Not enjoying making games

So the interesting thing about choice fiction is that you don’t necessarily have to do this – you want the audience to feel like this is the case, or at least that they’ve got some control over the story, but quite honestly? You can fake it. Or at least, there’s ways to make choices feel more important while still keeping the story more or less on rails.

You’ve written some nice reviews of the Lady Thalia games on IFDB, and I can share that the branching implications of any given choice in them are really, really small. Consequences are usually in the moment and don’t usually affect the overall plot by themselves. Instead they contribute points to various meters that, if they get too high, will affect how skillfully Thalia pulls off her shenanigans but doesn’t actually affect your chance of success, only your chance of getting the best ending (which is generally a self-indulgent scene with the love interest and separate from the heist itself). This means that although we have to write a lot of text for in-the-moment choices the actual number of plot branches is minimal. And you can probably back off significantly on the amount of divergent text and still grab the reader! Lady Thalia 1 has about 1/3 of the total text visible on any given playthrough, and for the subsequent games it’s closer to 1/2 because we cut down significantly on conversation branching options. The fact that nobody complained about this, or even seemed to notice, says a lot IMHO.

That said, you’re the best judge of what you want to make and if you don’t think IF is a good fit, that’s fine! There are plenty of people around here who are just players and not authors. You can still participate in the community that way if you’re interested, especially if you like beta testing or writing reviews. But I wanted to push back a bit on the idea that there’s a particular way that choice games have to be, because there’s a lot more to interactivity than just puzzles and super-gamey gameplay.

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