Larry Hosken: New: Game Report: Episode

Episode is another choose-your-own-adventure game app, kinda in the spirit of Choice of Games and Heart's Choice. But it doesn't restrict itself to text to tell stories; instead it uses a combination of text, pictures, and cartoon-y animations. The book 50 Years of Text Games describes it pretty well, in passing, in its chapter on another game, Choices: The Freshman:

At the same time [as the popularity of the mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood], an app called Episode (Pocket Gems 2013), which let players build their own interactive romance stories, was becoming another unstoppable hit. The app featured 2D characters who could be posed and animated like paper dolls to illustrate dialogue-driven stories; the company described it as "an interactive animated television show" and a "modern, mobile-first Choose Your Own Adventure." Episode also became wildly popular, especially teenage girls able to play through huge libraries of stories built by their peers.

The "huge libraries" are pretty impressive, effort-wise. Episode now has over 100,000 stories. Writing an Episode story ain't easy. When I see the phrase "animated like paper dolls," I nod my head and don't think about it much. In practice, it means that where a text story author might write "Chris paced nervously," an Episode author needs to enter in something like

• Move Chris' "paper doll" from screen coordinates (20, 30) to (50, 30) while playing the built-in walk animation
• Pause the walk animation, mirror-flipping Chris' "doll"
• Now move it back from (50, 30) to (20, 30), resuming the walk animation
• Pause the walk animation, mirror-flipping Chris' "doll" back to original
• Repeat

…then stare at resulting scene, decide it doesn't look quite right, tweak the numbers, stare some more…

I get tired just thinking about writing one scene, let alone one story's worth of scenes, let alone 100,000 stories; but that just goes to show I'm not millions of teenaged girls starved for creative outlets.

By the time I found Episode, it was ~10 years after it started. Things have changed. There are now two tiers of story:
Community: written by anybody (with the gumption to painstakingly move Chris' paper doll around the screen)
Episode Official: Stories guided by Episode's editorial team: hand-picked authors team up with pro editors, artists, etc

Those Episode Official stories are important because they make the money. It's free to download the Episode App; it's free to play the games. How does Episode make money from all this? Episode games can encourage readers to spend money. A game might present you a choice:

If you want the main character to wear a proper gown to the ball, you'll spend 19 gems, and those 19 gems will set you back about $1.99.

In recent years, the Episode Official games have pushed the gem choices really hard. In an Episode Official game, you know you're approaching a gown-or-potato-sack decision because the characters all start discussing the importance of fashion. When you've clicked through this not-so-interesting dialog a while, you finally get the gown-or-potato-sack choice. When you choose the potato sack, the game immediately asks "Are you sure? It's pretty smelly" and it repeats the gown-or-potato-sack choice, only relenting after you refuse a second time. If you're playing an Episode Official game, you can also expect icky choices like

You and I, dear reader, see these choices and have the sense to put down that Episode Official game and find something else to do with our time. But Episode keeps cranking out more of those games. I guess they've figured out that these icky choices are their best business model; they've got some customers who who will spend 19💎 to help a fictional dog and not quit the game, but instead keep going.

OK, so avoid the Episode Official games, stick to the Community games. Some of the Community games are pretty darned good. OK, I don't like 99% of them; but there are 100,000+ Community Games, so figure there are 1000 good ones. They might nudge you to spend some gems on a choice, but they won't have the Episode Official icky borderline-abusive-manipulative editorial voice.

The best games play to the medium's strengths. They don't try to convey everything with dialog; instead, they animate the characters to use gestures, body language… but since there's just these pre-made animations to choose from, a game author/director has to get creative. Like, maybe there's no great animation for a swimmer to wave to people on shore, but an author might play a dance-move animation and conceal the swimmer's legs and it'll look like they're waving. It's very constrained; and interesting art comes from interesting constraints.

Here are my faves:

Competitive Edge by Piccalilly

The main character is an aggressively competitive over-achieving college freshman. She landed at the same university as her high school rival. It's pretty funny; the game often presents you with three bad choices, because you're steering a character incapable of being humble, keeping quiet, etc. But things tend to work out OK for her nonetheless.

The Ruby Tiara by Wincy Writes

Vicious palace intrigue. No, more vicious than that.

Switch by Alusza:

A playboy college student has been cursed: He's been transformed into a lady. To restore himself to his old form, he must heal seven hearts he broke. For each broken heart he heals, he turns back into a dude one day a week. Despite these transformations, he's trying to maintain his school life and a budding romance. Wacky hijinx ensue.

Wow, that's not a lot of recommended games, considering that I had are 100,000+ to choose from. I suspect that "100,000+" number includes not-yet-finished games. My recommendations above are all complete, but my reading list on the app includes many many not-yet-finished games. It takes so much effort to crank out content for this platform; I suspect many authors get a few chapters in and give up. There's one game Magicka: Clubhouse of the Cursed, set in a fairy-tale world about a support group for people suffering from curses. Like, what if the Frog Prince and Sleeping Beauty and all them came together to help each other deal with their feelings and even break each others' curses? That's an awesome idea for a story, an awesome idea for a game, an amazing idea for a story-game… and the six chapters I read were great but dammit, the author hasn't updated the story in over six months. How long until I see a seventh chapter? Will we see the end of the story before the heat death of the universe?

There's some good stuff here; just don't get your hopes up about more chapters coming out in those not-yet-finished games any time soon.