New Game: Choice of the Star Captain

We’re proud to announce that our newest game, Choice of the Star Captain, is now available for Kindle, iOS, Android, and, via the Chrome Web Store, Windows, OS X, and Linux. It’s a hilarious interactive science-fiction novel where your choices determine how the story proceeds.

choiceofgames.com/star-captain/redirect.php

Fight on the front lines of the war between humanity and the hideous Blobs. (Not that anyone has actually seen a Blob up close, but everyone knows they have tentacles. Surely they’re hideous!) Go on stealth missions, run alien blockades, and investigate mysterious planets, “aided” by Lloyd, your insufferably obnoxious shipboard computer.

We hope you enjoy playing Choice of the Star Captain. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better we’ll rank.

Lots of platforms. But not, I notice, any for simply downloading the file and playing offline for anyone who doesn’t happen to use Chrome or to own a Kindle, iOS or Android…

I’m sure if you can provide them a secure means of selling their games to players on other browsers with analogous profit margins and the relative distribution control this grants them, the Choice of folks would be happy to entertain you.

Ok, here’s a thought - provide an offline game, in your own method of choice, and sell it yourselves by taking orders, or using PayPal or some sort of other service. Would they be happy to entertain me now?

If the availability and the general policies are really largely dictated by the selling end of it, as you suggest, then suddenly I’m not really interested in the Choice Of Games venture anymore. Textfyre at least eventually agreed to also sell the .ulx file to Shadow in the Cathedral, instead of sticking to silverlight which had its issues (most notably memory leaking as we saved games). Best thing Textfyre ever did. CoG marketing mostly to Androids and stuff doesn’t bother me. Targeting to users of Google Chrome as the only way of playing it on a computer does.

Sorry I missed this thread earlier.

Peter, the Chrome app does work offline. If you’d like a file for archival purposes, we can send you the Chrome CRX file as well. (It does require Chrome to play the CRX, but Chrome is free, and easier to install than an IF interpreter.)

Building a version of the game that works offline outside of any browser is something I’d like to do, but our research seems to indicate that very few people are interested in buying our games that way. Chrome’s “packaged web apps” were the easiest way we could bring something to market. Despite this, I want to make sure our apps are available for sale via the Windows Store and Mac App Store, which is not possible with a CRX, so I know we’ll have to cross that bridge at some point.

Before that, though, our current goal is to try more ways of allowing people to play our games without paying for them, e.g. by referring other customers, answering consumer surveys, etc.

That’s absurd. There are even IF interpreters that don’t even need to be installed at all.

Kind of a moot point anyway. If you’re savvy enough to have found your way to the Choice website, I think you ought to be able to figure out how to download and install a browser.

The majority of operating systems come with a browser pre-installed.

Bundle the games with a super-low-footprint browser a la Lynx? But I guess it probably doesn’t handle the requisite Javascript…

Right on!

I only meant to compare Chrome with other standalone installable IF interpreters, like Gargoyle, Frotz, and Spatterlight.

On Windows, Chrome is a signed executable using Microsoft’s ClickOnce technology; it’s really easy to install. Most open-source installers aren’t even in the same league.

While I think that the idea of installing another browser just to play ChoiceOfGames is absurd, for many reasons which I won’t go into, I thank you for your response. The way you’re going about it is, indeed, sensible, and I suppose you can’t please everyone.