[WIP] Tales of Ellaria

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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Hi Everyone,

When I was younger I was inspired by Philip Kempton’s games to create my own game with more advanced choice options. I really liked his games, espeically battles and country management like in Swamp Castle.

I was putting this idea off because I had no idea how to create a game and it looked sooo difficult for me. Finally, in the early morning of 8th of June 2026 I mustered up the courage to study it. And made a little progress.

Originally I wanted to make it main character story like he did. But I got a bit ambitious to create an open world with 4 different story paths. You can choose your race from 1 of 4 standard fantasy races and gender. I’m highly skeptical this will work out nor do I believe my abilities will be enough to make it anywhere closely well as other authors do, so I decided to post it to get some feedbacks.

Currently it has intro for human and orc races. Total 13k words including code.

To play the demo, version 5: https://cogdemos.ink/play/frozen.stream/tales-of-ellaria/mygame
Android version 2: https://limewire.com/d/El5ia#vOWhFKsDC2

P.S Beware of your morale stat, you can get too much emotional damage and have your character heavily debuffed.

Update 06/10/2026
All races introductions are finished

Total # of words rose to 31 221 including code.
Total of 8 secret achievements.

Spoiler: an old school dwarf meme added for the dwarf female storyline

AI Disclosure:

No — This project does not contain the output of Generative AI
Yes — This project contains the output of Generative AI

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I wanted to try to do a if too, but i wanted to ask does the little result reflect on the work u put in the code or u were just trying to do something short & heres the result. Im not trying to diss u or anything. Cuz i know even less than u, but did u put like crazy amount in the code but the result its still small. On another topic, did u planned all the lore in advance or for now u just go on the fly? I hope u will be able to create an incredible story im all for it. Have a good day :slight_smile:

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Hi Robert. First comment much faster than I expected :slightly_smiling_face:

I had a better plan for 1 main character storyline, but it requires better knowledge and experience how to use the choicescript to grow from 1 man to a band/army/kingdom. As the result of this digression, I am forced to invent and develop ideas on the fly. Regarding code, I decided to cut it shorter and used gpt to ask how to do this, how to achieve that, why is this not working, why I am getting this error. Half the time it gives wrong solutions, but it helps to learn. In the past 2 days I reached the point where I can continue in the notepad and test for errors myself.

What I have is small because I am only 2-3 days in, and learning features I want to add makes it longer. Now I have achievements, dynamic stats, npc addressing player depending on the gender he/she chose.

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Okay, I am really interested in an IF that was inspired by my favorite games.

Philip Kempton has had a extremely large impact on how I write, not just IF but fiction in general. That’s how much I liked the games. If this is anything like that, I think I’ll like this Tale of Ellaria.

Also, side note:

Maybe don’t?

I’m not gonna be stickler, since it just seems like you were using ChatGPT just to ask questions, and learn faster, which is pretty much what it was made for in the first place. So if it didn’t do any of the work for you just a little bit with you, then I think it’s okay to say no, this project does not contain the output of Generative AI.

Also also:

Yeah. Because ChatGPT doesn’t know anything about ChoiceScript. It can’t really help you, or give correct answers, because it doesn’t know them. Anything GPT tells you about CS, it will have got by scraping this forum. But here’s the thing, it can’t know the context, it can get the words, but there are thousands of topics here, with up to 10,000 post in one topic. It literally can’t know what we’re talking about, without scanning every single post for the past decade, which is impossible at this point.

So what I’m really saying is, any question you ask GPT, you can and should ask here, we have the answer, we have the context, and we want to help. You’ll get a lot more useful advice here in half a day, then a full day using GPT.

P.S At least one person, at some point will have asked the same question you want, so just use the search button(The spyglass / Q at the top right.) with a few keywords, and you’ll likely find a post that has already solved that exact question.

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May I ask what you mean by an IF, are there standards for this type of games or a must attributes?

I can’t tell for sure which games are your favourites, but I can tell mine, and that I draw inspiration from: warcraft 3, LOTR, medieval 2, heroes of might and magic 3, hand of fates 2, witcher 2, rpg games and many other, seasoned with Philip Kempton ideas for fights, design of open world etc and garnished by my quirky style.

As much as I like his style and the way he designed it, I can’t replicate it, because this setting is different, approach is different, and simply saying, I am not that skilled and talented as he is, unfortunately, nor can I generate such creative immersive story-telling.

The story is a product of my imagination only, and will remain to be so. If I run out of it, I will either stop for a while or abandon the project. Don’t see a point having AI do the story-telling for me and get a credit for it. GPT was the only way to push myself to even start it, because I have 0 experience and knowledge in coding. Once I figured out how it works, I switched to coding it myself.

I registered to website today, how do you cite what I wrote?:sweat_smile:

I honestly don’t think “we have the answer, we have the context, and we want to help.” is true, especially wanting to help without me becoming an unwanted husstle and burden. I guess I shall have the benefit of a doubt and to try to find out.

I’m pretty sure that any questions I have or will have already been raised and answered by other people, so searching for it is actually a very good tip, thank you.

Thank you for taking your time to give me the heads up for a newbie as I am. Feel free to share your opinion about the game. I just fixed the broken loop, so there is a new content that opened up.

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It means “Interactive Fiction”, which is what the games on this forum are. (There are other types of interactive fiction, but this is one of them.)

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Ahh, I see. Isn’t most, if not all the hosted games interaction fiction games?:grin:

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Yes, that’s exactly what they are.

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Thanks for clarifying

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Here is a guide for choicescript from literally years ago.

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How old is that guide? It can’t be that old; I’ve never seen it, and I feel like I would have by now if it was old. Regardless, that guide is amazing! That would have been so useful to me 10 years ago.

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Very useful guide. Thank you. All is left to learn how to implement them. Some mechanics are exactly what I wanted and was going to look for

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I’m not a fan of gender automatically distributing a stat point, if I wanna play a girl character with high strength you already lose a chance at a strength point and you get a stat increase you might not even want, and vice versa with the male character.

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Hi. We are at infancy stage right now. Logic was that each gender and race has its own advantage and disadvantage just like in real life. Next we will have childhood where you will have an opportunity to choose activities to hone specific stats you need. Max strength stat is more likely to be available for war oriented race like orcs. If you follow true Warrior path, you will be a very strong girl. You will be able to crush your enemies with your bare hands​:wink:

Not possible to focus on strength only for elf though, their culture is more about accuracy, mastery and precision. A bit of int wont hurt, battle intellegence often has a bigger impact than brute strength. It was planned to be added. Let me know if this helps.

It’s already implemented for the orc true warrior path with last update.

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Latest version 5 for android: Download Tales of Ellaria (2).apk | LimeWire

Without automatic switches to other characters like it happens on the website

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It’s was uploaded on march 2016, the guide is now the age of a teen

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No problem m8, I honestly did some very simple googling to find the guide.

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Saw that the game got updated, what’s changed?

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Fixed many typos, phrasing and stylistic issues, developing orc path at the moment