I talked briefly about Surviving High School before. It’s an iPhone game with a few semi-fun minigames. But the main gameplay and actual enjoyment of the game (for me, at least) boils down to two important aspects: good, funny writing and meaningful choices.
There’s another iPhone game that I downloaded later, which strips away the cartoony visuals and production values of Surviving High School while retaining the core two mechanics called Choice of the Dragon. You can also play it in your browser by visiting the link.
I love both of these games, despite (or perhaps even due to) their simplicity. With Choice of the Dragon, it’s as much an original online Choose Your Own Adventure book as a game. But the choices are more numerous and, like most games, slightly less punishing.
I remember a single wrong choice in a CYOA book often ending in disaster, death, and a sudden end to your journey. Here, while the choices you make certainly matter (and “bad” choices will have consequences), the reader/player isn’t instantly killed. There’s time to recover by making better choices and often content that you would never see if you had made the “good” choice initially.
Due to the stuff I’m currently working on and the realization that this is something that really satisfies me as a player, I’ve been thinking a lot about what meaningful choices in games mean.
What’s more, the people who made Choice of the Dragon have released a version of their scripting software (ChoiceScript) that allows anyone to create a similar game by simply writing text (and following certain formatting rules).
I’d like to give myself the challenge of seeing whether I can craft a small but enjoyable ChoiceScript game by the end of February. If I succeed, I’ll certainly post it here so everyone can play it and give feedback. If I don’t, you’ll probably never hear about it again. Either way, attempting it should be a learning experience when it comes to how to best present meaningful choices to a player and what types of decisions and consequences feel most satisfying.