commercial IF – Page 7 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Choice of Robots (Choice of Games)

Choice of Robots is a recent large-scale Choice of Games piece: you take the role of a gifted young graduate student in robotics, about to make significant breakthroughs in your field, generating a line of robots that might become surgeons, soldiers, companions, factory workers. Your choices include design decisions for the robots and business decisions about how to manufacture and sell them, but also personal decisions about how to relate to your robot creations, and what you think it all means. The scope of your activities is such that you may find yourself flying to Shanghai to take meetings, or spending months in a military jail, or preventing the invasion of Taiwan — and along the way it’s pretty likely that you’ll also make a considerable personal fortune, which you can choose to spend on luxuries, philanthropy, or a mix of things.

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Thieves’ Gambit, Psy High (Choice of Games)

Thieves’ Gambit: Curse of the Black Cat is a Choice of Games title in which you, as a great cat burglar, have to pull together a team of co-adventurers to attempt to steal a particular cursed gem. As usually for CoG, you can pick your sexuality and gender, as well as specialize in one of several types of theft-related skill. You can also decide which other characters to pursue romantically, which turns out to be one of the more significant aspects of the game, affecting not only how you feel about other characters but how your team forms up and how you approach the heist.

There’s enough bushy branching in the structure that you can experience significantly different scenes during both the break-in and the preparation, and overall the story felt quite responsive to my decisions. I might have liked to see more development of the romantic leads before I was forced to choose which options to pursue, but once I had made a choice, I noticed a number of subsequent points that had been unobtrusively tailored to reflect those decisions.

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80 Days (Meg Jayanth / inkle )

80 Days is a gorgeous iOS game from inkle studios and a script by Meg Jayanth, who (among other things) did the StoryNexus Samsara project. 80 Days takes off from the Jules Verne novel about Phileas Fogg’s round-the-world race; but it adds steampunk elements to the setting (I realize that some people feel about steampunk the way I feel about zombies) and allows the player to set the route, casting him in the role of Fogg’s valet Passepartout. Different routes take different amounts of time and have different costs associated with them; money and health are both resources that must be replenished periodically. The player can also buy (or more rarely acquire through narrative events) various inventory items that make the trip more comfortable, reveal new routes, or sell for fantastic profits in distant cities. It’s also slightly more constrained than the big open map might initially make it seem: you can’t really backtrack in some cases, even if there’s a nominally valid route in a particular direction and even if you the player think it would be a good idea.

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News about Versu and Blood & Laurels

An announcement from the relaunched versu.com site:

Versu

Until February of this year, the Versu project had its home at Linden Lab, exploring the possibilities of interactive storytelling with advanced character AI by Richard Evans (Sims 3, Black and White) and dialogue modeling by Emily Short (Galatea, Alabaster), as well as work by authors Jake Forbes (Return to Labyrinth) and Deirdra Kiai (Dominique Pamplemousse).

Regency-era comedy of manners and a modern office comedy stories, released for Versu, had received significant attention in various forms, including an appearance at GDC’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop, an award for best AI in an independent game in 2013, and coverage at Edge Online and New Scientist.

When the Lab decided to refocus its offerings and cut support for Versu, the project was only three days from launching a Roman political thriller called Blood & Laurels. Blood & Laurels represented a significant step forward in complexity and depth from previous Versu…

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Future Voices (inkle)

Future Voices is an iOS-based anthology of eleven CYOA stories from inkle, culled from an open competition. As one might expect from inkle’s work, it’s an aesthetically pleasing object: it uses Frankenstein’s imagery of pieces of paper being attached to the end of an ongoing, developing story. Proofreading is not flawless — I ran into a handful of typos here and there — but this is a fairly rare problem, and overall the app is an elegant-looking piece of work, tactile and classy.

I’m also delighted to see someone running with the concept of anthologized interactive narrative: curating and promoting the best material from the wide variety of freeware is still a really useful role for publishers or publisher-equivalents. And I gather that the competition leading to this anthology drew work from a wide range of authors, some of whom had no previous experience with interactive writing.

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Choice of Games: Eerie Estate Agent (Gavin Inglis)

Eerie Estate Agent is a newish piece from Choice of Games, created by writer Gavin Inglis. The premise is that you’re an estate agent (or realtor, in American terms) and you’re responsible for getting 57 Crowther Terrace rented out. Your unpleasant boss is just looking for an excuse to fire you and the other employees around the office don’t exactly have your back, so the stakes are high. The problem is that no one seems to want to stick around the place for long, possibly because of all the spooky stuff that happens there.

Inglis identifies as a writer more than a game designer, and that shows, in ways both good and bad. I’ve often thought that the actual prose quality was a bit of a weak spot in many Choice of Games offerings: the text in Choice of the Dragon, for instance, is typically utilitarian, and though some of the later works become more ambitious, the results are not universally happy.

Eerie Estate Agent has a much more distinctive and engaging voice than these: breezy but well-controlled, lightly humorous, sometimes casting the protagonist as a not entirely nice person. There’s a good sense of the Edinburgh setting (not perhaps surprising, as Inglis seems to know the place well). In the eerie happenings, he tends to hit a good middle ground between the creepy and the funny, going for paranormal indications that are amusing but that would probably be distinctly unnerving if they happened a lot in real life. (Rooms that periodically fill up with the scent of tea? Indications that seem to resemble the scurrying of a dozen ghostly rodents?)

A down side is that Eerie Estate Agent doesn’t deliver very strongly on Choice of Games’ traditional strength: lots and lots of agency.

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