Some terms questions

[Mifga]

@Havenstone

Choice of Rebels definitely has a Level 1 backbone plot. Your rebellion starts with you disrupting a public execution and fleeing to the greenwood; you bring your band through a hard winter, meet a few people in the spring, have an army come for you in the summer, and end up on your way across the border into the wilderness. None of that varies based on player choice. I wasn’t writing a rebellion sandbox. Them’s the rails.

But there’s no clear hierarchy of branches below that. There are lots of ways through the thicket of the story; there are characters you may or may not meet, and most chapters have extensive pathways that many readers will never see. The handful of basic stats interact with chapter-specific challenges to produce overarching outcomes that you can’t easily map (some of which have, to my surprise, taken dedicated readers literal years to hunt down).

Well, I’m starting to wonder if for an attentive reader if you need pure choice (ie more choices = more satisfying) as even fake choices can really pull you in and engage you even if there is not a bit of branching. Just being in a choicescript title when you feel confident in the author’s use of the medium, it enlarges as an experience more than even the options that you are offered (or that you take). (Note that sometimes when I read IF i switch into this foolish “just watch the changes” race-through mode that isn’t really the same thing, and have to stop myself so I don’t miss out.)

I think Choice of Rebels is amazing, and part of it is because I felt as a reader the impact of choices on what kind of experience unfolds, even if there are these big tentpole elements holding the structure together. Yours is exactly the kind of project that feels VERY rich in terms of the potential story space even if I don’t work my way through as a completist to try to read everything. Just reading a single well orchestrated path as a novel wouldn’t have been as rich as feeling the consequences of moving through Choice of Rebels as it stands – even if I was totally wrong where I thought I was accomplishing what.

@Havenstone

I think Kevin, Kreg, and Kyle have each found ways of doing it much more efficiently than I do – there’s much more method and less messiness in Kevin’s process, certainly. So if you’re going to code dive, look to Choice of Robots and Choice of Magics rather than Rebels . Compared to the GDC/Episode schematic structure, I think Gold’s games offer a much more satisfying model for writing IF.

I like your taste there, even if maybe the reason to read those others is partly because you went at the coding aspects of Choice of Rebels in more unique manner such that it is a bit more difficult for another reader to parse out when reading through.

I love those three as well, and have read source for Gold’s Choice of Robots and Marquis’s Silverworld after reading a bunch of paths through each. (And on my list is Tally-Ho, but I wanna do some more paths thru before peeking behind the curtain! Which is time intensive.) And one of the things I have found in general is that often as a reader parsing through the code afterwards that I’m wrong in what I’m expecting is happening under the surface “mechanically” (as far as setting up for branch switches or allowing or preventing various scenes), and I really love that as a reader. I think these two sources made me love their published projects even more – sort of gave me a “quantum reading” where i could “feel” some of the unexplored territory even if I’m not sure i could really navigate my way there without min-maxing or doing a really targeted read. I did get some good ideas how to offer juicy outcomes regardless of choices and routes, which has a lot to do with why I’m trying to write one now. I should probably read those sources again entirely now that I’ve been a beta reader on a bunch of projects. I’ll bet I’ll understand so much more!

But with Choice of Robots and Silverworld – and with Heart of the House – I just couldn’t quite imagine how these pieces were planned and written short of writing them as code from the beginning. And I don’t have a knack for that yet.

Frankly, Joel, with your project I found how well your piece worked even more inscrutable after attempting to read your source, and it made me love how your piece worked even more. both damned ambitious and satisfyingly delivers on those ambitions. Can’t imagine encountering your story in any other mode.