. Her bobbed, gray-blonde hair is sleek and neat. You don't know her exact age, but she's somewhere in her sixties, and as sharp as when you first met her. If it weren't for the studs on her lapel marking her rank, she could be a businessperson on her way to a meeting. @{(hb_aid = 1) Like you, she|She} uses a wooden cane; it's shiny and elegant, and the shade of green precisely matches her suit.
"Good journey?" she says, along with vigorous handshakes and back-pats; then, before you can say anything, "Never mind that. Tedious small-talk. Lovely to see you both!"
Originally, I wrote Korzha striding ahead of the PC in this scene - because they’re not all that sociable and like to be brisk. A thoughtful beta tester who wasn’t fond of Korzha on their playthrough said this came across as a lot more inconsiderate than I intended, especially because they were playing a very short character with an injured knee. So I shifted it a little bit! (Korzha isn’t very warm or sociable by nature, but isn’t completely callous, especially to fellow military officers.)
I’m always pleased to hear when something I’ve written doesn’t come across as I meant. I remember someone saying how Beaumont’s original intro in Royal Affairs came across to them, and realised I’d made them more hostile than I intended because I hadn’t settled into writing them at that point. It’s always useful to hear!
In other news, I found out that PG Wodehouse was born 143 years ago today. Here’s a thread of great quotes:
Amazing! I know this feeling immensely. I was trying to pitch my first draft of Honor Bound for 350,000 words or so and it ended up being something like 550,000 words. Glorious. It’s so easy for the writing to just… expand forever 
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Just popped up a writing snippet on my WIP thread in honor of the mid-month. 
It also illustrates a bunch of the ways I tend to use multireplace these days.
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This is the beginning of my Halloween jam entry It starts with a medical consult in a space station.
Asshole corpo rat
“I must insist again, you don’t need to make more futile trips!” The guy’s voice is disdainful and weakly oily like muddy water from a rusty pipe.
With a sigh on your dry lips, your sight focuses again on the pale, bony man, with a slit nose and a haughty look, He is certainly the complete package, Your fist crack as you see his ashen eyes glued on a
certain place of your anatomy. Ugh!
His fingers are lost in the virtual keyboard on his wrist. “This is the fifth station you have visited in this galactic sector! Hmm, don’t waste all the health corporations’ time and lose money to the poor sod who ends up being your heir. You will die in a month, get lost or sell your organs. The medical society doesn’t need more trash to deal with!”
Silence fills the aseptic nuclear white office. Your gaze gets lost on Doctor John’s off-white plastic pants like disembodied bone marrow around him—neat and plastic like all the tiles in the damn posh Zeramin Corp station.
But there is something off, your gut rumbles. "Hmm, here it is! You mumble, observing a tiny discolouration patch in his bull’s eye
That only means one thing and one thing. A bitter snark emerges from your mouth like a climbing plant on a hollow and rotten trunk— “I get you, John”
What kind of drug have you taken, comrade? Your illness has not been able to affect your dull and pathetic mental capacities.
“Oh, no, comrade, it’s not me who has had problems raising the canary!”
“Eh, what are you talking about? Oh, what in the seven mo… moons!” He stutters and everything.
“I’m not a corpo rat like you, sweetie; Then, life on the galactic streets taught me many things especially what a codpiece with a subdermal spike meant on a man. Doctor dead fly.”
You plant your magnetic boots on the pristine holographic glass table watching with delight as each speck of blood, dust and viscera horrifies the babbling corporate rat.
“What do you want? The disease is real. There is nothing I can do!”
*fake_choice
#“As you have said a second go, I have nothing to lose. However you can muff up your corporate dream life.”(intimidate)
#Shut up! I know you sell options to people desperate enough!" (bribe)
#Blah, don’t cry me a river and spill your beans. A little birdie has told me you have other ways to deal with stuff"(persuade)
“Oh, a little bird you say. I am sure Zeramin Corp will be happy to know who is the snitch.”
“If I get what I want, I will be happy to give the little bird in a golden cage free of charge for once.”
A creepy, filthy smile emerges from his huge, shiny mouth full of dental implants. As how prevalent it is on all corporate docs; one can believe it
is a part of all legitimate medical institutions. That and being assholes.
“You are nothing more than a thug with filthy boots. He yells out as his sigh spreads across the pristine office like a farting snake. I can work with that, it’s part of the business.”
*goto hall
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Resolution for the rest of the month is to get better about leaving comments/feedback on the WIPs I play, tend to get too much in my own head about what I want to say not being useful and so I ultimately end up not saying much but feel like in the threads that ask for it something is probably better than nothing! And on a happier note I now have a rough four chapters completed! It’s all the first draft and the code needs work but the only way is up from here!
Rough snippet from the prologue as I was just editing it.
Snippet
Your feet keep pushing you forward, something primal and desperate taking hold even as a part of you screams for your stride to stop. The Tear is forbidden. You’ve been raised to fear and love it in equal parts and you cannot remember ever being so close to it, being close enough to touch it.
But you do not have any other choice.
The Tear is open and jagged, The Tear is weeping, its tears mix with yours.
You push yourself forward until it is all you can see, bright blinding light taking over your vision. You do not hear the orderly behind you, do not feel her stalking towards you, do not see anything but the tear. The light wraps itself around you and you are consumed. You do not belong here and it is trying to shake you off. You do not belong anywhere. You pitiful, timeless, lost little thing. You child. It is your only escape. It will always be your escape. The orderly was coming behind you and you know what it was she would do. You saw what happened to the others.
You escape.
*fake_choice
*selectable_if (false) #You want it all to end.
*selectable_if (false) #You scream.
*selectable_if (false) #You sob.
#You burn.
The night is dark and the forest is empty, save for some travellers in the cold. Men with guns whose faces burn in the wind, crests upon their lapel and a cloak of righteousness at their backs. And a woman in the rockpools forcing her way onto the shore with steady steps, searching for something beyond the horizon.
You should never have been here, and yet here you are.
The Tear burned you up and it is here it will spit out your ashes.
*goto forest_pro
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Oh, here’s a question - and apologizes if asked in an earlier period: For you, which comes first, the code or the text? That is, do you write your words then adapt them into the code, or do you build the code from top to bottom and write the text along the way?
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For me it depends! Generally I’ll have ideas for what I want to write and I’ll sketch it out so writing and then [with what code I’d want in that section/what choices I’d want] and then properly compile it all up together. Admittedly an inefficent way of doing it but I find it the easiest way.
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The text is the code and the code is the text. They’re too closely integrated in my writing style for me to do one independently of the other.
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First, I write an outline of my narrative, then I build a code-skeleton. Once I do that I start writing the narrative, adjusting both the outline and the code as I go.
Once I get the opening written, I make character sheets and fill those in as I go as well.
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Making decent progress on Before the Incident, finally got into the flow of writing 1-2k words a day. I want to at least write 100k words before my next update. Got into a philosophical discussion with my friends on how much is an appropriate time to move on from a death with a loved one, don’t worry this is related to my story.
This is my second time writing romance in a story, albeit it goes much deeper compared to my first WIP. It’s a lot, but I believe I’ll get through it!
I did have a question for people, do your readers catch on to the metaphors/themes of your story and if so, how does it make you feel? For me personally, I love literary analysis, so when someone mentions a connection or metaphor I wrote, it makes me giddy for me to notice that!
Side tangent, I always wonder using these cute bear images make people take me less seriously of an author (I can’t help it, they just look so silly)
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I use cats dancing cute cats.
So no, I found them cute and funny.
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Aw now you’re making me all giddy inside, I love cats:heart_eyes:
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This. I write both as I go. Sometimes I jump ahead and lay the path out in code, so to speak, but it’s never just one and then the other. I do both as works best for the place I’m at in the story.
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Normally, I code and write as I go, but this time around, I coded the whole skeleton and tested it first, before going back and filling the gaps with code.
This way, I could test things like pacing, balance, and broad design elements before going through all the work of writing prose which I might have to rewrite anyway later.
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That’s…really smart.
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I’m not a writer, but I’ve done a ton of code diving and listening to authors, so I know a bit about this.
In pretty much all CoG and HC games, either the text and code are written simultaneously or the author starts with a code skeleton and fleshes it out with text along the way. The only cases I’ve heard of where the text came first were those where the story was originally conceived as a non-interactive work or when there are multiple authors involved and one of them does all the coding. Otherwise, the style CoG/HC expects from their writers (lots of choices that meaningfully impact the story, lots of variables, efficient use of multireplace and subroutines) essentially demands the interactivity be baked into the story on the most basic level: text and code as inseparable as warp and woof.
Some (not all) Hosted Games authors do write first and code later, but that makes more sense to do when a story is either very linear or short and very branchy, rather than using a lot of variables that directly modify the text.
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