Briar Rose has just released a brand new version of Price of Freedom: Innocence lost. The original version was the first place winner the 2014 SpringThing. The new one is more than double the length and includes a choice of gender for the protagonist and many new scenes expanding the characters and plot.
You are ten years old when you first feel the weight of shackles around your wrists. In a matter of hours, your whole world is turned upside down as you and your brother are dragged away from your home in Greece to work as slaves in the Roman Empire. Now you must struggle for survival. Every decision you make will affect your future. Your life, the life of your brother and the lives of your friends are in your hands.
Begin your journey as a child, and make heartbreaking choices that will shape the adult you will become. But be careful. An act of kindness might come back to haunt you, and a thoughtless word could earn you some powerful enemies. A split second decision will determine who lives and who dies. Will you sell your soul to win your freedom, or sacrifice everything for the people you love? Will you even live long enough to see the sun rise?
Iâve had only a brief look at the beta version previously, but Iâm settling down with a fresh pot of late night coffee to read it now. Itâs choice based with the clicky links and all and I know some of you have strong feelings about those (or at least used to) but itâs a genuinely good story I think anyone can enjoy so I hope you take a look.
Oookay, now it looks like people over on Choice of Games are stirring up rumors that the old version winning the Spring Thing is what kept it from being published there instead of the actions of their own admins. Except ChooseYourStory is being named as the host of the SpringThing now? I donât even freaking know but this might be fun/bizarre to watch develop if it doesnât just get shut down in its infancy by a mod.
Letâs try not to have anything fun/bizarre develop here if we can help itâif by that we mean something thatâs going to develop into a needless big argument.
If people have specific issues or questions with what happened around the publication and republication of Price of Freedom, that would be great to discuss! But Iâd request that people try to keep it specific and civil, and where they donât know the details of something to try to find out about it before getting angry (as seems to have happened in the quoted post).
Also, it doesnât seem to me that we should turn this thread to a discussion of conflict on other forums. Again, if thereâs a specific issue that can be discussed in a civil way, thatâs great, but letâs try to avoid having our discussion go down a road that could lead to needless argument.
So basicallyâas a mod, if weâre having discussions about the publishing history of the game and what went on with it, those are worthwhile discussions to have! But letâs keep it out of flamewar-adjacent territory.
If Iâm not mistaken, Spring Thing is one of the few competitions that welcomes games on the road to commercial publication (or vertical slices of them?) as entries.
There have been some IFComp games which are substantially overhauled and released commercially - CoGâs own Scarlet Sails being one of them. Part of that is a rule of IFComp is that the competition-submitted version of the game must remain freely available. An author or a company canât pull the free version and re-release it with a price tag post comp. Scarlet Sails was heavily re-written and expanded to be a viable commercial release separate from its comp version.
Briar as far as I know had no intention to pull down the old version, but the new one had been more than doubled in length and anyway all of that had been sorted out with COG staff a long time ago while the story was still being written.
The SpringThing misinformation was dropped early on in the thread at least, and the rest of it involves drama I donât really have the time or the inclination to go into the context of now, even if this were the place for it. The thread really did morph into something strange but not the way I expected at allâŚ
I think the best advice for all content-creators to possibly glean from this is to be aware of the licensing and copyright requirements any platform they are using to create and distribute any extensive work. Many of us are used to seeing and not reading and just clicking through agreements or EULA style signup pages which can amount to a contract. (Legality and usage of EULAs vary by country.)
I love checking out and experimenting with new IF-creation tools, and my first questions include âHow can I distribute anything I make with this? Can I build a standalone version of the game so the player doesnât need to download the creation software?â If itâs a website, âWho owns the content I create here? Can I delete my work? Can I export it? How can I extract it into a standalone playable format that doesnât require going to the website or signing up for it to play?â
Even certain writing/game contests (especially when run by a publisher or a movie studio) stipulate that they outright own the content of the winning submissions or even all entries that submitted.
It's like how a couple years into American Idol...
it was said that coming 2nd was better than winning, since the winner was locked into contracting exclusively with the producers of that show, and finalists got just as much exposure and were free agents (outside of having to perform in a national tour.)
All of this for sure, and itâs good to do research on a publisherâs reputation and relationship with previous clients as well if at all possible.
Although for the sake of clarity I should point out for anyone reading this who may only glance at the linked title that the âcopyright issueâ turned out to have never existed. The ChooseYourStory founder showed up in the thread to confirm what the author had been saying all along, there was no problem of that nature with CoG publishing it, but heâd simply never been contacted by them.
Iâm not sure why Choice of Games chose to represent things that way, but at least the issue has been untangled now and it was gotten out into the open that the SpringThing or ChooseYourStory and any other IF sites are free of involvement.
Yeah, very strange little misadventure I had there⌠But the short version is that, in the end, I decided for several reasons that it would be better for me to publish my games over on CYS from now on.
So, now thatâs out of the way⌠Letâs talk about the game instead. Would be great if you guys let me know what you think of it.
