choose your own adventure
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Live theater over Zoom is better when it’s interactive
Live theater over Zoom is a lot more fun when the audience gets to call the shots.
Whatifi turns mobile video into a choose your own adventure party
Whatifi offers interactive mobile videos with "choose your own adventure" narratives. It's the first company to truly make mobile video work.
YouTube is working on interactive original shows, too
Netflix isn't the only big-name streaming platform working on interactive shows. YouTube is also developing programming that uses the format. Ben Relles, who was YouTube's head of unscripted programming, is heading up a new division focused on interactive shows and live specials.
Co-op choose-your-own-adventure game The Yawhg hits Steam
The Yawhg tells a randomized story every time you (and your friends) sit down to play, a story that begins with the evil Yawhg coming to ransack your town and ends in more than 50 different ways for each character. It's a choose-your-own-adventure game steeped in humor, magic and horrible things, from indie team Emily Carroll and Damian Sommer. The game supports up to four players locally and has full controller support on Steam. The Yawhg made it through Greenlight and launched today on Steam for PC, for $8 with a 20 percent off sale. The discount ends on March 6. Carroll and Sommer launched the game last year independently, and it's still available to purchase through their site. Carroll, a comic artist, ended up working with Sommer, a game developer, during the TIFF Nexus Comics vs. Games showcase. Apparently it was a match made in dark fantasy heaven.
Anna Anthropy invites you to 'A Very Very Very Scary House'
Anna Anthropy, developer of the powerful autobiographical flash title Dys4ia, has revealed a new project: a digital choose-your-own-adventure entitled A Very Very Very Scary House. Built in part with the interactive story tool Twine, the game is available now for $2. "Investigate the scariest house you've ever seen!" the description for the title proclaims, noting the game has 58 unique endings. "This is probably the largest Twine story i've ever written, at over 11,000 words in 197 passages," Anthropy wrote on her blog. A Very Very Very Scary House, featuring original art from Shelley Yu, represents something of an experiment for the creator, monetizing one of her creations for the first time. "Putting games behind paywalls is something I've been extremely wary about – the people I want my games to reach are the ones most marginalized within games culture as it stands, the ones with the least money and the least access," Anthropy told Gamasutra. "Why would I buy a Twine game for two dollars when I can get all of these polished indie games [emphasis hers] for the same amount? This is an attempt at pushback, at establishing a precedent for folks to be able to sell little Twine zines and make some money off their work," she added in her blog post announcing the game's availability. For more on Anna Anthropy and her unique and personal games, be sure to read Joystiq's original feature Games on the Fringe.
Radio drama game Codename Cygnus crosses funding finish line
Codename Cygnus successfully reached its Kickstarter funding goal this week, earning a total of $13,943. The interactive radio drama app for iOS has players acting as secret agents, with their choices impacting a fictional world through both touch and voice commands. Each of Codename Cygnus' episodes are around 20 minutes in length, with the first episode launching this month and subsequent episodes arriving every week. Among the cast involved in a few episodes are Logan Cunningham, known for voicing the narrator Rucks in Bastion, and Red Dead Redemption's Rob Wiethoff, the voice of John Marston.
Storybricks alpha video shows how you can choose your own adventure
Ever since the Storybricks toolset was announced, a common question people have had is, "That sounds great, but how easy will it be to actually make my own MMO world? Will I need to be a master programmer or something?" The answer is, apparently, quite easy. The Storybricks devs took a few minutes to put together an alpha gameplay video showing how simple it is to set up complex social interactions between characters. As players piece together the "bricks" that dictate a character's mood, actions, and responses to the player, every encounter in the game turns into a "choose your own adventure" that has a variety of outcomes. One of the situations that was shown is that of a player encountering an irritated wizard. In the first attempt to interact with him, the player pesters the wizard, which prompts the wizard to unleash a zombie. If the player apologizes, the wizard is astonished, unsummons the zombie, and asks to be the player's friend. But in a second attempt, the player chooses to zap the zombie instead and then punch the guard that comes to investigate. This outcome leads to banishment from the city. Storybricks is currently seeking funding via Kickstarter. It's certainly a promising system fraught with possibilities, so give it a look-see after the jump!
8-bit Mad Men Choose Your Own Adventure looks awesome, is awesome (video)
Hearing "8-bit", "Mad Men", and "choose your own adventure" all in one sentence is a bit too much for us to handle. But yes, that's very much what we have here. So, if you just can't hold out those final few days until the next season of whiskey swilling misogyny, then hit up the video above and make your own story in the meantime. Just don't forget to take your shoes off before bursting into Cooper's office.
LotRO's Yule Festival Theatre transforms players into actors
It started as a simple idea: To include an interactive theater experience with Lord of the Rings Online's revamped Yule Festival. However, as Turbine's "Rhidden" writes in a new dev diary, the simple idea became fiendishly complex in application. With the advent of next week's festival, players will be invited to Frostbluff Theatre in Winter-home to watch "The Curious Disappearance of Mad Baggins," the story of Bilbo's vanishing at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring told from the Hobbits' point of view. What's interesting is that Turbine wants players to be involved, both as audience members (throwing flower petals or rotten fruit, based on the performances) and as potential actors (who may "choose their own adventure" with emotes to complete the story). Because the LotRO team wanted this to be more than just a "Simon Says" game, they created an intricate script and whipped up a powerful, yet invisible, NPC called "The Audience" that handles the interaction and score-keeping. Based on performances, actors can be rewarded with titles for stellar performances as well as horrible ones. Rhidden promises that no two performances should play out the same. Read more about this truly unique festival event over at LotRO's site!
Hyperspace Beacon: Star Wars Galaxies 2
It happens all the time: When a new game is coming out we attempt to compare it to something familiar. "Jumpgate Evolution is like EVE combined with Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed." "Guild Wars 2's battles are scalable like Warhammer's." Even Rich Vogel, the Executive Producer for Star Wars: The Old Republic, couldn't get away from comparing his crafting system to an existing MMO when we interviewed him at E3. "It will be very similar to what WoW has," is what he said. Granted, Blaine Christine later set our minds at ease at PAX: "I think it's a different take on crafting than what people will be expecting. It's not the standard implementation." Unfortunately, the stigma of comparison was already there. One of my favorite features of MMO creation is the fact that there are no real rules regarding gameplay style. Granted, in the early days of MMO design, a creator had to consider the heavy latency of dial-up connections, so most games were designed to be turn-based. However, now there really is no limit to gameplay style, so there are no rules regarding what makes a game an MMO besides its having a persistent online world. There are no rules that say a game must have similar gameplay to other games that came before, even a prequel. Guild Wars 2 is a great example of this, yet people, inevitably, are going to attempt to compare Guild Wars and its sequel -- sometimes to the point of being unfair about it. Current Star Wars fans cannot help but compare SWTOR to Star Wars Galaxies. Follow me after the break as I make an attempt to debunk this stigma.
Choose Your Own Adventure available for iPhone as U-Ventures
If you, like me, were a big scifi/fantasy reader at a young age, you probably remember the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series. It was a series of books in which, every chapter or so, you could make a choice that affected the story, and you were then prompted to turn to a certain page to continue the story after that choice. Edward Packard was the original author of that series, and he's now teamed up with an iPhone app company to create U-Ventures, a throwback iPhone application that works as an interactive, e-book style Choose You Own Adventure. The first book is called "Return to the Cave of Time" (after the first book in the original series), and just like the old series, it offers up a set of second-person branching paths. Unfortunately, at US$3.99, the app is pretty expensive. Reviews say that there are only about 15 minutes of content to go through here, and while the old books were short, there are a lot of other interactive storytelling options on the App Store in the form of games and other e-books. But as a retro return to the old form, it's a nice taste of what's possible. I'm hoping that Packard will update the idea a little bit and make it a little more iPhone-friendly next time. Or, ... you could just roll your own. Our own Victor Agreda wrote about iPod-friendly CYOA books a long time ago. Download some of those onto your iPod, and you could be right back in those old pre-video game days of interactive storytelling. [via Slashdot]
Choose my adventure with WoW.com profiles
We're all still slaving away on WoW.com, finding bugs and filing feedback. To help that process along, we're going to try a little experiment. I'm going to level a character from level 1 to level 80, and all of it will be documented on my WoW.com profile. The hook is that you guys are going to decide most aspects of this character, such as race, class, and talent spec.Such things will be determined largely via polls right here on the front page of WoW.com, where I'll be giving weekly updates on my progress along with what I've learned about the class and the world and any other observations I might have. If you want a little more detail on the process such as where I'm going, what I've done, and any other little notes I make via the Adventurer's Note feature, you can follow that on my profile. If you don't dig our profiles portion of the site, hey, no problem. You'll still get weekly updates right here on the blog until I'm level 80.There are two polls: Race and Class. I will play whichever choices are the most popular. If the chosen race can't actually be the chosen class, I'm going to go with whatever is the most popular class that I can actually play as that race. The polls are below, and there's a little more information behind the cut underneath them.Update: Polls will remain open so those who voted can still see the results, but as of May 22nd, Gnome Warlock won the polls and the adventures have begun.%Poll-30341% %Poll-30352%
New Furbolg form casting animation
Sure, this is hardly the most important change to come down in patch 3.0.2, but anything Furbolg is worth a mention in my book.Personally, a Furbolg casting is more than enough excitement for me, but you, our readers, are discerning people, and we know you'd like a little bit of insight tailored to your own expectations, so we're going "choose your own adventure" on this one. You can read either one of the next two sections of this post whether you're the sarcastic and cynical reader type or the excited, "can't get enough rumors and speculation" type:Meh: "So Blizzard improved an animation only used by lowbies (Alliance lowbies at that) with an obscure quest item? Is this why we can't have more battlegrounds?"OMG Rumorz: "Emerald Dream expansion confirmed, with playable Furblog races! I can't wait!"There you go: either you get a chance to whine that Blizzard isn't working on more important things, or you can extrapolate a ton of rumors from something that probably took a developer a few minutes to do. Enjoy.Thanks, Acyronius!
Choose Your Own Adventure on iPod
If you're of a certain age (which I am), you may fondly remember a little series of books called Choose Your Own Adventure. Right around the time a little game company called Infocom was really cranking out the interactive computer games, which I spent countless hours playing on my Apple ][, CYOA books were a regular staple at my house. Yeah, we'd all skip ahead to make sure we weren't about to wind up as ant food, but the books did a lot to foster reading across the country, long before Harry Potter was a gleam in Rowling's eye.Anyway, Choose Your Own Adventure books are back! Sure, you can buy dead tree versions. But you can also buy iPod versions, which use the iPod's primitive hyperlinking in the Notes. And as astute reader Amy pointed out to us, there's a free sample iPod CYOA book, The Abominable Snowman, on their website. It's neat to see the old series faithfully reproduced, but even better knowing I can carry these around in my pocket (and read them to my kids).
