(disclaimer: I’m a co-founder at Choice of Games; everything I say is biased)
It sounds like you’re planning to use randomized storylets, perhaps in the style of Failbetter’s quality-based narrative?
QBN/SBN storylets are possible in ChoiceScript. CS has *if
, it has *goto
, it has *rand
for randomness, and therefore, with some effort and perhaps quite a lot of duplicated code, you can implement QBN. The effort would be approximately the same for out-of-the-box Ink and Twine; as far as I know, neither of them include any QBN facilities out of the box.
(The only things I’m aware of that Ink can do and ChoiceScript can’t is Unity integration, granting the author access to all of Unity’s supported platforms, and unlimited customization of the user interface, e.g. implementing a card-based look and feel. CS supports almost no UI customization at all.)
@JoshGrams has built out a Twine thing for QBN. GitHub - JoshuaGrams/tiny-qbn: A storylets library for Twine2/Sugarcube.
There was a thread a few months back about choosing software for QBN.
Having said all of this, there is the problem of finding a market. StoryNexus offered itself up as a platform for QBN games, but it went into “maintenance mode” in 2013; it’s now closed to new games.
QBNs seem to be a market where the winner takes all. http://www.failbettergames.com/failbetter-games-what-are-we-for/
Why? It’s hard to pin down one reason. Many Fallen London players only have room for one FL-type game in their lives. Most lone creators don’t have access to a full-time artist. Most creators can’t risk going full-time in the beginning, as we did, and that means content and support and promotion are all limited.
Even though ChoiceScript isn’t particularly helping you technology-wise, I suspect that you wild find it possible to implement what you want and significantly easier to find a market for your game on the Hosted Games platform.