Hey forum! I have been wanting to work on a choice script game for some time now. I am an Airborne Ranger qualified Infantry LT in the US Army, while on a recent deployment, I saw some of my soldiers playing choice of games to pass the time and debating the choices they made with their friends. I became interested in the genre and decided to write a sci fi choose your own adventure type game based off of my actual experiences but set in a totally fictional future which I have developed. I just finished working on the prologue and wanted to post it. My concern is that either the concept wont appeal or the background is too complex (I wanted to create a future military with real depth, not just a shallow adaptation of current ranks/structures)
So the story basically begins with you arriving to your new unit, you have to meet your soldiers and design a training cycle. After getting to know your platoon you are deployed to a planet to fight. You have the option to choose how to outfit your unit and the gameplay centers on tactical decision making. The title comes from your rank! Decurion is the rank of Platoon Leaders and your radio call sign (in this case your a member of the Outlaws and the 1st Platoon leader which is called Red, the actual denotes you as the commander of that element)
Please let me know what you guys (or girls of course!) think about it so far and if you would like to see the rest of the story!
New Link: Https://dashingdon.com/go/3758
Ditto. You’ve invented a rich world and the sequence of Q&As that you go through to define yourself is very cool. I’m not military, at all, but to me the game really reads like something from somebody on the inside. The focus on unit structure, meeting your commanding officer, etc. It gives the game a very realistic feel, if that makes sense, since it’s about a soldier and seems to have been written by a soldier.
I’d suggest editing and tightening some of the text. There was an option near the start, for example, where I thought I was being asked if I wanted to read more background on the Tiger War that created the Pacific Bloc (yes, please, I chose - that sounds awesome) and instead it was asking me about naval rank. Likewise the *hide_reuse *choice about the background questions generally – at one point I think I chose the option “tell me something else besides these things” and it just gave me the remaining choices about these things again.
I agree with others here that it was very well done and it’s clear the author has extensive knowledge of the military. My only suggestion would be to put a guide to the ranks in the stat screen because the roman ranks can become quite confusing at times even though I just read about them.
Also just out of curiosity was the commander before you killed or promoted
I know this is a bit nitpiky and your response and rightfully be “its the future,” but shouldn’t you replace company and platoon with cohort and century.
@SLVRWINGS the demo doesn’t include much of the actual game but the amount of details on the world make it look promising. I’m sure the quality of the game will benefit greatly from your own training and experience as an army officer.
I think you could improve a few things so far, namely:
a. I think all the information on the army and navy structures, ranks, ships etc. should be not in the main game but in a separate section of the stats.
b. I agree with @cascat07. The terms “platoon” and “company” look out of place in a world where all other army-related terms are borrowed from ancient rome.
finally, out of curiosity, could you tell us which game (s) your soldier was playing?
Wow Lt. Silverwing it seems that you did some homework on Chinese lol. Not many know what does the word Zhidui mean in PLA navy, not even the think tank analysts, or most native Chinese speakers in that regard.
The the description of military structure is fairly good. Looking forward to the complete game.
I’ve got a pretty crazy schedule at work so I’m pretty sporadic with writing/visiting the forum (which seems pretty consistent across the board here) but I read everything yall said and am extremely thankful for the feedback. Now to respond to comments: distracteddad: I absolutely plan on flushing out the background more as well as tightening the dialogue, right now I’m focusing on testing the concept and developing the gameplay. I also agree that I should create a glossary in the stats menu and cut most of the descriptions out of the story itself.
Verand: you will be able to ask a lot of those questions once you meet your platoon!
I was very against changing platoon and company to cohort and century because frankly those are words I use everyday and it just made sense…after thinking about it I realize that you guys are absolutely right and it makes more sense to change it. Also, it sounds good once I got over it ; )
There will be personal stats but they will not be visible to the character… Same with squad leader stats, you can modify them but the only way to evaluate your unit is to actually think about why events played out the way they did or through paying attention to dialogue or training scores
Wulfyk:my boys were playing mobile armored marine and marine raider
Ukheic: thanks! I’m also working on getting some of my writing published in Army professional journals and attended west point so I’ve gotten a tremendous amount of practice researching lol
To everyone thanks again for reading and helping me with feedback! I’m going to make every effort to get some of this done in the next couple weeks!
Love this game so far! Very detailed universe you’re creating and I can’t wait to see how the rest shapes up. There’s some sentence structure issues, but those are minor.
Just wanted to let you all know that because I’m getting married this weekend my schedule has been devastated as of late. But I hope to start driving on making the changes you all proposed as well as getting together the first real chapter for a demo! Thanks so much for the support!
I just wish to let you know that there is a typo here "hey also have powerful Rail guns that can destroy not shielded targets from incredible distances. " not should be non. also I really enjoyed the thought and detail put into the background for this story.
