So how did you end up here?, What got you Into IF?, What aspects of Choice of Games did you love? and other stuff about the lovable CoG.
I joined this forum on Oct 1, '15 and I love reading Novels, this love for Books got me into Interactive fiction when I wanted to know other mediums where I can read and with much time searching at Google Play I found “Psy High” yes my first CoG game was Psy High.
I began playing Heroes Rise Trilogy and Waywalkers, I became curious at where this games originated and from here I ended up at the Website, found out that there was a forum and joined.
Choice of Games provided something that novels can’t and that is a chance to become the character and roleplay. I was surprised and amazed of this, the freedom to become someone else, to pick your gender and love the same sex , having to choose how the story goes. To cut this short this gave me the power to Choose.
The CoG community is where I go when College becomes too Stressful, I mostly lurk and read the comments of the other members and laugh when they comment such silly things and how much they love a game that I also love.
This community is the friendliest forum that I have ever joined, that there’s no cause to fear about asking and commenting and suddenly getting badly trolled, bullied or snubbed. You can literally be yourself here, express yourself and have fun that sometimes I wished the whole world would become like the CoG Forum.
I happened to this lovely place quite by accident, when a yahoo search lead me her. I do not know why on a lark I search for interactive fiction and viola I was here and stumble across this Samurai: A Warrior's Path -In Progress- and I was hooked this was back when the only hosted games were Choice of Vampire by @jasonstevanhill , Choice of Romance, and the oh so popular Choice of Dragon.
It was the community and the stories that were brought to life by all the wonderful authors that have came and went, but it was that story by @ScarletGeisha that made me fall in love with this place.
Though that story may have been put to rest, there are others here that keep that feeling alive with works from @JimD , @AllenGies , and too many authors to name (and take up a paragraph alone )
So in short, some stories might come and go, but tit the community and author’s here that keep you here.
I must say I love games where the choices are changing the way the game goes. My first game of that kind was Dramatical Murder (No CoG Game ^^°) and later on Amnesia (again, no CoG Game). As I finished both of them fairly quickly and was surprised of how much I liked such games. I searched for new games, found CoG and ‘Choice of the Dragon’, which I played during my time in Ireland.
A week or so later I found out that CoG also has games on Steam, which is why I got the Heroes Rise trilogy after a few days and played everything until I really had every ending, every possible romance and so on and so forth. It was really exciting.
After that I played multiple games; Versus, Psy High, A Wise Use of Time, etc.
On November 24, 2015, I officially joined the Forum and I still do not regret it
The people here are nice and help each other where they can and it is always nice to read the comments, as they are both inspiring and hilarious at some points
I played all manner of interactive fiction, but found myself vexed at finding the words needed for parser-based IFs. Some even demanded a precise sentence. I enjoyed the stories but not the work needed to accomplish what I wanted to do.
Years later I felt and urge to play something non-graphical, powered by words and imagination. By pure chance I stumbled across a link to Choice of Games - said link now long gone into the cyber-void of the internet somewhere - and was delighted to see what was offered, foremost by official releases: gender choice and romance for all, the latter often optional, but all of it backed with a good story.
I lurked for a long time and finally stepped into the light shortly before I decided to try my own hand at these marvellous little gems. Choice of the Vampire, I can even play a reluctant, nigh-vegan vampire. I do so hope the next instalment is in the works - and I am not really into vampires. Look what you did to me, @jasonstevanhill! Tin Star, what an epic span, and that epilogue. I can only dream of making something a fraction of that one, @AllenGies, but it is worth striving for. And SLAMMED! - I can barely stand wrestling, but I love this game even so, @P_Chikiamco. Bravo, I say, bravo.
I could go on and mention more, but I shall leave it at that, lest I list them all.
I had something of a… “zombie fever”, that’s to say, I was looking for games that contained zombies. I found Zombie Exodus, and that got me hooked in.
Of course, I didn’t join right away, in fact, I found out about the forums about a year after I started playing the games, then I lurked for about a month and then joined.
The thing I love the most about the community? Hmm… I’d have to say I love the though-provoking discussions that are always happening here.
Was looking for something to read before work one day on my phone or an app to busy myself with then BAM. I ran smack into the choice of games.
Started simple with the old freebies but within two months I’d read ten to twelve stories and wanted more.
Soon my curiosity found me venturing to the site and I found that people could MAKE there own stories!! This concept grabbed me right away and I found myself driven to learn everything I could about it so I could finally share all the fantasy world’s I dreamed about all the creatures I’d drawn and write about the adventures therein.
Before that I’d always been looking for a place that I could get feedback and ‘know’ that people really liked work. I’d never found anything like that elsewhere. Sure you can post up on deviant art or myriad of other sites but you’re too quickly buried by everyone else. Be it art or literature.
But here I finally managed to get honest indepth feedback on my imaginary world’s. That is beyond awesome, this coming from someone that’s used to going unnoticed (when it comes to my skill set at least. I get noticed irl but that’s usually a wtf kinda look lol)
The first CS game I played was Unnatural, wonderful game and still one of my favourites. I played it several times and moved on Zombie Exodus and then Mecha Ace and so on and so forth.
How I came to the forums? I had many questions about Unnatural and wanted to express my gratitude to the Author @Nocturnal_Stillness and then I discovered the sequel of the game in progress too. I lurked for a few weeks on the forums being rather scarce, give a like here, a comment there I soon explored the WiPs and this turned me into a regular commenter, all the talent and inspiration on one website, it was insightful. Eventually I created my own topic and now working on my own game when life doesn’t throw too many obstacles or I’m not writing any short stories. What keeps me here is the wonderful community, how everybody gets along and things are always civil even when it’s a little tense. That’s hard to come by. I got into conversation with a good amount of people on here too and consider many of them friends.
I really love games with a story and choices so I typed up something like ‘good game with story and choices for android’ and one link told me of COG, I was a bit hesitant at first to play a gamebook (felt kind of silly to me) but I got Creatures such as we (around June last year?) And I’ve been in love with these games since.
Well. I’ve been reading there books for awhile now. And I fell in love with them… Even the bad ones. I found the forum after a long time, after that I just decided to do beta testing and help out with WIPs. I love the ones I’ve tried and I’m hugely impatient for them to be finished lol. I decided to make my own but because I literally have no experience in coding I’m going to take awhile. And it’s now shut to a stand still until my computers fixed. Bleh. I
The co-optional podcast (Totalbiscuits podcast) mentioned choice of robots, and their endorsement of it intrigued me enough to look into it on the play store. Eventually I made my way here and played pretty much all the hosted and official (or whatever they are called) CoG games.
As to what got me into IF? I love RPGs that’s it. The problem is triple A RPGs have become so watered down that I honestly hesitate calling them RPGs. The RPG genre basically means stats, loot and skills at this point rather than any actual roleplay. Skyrim and Fallout 4 (and to some degree Dragon Age Inquisition) certainly didn’t help me get my RPG fill, instead making me disappointed with what the games could have been if they were deeper than puddles.
So, obviously, what I love about CoG titles is that it’s an actual story and a good one at that. You can mold your character (to a certain degree) into what you want and actually roleplay. The choices have actual meaning not to mention the writing tends to be amazing (Looking at you Sabres of Infinity and Lords of Aswick) to the point that my 2 favourite CoG titles are below Baulders Gate and the KoToR series on my favourite games list.
Everything I want from an RPG that I have been missing for years is in CoG titles and that’s both amazing and sad. They have the ability to scratch my RPG itch and it is so damn satisfying.
Years ago, when I was either a freshman or sophomore in high school, I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas. I downloaded the Alter Ego app early on, and then Choice of Romance appeared in my recommendations in the app store. I played it, and before I knew it, I was on my eighth playthrough. Then I went and got Choice of the Dragon, Choice of the Vampire, and Choice of Broadsides and played through all of them many, many times as well.
I’ve been hooked on these games since.
I mean, what’s better than a story where you control the main character and have a say in how the story plays out? Choice of Games and BioWare have spoiled me to the point where I can’t play a game where I have no say in the creation of my character or the decisions I make and how they affect the plot.
I heard that my college friends Adam and Dan had written a computer game called Choice of the Dragon. It took me a while to look it up and play it – but as soon as I did, I knew this was how I’d wanted to tell stories since I was a kid improvising CYOAs verbally with my friends. Back then, I tried out a program that would let me write text adventures… but it was incredibly cumbersome for a non-programmer. CS worked.
So I started writing, then started asking questions on the forum, then started getting involved in other conversations and reading WIPs… and here we are.
I got bored play too many visual novel games and got super bored with all the romance it had. Bleh, went searching then found text games. Not yet Cog but it was the delight games I got first. Then CoG games started to pop on my recommendation list. Tried it and here I am.
Started by developing a game for textadventures, but then I realized it would be difficult to make an App for it, so explored the internet and found CoG. Loved it from day one, and choicescript is so easy to use…
Warning: Really long post with lots of unnecessary background information incoming.
I’ve liked to read since I was a toddler and have been writing since highschool, mainly because I ran out of stuff to read that actually interested me, with my favorite genres being fantasy and Sci-Fi and the only books in my native language that are in that genre either being translations or pretty darn terrible. (So me writing my stories in English more or less undermines my original goal…)
Anyway, I liked video-games too, mainly for the story, not for the game-play, but was disappointed in the depth and variety of the story-lines and characters (which were usually pretty much the same as everything else). So when I figured out how to display chunks of text on a computer screen and make choices using input from the keyboard during a class in programming in C# I tried to make a branching story. It didn’t work out, mainly because my lack of knowledge about the coding language (my classes only covered the basics of the basics). That was rather frustrating.
About half a year after that I somehow stumbled upon Choice of Dragons while looking for games with a good story, and realized ‘Hey, these people are doing what I was trying to do a few months ago.’ Then I found out there was a way to write a branching story using the same software as used for CoG’s games, and I gave it a go. It still took about half a year before I joined the forum though, since I’m quite shy by nature and not too fond (read: terrified) of doing new things involving people. It’s just that I had some problems with coding I couldn’t figure out myself, so I had to.
Anyway, I really liked the community (you people are awesome :D) and stuck around, and now some of you guys and gals are like the friends I don’t really have in real life (it takes me a looooooong time to warm up to people, so they usually drop off the radar long before I concider them to be actual friends rather than a person I vaguely know from something). It’s also great fun to help/boss around people ;)(mainly @Nathan_Faxon), though it causes some collateral damage from time to time (Sorry, @Jjcb).
Hmm, Difficult question. I was searching if in English to improve my self taught English language. I read choice of dragon and discovered in the official website that there was a forum. And I just signed right then. I never was a shy lurking creature. And still here with another account because a bad guy stole my old Facebook profile.
I’m actually an old-school Infocom junkie, and have released several Inform games which are available on IFDB. I also love exploring new IF systems (Storynexus was a favorite) and in my usual trawl for development systems I ran into CoG.
I actually detested choicescript at first. The output felt like an interface to take an SAT test and I really didn’t jibe with the amount of story and character co-creation of the house style. I also am an idiot with regards to writing something in a text editor and compiling it - I am very used to compiling frequently and making sure the code is right inside of an IDE so I left CS alone for a while.
As CoG developed, I warmed to it. They actually provide an amazing vector to develop and actually sell games, and the hosted games offer more freedom from the house style that the options are more attractive. I also like that there is a community developed IDE that let me actually experiment with the thing to see if it clicked with me without having to set up directories and writing text files.
I also still haven’t quite found the exact thing I want to write games in. I liked Inklewriter a lot, but it might be a little clunky for anything beyond short-story length. What I’d like is a choice-system with stats and an inventory system and perhaps some degree of randomness. CS is probably the easiest “choice with stats” system there is outside of Storynexus.
I’m not sure whether to begin with my discovery of a CS game, or before that… y’see, for some time before I discovered my first CS game, I was frustrated with wanting to create something like a Visual Novel, without having the artistic patience for it. I looked through possible mediums. Ren’Py, an adventure-game maker software I’ve forgotten the name of, and came across someplace called Story Nexus when a Steam Game called Sunless Sea led me there, based on one of their games called Fallen London. The system was …clunkier, though; Story Nexus wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Fast forward a bit- I discovered Heroes Rise when it came out on Steam. Being an avid, near-rabid Steam-gamer. It perked my interest immediately- I’d played old text based games in my youth like Zork. I played it, and I was floored. It was the first time I’d discovered anything remotely like it- and I’d been enjoying VNs for quite some time. It took another release on Steam- it may even have been the second Heroes Rise game, before I decided to track down where it was coming from- the ‘play more games like these’ at the end of the stories piqued my interest and led me to CoG. Though, I wasn’t immediately into the forums. What first caught me was ‘Looking for new authors’. So I downloaded CS. Except… I couldn’t script, I couldn’t code. I thought that I was facing the same frustration I’d been faced with before. I did get into the games, though! And somewhere in the mix, into the forums… where I learned people were helping each other regarding the coding. So I looked into it again, and buckled myself down and told myself I could learn it. With a bit of help, and some dedication. So I went through all the information I could find and the tutorials and got my messy, wonderful start with Monsters, one of the stories I’d been wanting to tell for a long time, in the CScomp. The forums felt so… welcoming. I found amazing people here. I found motivation here. I’d felt lost and floundering, but writing again, and all the reasons to stick with it, make me feel like I have a purpose that makes me happy. : )
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I soon explored the WiPs and this turned me into a regular commenter, all the talent and inspiration on one website, it was insightful. Eventually I created my own topic and now working on my own game when life doesn’t throw too many obstacles or I’m not writing any short stories. What keeps me here is the wonderful community, how everybody gets along and things are always civil even when it’s a little tense. That’s hard to come by. I got into conversation with a good amount of people on here too and consider many of them friends.
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