Hello.

[JagenSprom]

I'm Jagen. I used to play a lot of Choice of Games titles when I was younger, and I remembered their existence randomly after looking into a new type of challenge/cooperative game.

It's done through something called Archipelago, which essentially randomizes items, power-ups, achievements, etc. across multiple games that people are playing. This makes it so players are, at times, dependent on others to find and grab stuff from their own games in order to progress.

I thought about what kinds of games might be easiest to implement this kind of system into, and thought about something like the games published by Choice of Games. I remembered there being a shared programming language and figured somewhere like a modding community might be the best place to start to learn about how something like this might be implemented. Are there tools which allow one to look at the internals of these games to see how events and variables are most commonly formatted?

 

[daniellwtf]

I'm Jagen. I used to play a lot of Choice of Games titles when I was younger, and I remembered their existence randomly after looking into a new type of challenge/cooperative game.

It's done through something called Archipelago, which essentially randomizes items, power-ups, achievements, etc. across multiple games that people are playing. This makes it so players are, at times, dependent on others to find and grab stuff from their own games in order to progress.

I thought about what kinds of games might be easiest to implement this kind of system into, and thought about something like the games published by Choice of Games. I remembered there being a shared programming language and figured somewhere like a modding community might be the best place to start to learn about how something like this might be implemented. Are there tools which allow one to look at the internals of these games to see how events and variables are most commonly formatted?

Possible, but probably not worth it. It would be much harder than adding Archipelago support to something like a platformer, RPG, or roguelike. Choice games are built around branching narrative choices rather than item progression, so making them work would require things like reverse-engineering or directly modifying the game, creating location checks for choices, achievements, and story flags, defining progression logic, and building a custom Archipelago client/server integration.

I could see someone doing something custom like that from the start, with choices becoming “checks,” companions being randomized, and so on. But it would need to be designed specifically for that purpose rather than retrofitting an existing Choice of Games title. And since text games on Choice of Games or Itch.io are usually made with at least minimal platform support in mind (to sell for money, obviously), I really cannot see many people putting in all that work for something that may or may not even be fun in practice. It just does not seem worth it compared to other alternatives.

TLDR: Possible but HIGHLY unlikely.

 

[JagenSprom]

Possible, but probably not worth it. It would be much harder than adding Archipelago support to something like a platformer, RPG, or roguelike. Choice games are built around branching narrative choices rather than item progression, so making them work would require things like reverse-engineering or directly modifying the game, creating location checks for choices, achievements, and story flags, defining progression logic, and building a custom Archipelago client/server integration.

I could see someone doing something custom like that from the start, with choices becoming “checks,” companions being randomized, and so on. But it would need to be designed specifically for that purpose rather than retrofitting an existing Choice of Games title. And since text games on Choice of Games or Itch.io are usually made with at least minimal platform support in mind (to sell for money, obviously), I really cannot see many people putting in all that work for something that may or may not even be fun in practice. It just does not seem worth it compared to other alternatives.

TLDR: Possible but HIGHLY unlikely.

I hear your concerns, but this wasn't a visit specifically for the purpose of doing this on my own. I'm looking to study the formatting and check system to present to much more experienced people. Archipelago officially supports 81 games at this time, but due to allowing people to release non-verified cores in their Discord server, there are about 500 extra games in various states of development for use with Archipelago, and even more when including games not strictly allowed in their main Discord server. I'm not asking for full one-on-one coaching or anything. Rather, I'm needing Just links to useful tools/guides for looking under the hood of these games and to interpret the ChoiceScript language in a way to present this idea itself.

 

[daniellwtf]

I hear your concerns, but this wasn't a visit specifically for the purpose of doing this on my own. I'm looking to study the formatting and check system to present to much more experienced people. Archipelago officially supports 81 games at this time, but due to allowing people to release non-verified cores in their Discord server, there are about 500 extra games in various states of development for use with Archipelago, and even more when including games not strictly allowed in their main Discord server. I'm not asking for full one-on-one coaching or anything. Rather, I'm needing Just links to useful tools/guides for looking under the hood of these games and to interpret the ChoiceScript language in a way to present this idea itself.

Try CSIDE or Chronicler