Hi everyone! I’m working on a choice-based game, and if it sounds interesting, it’d be great if you tried it out…
Pageant is an interactive fiction story with dating sim and time management elements, featuring a lesbian protagonist. It’s a choice-based HTML game written in the dendry language, with a lot of elements that might be familiar from choicescript. It’s a slice-of-life story with a realistic, modern high school setting, heavily influenced by Chinese-American culture. (I’ve noticed that these kinds of settings are basically nonexistent among choicescript games lol).
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Currently, there are ~14000 words, which is around 10-20% of the content. And hopefully the game will be updated regularly.
Synopsis: Your name is Karen Zhao, and you’ve just been signed up by your parents for a beauty pageant. You’re not ready, not even close, but you don’t have a choice. But perhaps you can make the best of it. Maybe it’s the one opportunity to create a hook for your college applications. Maybe you can reinvent yourself, become the metaphorical butterfly breaking out of its cocoon or something like that. Or maybe you can find true love (or some approximation thereof).
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A few things I would like to hear feedback about:
- is the story interesting? i’m guessing a lot of people won’t care for the premise, but otherwise, does the story live up to it so far? would you be interested in reading more?
- Is the narrative voice interesting? is the protagonist likeable or too whiny or sympathetic in any way or …?
- Most of the relationship “routes” have barely been started, but based on what is there, are they worth pursuing? do you like anyone in particular?
Also please tell me if you find any typos or bugs, or if you have any other comments about the story, writing, etc. A lot of parts are unimplemented and sometimes a storylet might cut off in the middle.
Thank you so much!
EDIT 2020-11-24: The game is completed and officially released (but there can still be updates). The total word count is over 79k, with playthroughs around 25-30k.
Feedback link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScdzmxae1pPKjGw3oZcNNnSXDVaEjgE41-ZAND8D2DqgJ6Htg/viewform?usp=sf_link
I’ve also uploaded the source code at https://github.com/aucchen/pageant. Hopefully it will be educational; it is the only game that I know of to have been created using the dendry engine.