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Hello everyone! This is Pierre of Celestory Studio. We love gamebooks, text adventures, and all other forms of interactive storytelling media out there. Which is why, we have developed the Celestory Creator! A very easy to use game engine that allows you to create your own interactive story in just a few minutes. You can create a video game for any platform you want (iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa, Steam) a chatbot, an Alexa skill, or interactive video without the need to code!

The Celestory Creator allows you to create a graph that shows you all possible branches of your story. You can add your own media to your project (ie: music, images, videos etc) or you can use the ones that come with the engine. Once you are finished with your game, you can then generate it and monetize it right away!

If you are interested and would like to download the Celestory creator, or would like to know more information, you can go to our website: https://celestorystudio.com/en/ 

You can also contact us for any other questions you may have at, [email protected]

Thank you for your attention!

So we would need to pay for this system, with the upside of being able to make money without giving any of it to Jason Hill?

You can use the engine for free and you get access to all of the content included in the engine for your games (images, sounds etc). With the free version, you are also able to generate as many games as you want for whichever system and app-store you want (iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa, Steam etc). However, if you would like to modify your game after it has been released, you are not able to do it after 15 days with the free version.

Can we see an example of a game on Steam/Android etc made with it?

Yes, of course! Here is a link to History Oggy on the appstore. In this case, this is an educational game for children to learn history with Oggy in the form of an interactive story. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/history-oggy/id1301368709 

Here is also a link to a demo of Mighty Magic which is available on itch.io. This is a fantasy game in a visual novel format. https://pierrelacombe.itch.io/gladiator  

Thank you for being interested!

If you would like to just create a game primarily with text choices, we recommend you use the chatbot option at the beginning when you click on create new project. You would just need to add the amount of characters the story will have in the settings option. Then after, you can just begin your story and just use dialogue and choice blocks. You can add an image in a block if you would like as well, or add an image block separately . Many of the other options are if you want to get more complex with your story, such as adding certain conditions that can affect the story. For example, if early on in the story a character has the option of picking up a key, you can continue your branch graph from the condition block. One branch will be the true condition meaning the character picked up the key, the other one will be false, meaning the character didn't pick it up.  The engine will automatically know this so you can save time, and it will take the player on the correct branch path depending on his/her decisions. 

Thanks, I'll give this a try.

The CYS editor allows the option of variable tracking and basic IF/THAN/ELSE scripting as well as an inventory system, and choice additions or restrictions based on all that, so that's what most of us are used to working with.

If I can get together a working demo of using the program in ways that would be applicable to us, I'll try scribbling up a little tutorial here for anyone else that wanted to try it, but I'm old and learning new things is hard and I'm supposed to be writing a fantasy epic right now so I cannot promise these things. I think Ogre was messing around with it in the Discord last night too but of course he's easily confused.

Thank you for your question!

As of right now, there are no games available on Steam made with our engine yet. We are a startup and as you say, we are starting to finally get things off the ground. The option to put games on Steam was added recently, but we know there will be some games added to Steam very soon. 

For the revenue question, yes, the 20% revenue fee is after what Steam would take.

 

That is the latest version of the engine, and we are actually working to release the next version (V5) of the engine very soon, which will have many new helpful features. We are hoping to release it this fall. 

20% is really quite good tbf, for an opportunity to sort of cut out the middleman. It does look like it's not quite designed for the style of game we're most interested in here, (something a little like Twine, but compilable into a format for app stores this way would be ideal for us) but it may be possible once I spend a little more time getting over the learning curve.

Too bad the Choice of Games forum probably wouldn't allow you to advertise. There's a lot of Hosted Games authors there that would jump at the chance to actually keep the majority of their sales money.