Two New Hosted Games: “Somme Trench” and “Silent Gear”

There are two more games in our Hosted Games program ready for you to play!

Somme Trench: Can you survive six months on the Western Front?

You’re a fresh British infantryman at the Battle of the Somme, one of the longest, bloodiest battles of World War One. Can you survive a clash that kills almost twenty thousand of your countrymen on the first morning alone?

Somme Trench is an interactive historical military novel by Andrew J. Schaefer, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. Schaefer previously published Planetary Quarantine under the Hosted Games label.

Your best bet might be as an airplane gunner, or a trench fighter, or even as a stretcher bearer. Firing squads, brothels and homeward-bound steamships are all in your possible future. Or you might give in to your inner demons and wind up chatting with ghosts and skeletons as though they’re your friends. Whatever path you choose, you’ll be immersed in a richly detailed, interactive historical novel that has almost as many twists and turns as there were soldiers at the Somme.

  • Immerse yourself in the world of the Western Front
  • Choose paths as diverse as infantryman, stretcher bearer or aircraft machine gunner
  • Learn about some of the most important events of world history
  • Challenge your mind
  • Enjoy a richly-detailed interactive novel with countless storylines
  • Solve mysteries embedded within the game

Silent Gear: Interactive sci-fi novel of survival and betrayal

Silent Gear is an interactive sci-fi thriller by Lee Yuan. Become an elite trained soldier in a grim military future world. You decide your friendship, love, war, betrayal, and above all, survival.

With the constant economic downturn and conflicts, the United States had officially lost its superpower title in the year 2032.

Russia and China have risen together and created the New Unified Communist Party (NUCP); they have dominated most of Asia and parts of Europe in terms of economy and political influence. They are the undisputed new super power.

Without the support from the United States, the ISIS terrorists seized almost all of the middle east. The oil production in Saudi Arabia and other natural resources in the region are now all under ISIS control. They renamed themselves as Holy Islamic Liberation Organization (HILO). Their massive increase of wealth has a devastating effect on all democratic nations.

In a desperate effort to maintain balance, NATO has created the Augmented Reconnaissance and Operations Corp (AROC) to counter the new threats.

The story begins on your AROC academy graduation day. This is an interactive story with elements of romance, betrayal and survival, complete with a prologue, three Episodes and multiple endings. Your choices will determine the fate of your squad as well as your own.

The game also contains 4 mini games: Greedy Banker Dice, Cho Han Bakuchi, Gunship boss battle and Mech Suit boss battle.

  • Immerse in a sci-fi military world based on real life political groups
  • Dozens of sound effects
  • Different mini games throughout each Episodes
  • Key items randomized in different locations upon each play through for replayability
  • Two Boss battles that require some thinking and planning
  • Survival of squad members dependent on a combination of the decisions you previously made
  • Multiple endings

These authors have developed their games using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and we’ll publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

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Silent Gear looks really promising. Any idea how long it is, in terms of word count? Off to play it.

Happy new year everyone :slight_smile:

Silent Gear is 39K words; Somme Trench is 217K words.

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Both games look interesting. On a first partial playthrough, Somme Trench looks quite solid. Schaefer’s clearly improved on his (decent if slightly over-ambitious) first outing and I’m liking it…which is saying something considering my extraordinarily low opinion of the subject of the story (i.e. WWI).

Oh I’d hoped Silent Gear would be longer.

Anyway that’s not gonna stop me. Gonna try out Somme Trench too.

Russia and China joining together to form basically a new soviet union? Wow… if these two great totalitarian nations with completely different cultures aside from a shared sense of overblown nationalism and disregard for what other nations think of them could miraculously come together to form a peaceful union I think they might just have something there.

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Is there not a demo available for Silent Gear? I’m getting an authorization login popup whenever I try to access it.

Oops, password lock’s fixed.

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Thanks @Gray. I’m a big fan of compliments that make you stop for a second and say “hey wait, that is a compliment, right?” and you’ve got me to rights. Thanks for playing. :slight_smile:

I didn’t get the end of silent gear, I mean are we dead, back in time, or delirious?

@emote laughs

I’m glad I could make your day. I’m buying the game now, and I’m looking forward to playing it through. It’s a shame I can’t download it at the moment…otherwise it would probably occupy most of my train ride back home tonight.

Thanks for checking out my game guys, sorry Silent Gear is much shorter than anticipated, since it was my first hosted game, I tried to focus on quality instead of quantity and I’m no professional writer, so please go easy on me. I am getting some fan emails for the game, so I hope you will enjoy it too. I’ll try to improve and do better next time =)

If Japan, German and Italy could form an alliance during WWII, I don’t see why Russia and China can’t mix in a “Fictional novel story” =)

Just finished Silent Gear. One word: Awesome!

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Thank you sandstorm, it means a lot to me. :slight_smile:

I’m in the middle of reading Silent Gear. So far, it’s not bad. The characters have enough development to be enjoyable, the writing is good (albeit a bit florid sometimes) and the length is decent for a free title. However, there are a lot of typos; I notice at least five or ten on every page, although this is understandable since, and correct me if I’m wrong, English isn’t your native language. However, it does detract from the overall experience.

Also, the boss battles and the mini-games seem a little redundant and bland to me. And it can get a little tiring that there are “right” and “wrong” choices. Overall, Silent Gear was a solid title, though I suggest doing a thorough proofread at the least, and you might consider adding a bit more to the boss battles and min-games.

Wow, five to ten typos on every page? I ran spell check again just now on the final published submittal, and I only found one spacing issue, no spelling mistakes or typos.

I don’t think the publisher would have approved something that had 5 to 10 typos on every page. I ran spell check many many times, along with english major friends who have play test it. I thought I caught everything. I’ve sent you a PM, please let me know some of these typos you found and I’ll get on correcting them right away if there are any.

Thanks so much.

P.S: english is my native language, it’s just not my major.

It’s not that there are a bunch of blatant misspellings everywhere (though there are a few.) There were a couple spacing issues, but I’m mainly talking about grammar errors. There are a lot of incorrect punctuation marks and many of the sentences don’t start out with a capitalized letter. There are also some weird instances where you’ll switch back and forth between tenses, sometimes even in the middle of a sentence, as well as quite a few conjugation errors throughout.

For example:
“You went on a few more missions in the following month, your mind was always on coming back to enjoy the company of Selene.”

There should actually be a semicolon or a period in between “month” and “your mind” but there’s a comma. This issue is present throughout the story, so sometimes I get confused and have to re-read some of the sentences over again.

And there are ones like this, too:

Catherine calls you "Samuel, we're under attack by the HILO, they've already breached the docking bay where the XT-90 prototype gunship is located."

Again, there should be a semicolon or period instead of a comma between “HILO” and “they’ve” and there needs to be a comma after “you” and before the dialogue.

I don’t have the time or inclination to go through the pick out all the errors for you, though; I just think it’d be better if you went through yourself and carefully proofread everything, or got someone to help you with it.

@Zanity, I for one really liked Silent Gear. It was short, yeah, and I was kind of disappointed there was only one ‘real’ ending, (IE I rage rebooted when the Join Selene option went bad.), but it was a damn good first go around and I can’t wait to see more from you.

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I think the main problem with Silent Gear is that it is incredibly linear; the story is good if you fit exactly for it.
There are really no choices, either you go the way story is written, or it is game over. Even the choice of gender is nonexistent, as whatever you choose, your character will be male anyway (or this was a bug) and you will behave like typical male action hero.
So while boss fights were interesting (although little to much dependent on luck) and writing is good, i don’t think it fits with other choice games, as it really is not a choice game. This is more like a novel with interactive fights. Not saying it is bad, just different genre.

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