Choice of the Petal Throne: Rise to glory in Tékumel™!

We’re proud to announce that our newest game, Choice of the Petal Throne by Danielle Goudeau, is now available for Steam, iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire. It’s 25% off during launch week.

choiceofgames.com/petal-thr … hp?src=ifo

In the Empire of the Petal Throne™, will you find glory, or a knife in your back?

“Choice of the Petal Throne” is a 124,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Danielle Goudeau, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

M.A.R. Barker’s world of Tékumel™ is a fantasy universe like no other, where South American, Middle Eastern, and Indian cultures collide. The princes and princesses of the Tsolyáni empire vie for their father’s mystical Petal Throne, tearing the nation apart with civil war and political intrigues.

As a captain in one of their armies, will you play as male or female, gay straight or bi? A brave and forthright soldier, a hedonistic intriguer with a heart of gold, or scheming double agent?

(Tékumel™ and Empire of the Petal Throne™ are trademarks of M.A.R. Barker and are used with permission of the Tékumel Foundation. For additional information, please visit tekumelfoundation.org.)

Why Tékumel?

Author Danielle Goudeau explains,

Hi Dan,

Choice of the Petal Throne is not showing up on new releases at Steam. I don’t mean ‘popular new releases’, I mean the list that has all of them.

You can search for it, but otherwise it is invisible.

You might want to check on that.

Also, you might consider trying to get Choice of titles on the “Upcoming” list – even just a few days before, because some people look at those and it is a good chance at additional eyeballs.

While I’m at it, an additional Steam sales strategy you don’t seem to be using is the “recently updated games” list. I seem to remember you’ve done a couple updates on games but I’ve never seen one of those updates pop up on the Recently Updated stream. That particular stream – by the quirk of the main Steam page’s odd design – is actually visible from the top page. I often see – and more importantly, click on – games I’ve never heard of mentioned in the updates.

Even if you don’t do a technical update, a strategy guide or addition of Steam cards is also an occasion for using the Updated Games list.

My understanding is that there’s no unfiltered list of all new releases any more. You have to reach a certain minimum of popularity in order to get onto the new releases list at all. Then the “Popular New Releases” list includes qualified new releases, sorted by popularity.

Good point about the Upcoming list.

Re: “recently updated,” we’ve only done minor bug fix releases. You have to click a button saying that you’ve done a “significant” update to get on that list; they discourage exaggeration. Maybe the moral of that story is that we should plan to hold some content back and release it later, specifically so we can click the button, but but but I dislike that. :-p

There’s a tiny button labelled “All New Releases” below the main list. It is easy to miss. Here is a direct link to the Windows version.

store.steampowered.com/search/?s … ESC&os=win

Fortunately, Petal Throne is there now. There must have been a delay.

(One other option is to install the very popular Enhanced Steam extension to a browser, which will add a new releases tab.)

I was never quite clear on the scale of your bug releases, and no, I wouldn’t withhold something just so you can advertise you fixed it. However, something like Slammed (if it had already been on Steam) would have been good to put on there as adding new endings/content.

Yeah, I claim that list isn’t really “all new releases” any more, and hasn’t been for a few months; only just now are we popular enough to participate.

Given it is possible (if you’re, uh, a little obsessive) to get details via alternate sites/plugins, yeah, it’s the real list. It’s just nobody (in relative terms) is looking at that list. It’s rather hidden away there.

How would the other sites even know about new releases that weren’t on that list?

It’s possible to access the Steam database w/o using just what the website says off the list. (Installing Enhanced Steam on a browser is probably the easiest thing if you want to muck around.)