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Hey everybody, I don't mean for my first post to sound like an ad.  I am working for a gaming company that does interactive storytelling games on the mobile. I wanted to ask if anybody would be interested in giving us a shot? You can send me a PM and I can send you my email so I can share details.

I'm trying to help promote a game for my company.  It's called Secrets: Game Of Choices. https://www.facebook.com/SecretsGameofchoices/

You can download the game here for free. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.OnyxGames.Secrets&hl=en

Let me know what you think. The company is taking advice to make changes to make the game or stories better overall.  Thanks

Yeah, basically, you're allowed to advertise your stuff in the forums (as far as I'm aware) so you can just say what the company is and what it is that you're looking for. ^_^

Thanks for the feedback. I made a second post with all the details.

Thanks for the feedback. I added the details you were asking for in my second post. If you are interested my work email is also listed. Send me a message anytime.

I'm definitely interested in writing procedural story for games, though I'm not sure that's what you're talking about. I'm also not sure if I have time for anything new now anyway, but I may be interested in hearing about the details.

My email is in my post. When you have the time, email me anytime.

I heard you guys loud and clear so here is the full pitch.?

I'm the senior content editor for Onyx Games. I'm in charge of storyboards and new story ideas. We create interactive story games for mobile. My company is looking for writers who can help write stories. Each story (or book) has 15 and or more chapters. Each chapter is about 4000 to 5000 words. The writing is mainly dialogue, so when there is a conflict, special events, or secret option. The player is given a choice of what happens next or can unlock a secret part of the story. Here is a link to our game so you can check it out and see what we do.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.OnyxGames.Secrets

1. If you already have a story that is already written and you feel you can make small changes that fit our format. You pick this option.

2. If you have an idea for a new story you can send a short description. How many characters and scenes. The description of the characters (Age, Nationality, Job). Are the scenes at night or day. If there is anything special that needs to be in the space. Let us know and we can design the scene based on your description.

We give a time table of 15 days to send us your story. A story can be ongoing, it doesn't have to end at chapter 15. So if you send 15 chapters around the 15-day mark and that's not the end of the story don't worry. That's all you have to send. We can extend the contract after we pay you for the first batch of chapters sent. Any extra payment for the rest of the chapters will be up for discussion if there is no set amount of chapters to determine the end of a story. Or we just renew or extend the contract and we pay you for another for another batch of chapters. It's up to you and can be negotiated. Please let me know how much you would like to be paid for your services. Again ask me anything you need to know I am here to help.

Hmm, I'll ask something I didn't in the other thread, as given this new information it feels relevant now, also I do think others might be interested as well.

Is there a specific genre the stories ought to be? This whole post makes it look like the writer has massive freedom in regards to the type of story they'll be making, barring the restrictions of the style (i.e. mostly dialogue) and the program (it is a choices styled game, not an shooter or something, after all), and the fact that it is chapter based, but I imagine there has to be some sort of restriction for the type of content Onyx Games is looking for, right?

Looking at the application description, "Discover Secrets in romance, fantasy, drama in thrilling stories," shows some pretty board things, and some of the specific descriptions of games also show variety, but two of three have romance as the common thread. Yet, at least here, it is not specified as necessary, and "Miami Sunrise" doesn't mention it either, so perhaps it could just be that those games happen to have those elements.

Anyway, to me this looks rather good: having stories reach wider audiences is always great, getting paid is also great, having freedom to write what you want is also great, but the thing is, I'm curious about how much freedom there actually is in regards to the stories, mainly because Onyx Games looks pretty big (not a mega-crop or anything, but bigger than a handful of people trying out being a studio, so big by my standards, is what I mean), and so I imagine they are taking this pretty seriously, and as such might have certain things that they are looking for (which they clearly do, but I mean more specific things).

I imagine it is possible that you will explain more to people who go and contact you by email (or pm), as that shows serious interest, where the specifics matter a lot more, and if that is the case, that is perfectly understandable. Guess I'm just curious, seeing as this types of potential offer/opportunity doesn't show up every day.

TL;DR
Any specific genres? It seems like no, but it wasn't outright stated (just heavily implied), and confirmation one way or the other would almost certainly be appreciated.

I'm happy to answer your questions. Most games like ours focus on love and romance in the stories. Our goal is to break away and allow other genres to be featured. Freedom is key. We want the writers to be true to themselves and their style. Fantasy, Thriller, Mystery, Historical, Sexy, whatever the genre. We want to present quality storytelling. If there are extremes, then we can filter and ask to tone somethings down. The second post I made is the bulk of the details. Payment discussion would be made through emails. Also I would send documents that explains the process of writing your story into the game. Onyx games has been around for almost a year now. We are still small, but not micro. If you have a story you would like to make into game, please email me. Let me know if you have anymore questions.

Yeah, this looks really interesting and I'll definitely look more into it later.

One question though, regarding payment, would you be paying author's in installments (like a certain amount per chapter) or would it be a single lump sum after the story is complete?

Payments would be made installments if that is what you would like. There are many options my company would be happy to abide by to make you or any other writer to feel comfortable working with us. We'd love to give you a shout and credit for your story. On all our social media pages. 

Lol. My comment about exposure was actually a joke regarding the massive amount of people who ask writers, artists and graphic designers to do several hours worth of work for free, in exchange for a "shout out". 

I'll take payment in exposure if 30% the rise above my average book sales in a month can match the pay I would have expected from the job I did, and they can show me that they did it. Otherwise they're getting an invoice.

Yeah, but what I'm talking about is 15 year olds saying, "Hey, can you draw me something for free? I'll give you a shout out! I have 53 facebook friends, 30 followers on twitter and 7 subscribers to my youtube channel where I mimic other people's shitty prank videos and aimlessly follow my cat around." 

Briar, surely you must have a lot of exposure with the CoG/social media connections.

I mean I do absolutely nothing with social media or anything popular and somehow my name still pops up in places.

Guys, the joke was intended as: "Are you actually a professional company, or are you just some random first-timer with a passion project who's going to pay us in shout-outs and exposure bucks?" 

Yeah I know, but I was just speaking in general.

Ah, okay... But yeah, I'm not really sure how many followers a person has to have for the exposure to be worth monetary value. 

Love it

Hey no worries, I'm always happy to meet expectations. I know we never met but I am happy to have your approval.  Thanks for asking questions and hearing out. I honestly could not have asked for more. I'm here whenever you are stricken with inspiration.

Personally, I would prefer to be paid in EXPOSURE! After all, what could be more beneficial to an aspiring writer or artist than a shout out on someone's youtube channel? ^_^

Any chance you could give us an estimate on what you'd be willing to pay? I mean, I'd like to be paid $1 million per chapter, but I'd highly doubt you have the budget. 

Hold on to your hat, but we let you make us an offer for payment. Skills and talents are snowflakes each is unique. All are beautiful. So who I'm to place a value on something I can only appreciate from a distance. I only ask for reasonable offers because we have to build trust as we work together for the first time. If the first team up is successful then, by all means, ask for more. Make an offer based on the workload and time it would take to complete.  For 15 chapters 4000 words per chapter with a 2-week timetable to complete the story. Adding choices for the players to choose from during the story. Meet these goals and you're golden.

I went ahead and condensed the content and the links from the other threads in the original post on this one since you got like 5 threads about the same subject.

That's fine, I don't want or mean to spam on the page. If I'm breaking rules let me know and I will stop right away.

Nah, you're good. Just keeping all this to one thread.

In any case, I've already written a romance CYOA. Feel free to look it over to see if it would be a good fit.

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/viewer/default.aspx?StoryId=8097

LMFAO!!!

Please understand that this a future classic that schoolchildren will have to remember as the greatest romance of the modern age.  If you guys take this opportunity now, your brand will receive an instant boost above all others.  

You'll never have an opportunity like this again.

Yeah! I would be happy to give it a read. Thanks for the link.

... OH! It's THOSE kind of games! 

Well, I'll definitely think about it. Obviously I've got two massive projects in the work already, but a game where you're only writing dialogue is going to be REALLY frikkin' quick to write, and it'd be a great little side job if there were enough shiny pennies. 

... And I just realized the "secape" bit. LMAO! 

LOL! No FB currency, but we do contest on FB so players can win free in-game currency.  Check us out. Our type of games may not be your cup of tea. But maybe you can enjoy the book covers our artist work very hard on.  You can find us at SecretsGameofchoices.

Change the first picture with the clothing choices of a harlequin outfit and a school girl outfit. She should be currently wearing nothing at all.

Change the second picture with the choices: "My father, my brother, my sister"

In the third picture, the choices are fine, but the outcomes of the choices should obviously be becoming a royal whore, chopping the queen's head off, and having decadent lesbian sex with the queen respectively.

Change the fourth picture choices with "Resist and stab him in the crotch" and "Let him RAPE me"

Or, if you'd like to go the really fun route,

"My sister, my daughter, my cat." 

Gotta save something for the premium content.

The premium would feature her as a serial killer that kill whoever she dates.

So you have to choose who you liked most previously in the story and kill them without knowing. And then she dates the rotting corpse a la Yoshikage Kira.

Also, i'm kinda ashamed i even played this when i was bored some time ago. It's literally a very simple story with some fucking "romance" in-between that you have to use some diamond currency and microtransactions to pick the good choices (ex: There's a palace coup going on. You can either pay diamonds to become the king, bang your head on the door or go around playing Robespierre.)

They could easily just put non-intrusive ads and leave all choices free for users. Magium got a large following (at least in Brazil) this way: advertising gives the author money and you could get other chapters for free just getting achievements, which also encourages replaying.

So in the end, you aren't forced to buy anything to choose what you want, instead you can either put some effort or, if you have the money, buy the pass and support the creator directly, getting rid of ads and achievement hunting in the proccess. And the storytelling is good, of course, but maybe i just don't like these games lol.

You have a solid idea, want to plant that seed and watch it grow to into freaking unimaginable dream?

Well, people seemed to have noticed the type of story-telling program now, so I can ask some more questions!

If you look at the storygames on this site (or the Choice Of Games as well) you will see they are much more akin to traditional books, in that (generally) there are no visuals to go along with it, and there is a lot of writing. This leads to the writer having to describe everything that is relevant and what have you, but this also gives a massive degree of freedom in how to tell the story. When writing mostly dialogue to convey the story, it is obviously much different, and due to the presentation being all on the phone through the game of choices program (as I'll call it) a question arises:

How much flexibility is there in the form that the story will be told in? What I specifically mean by this is how different can future stories be to the ones currently there. I'm not talking about genre, as you have answered that already, but I'm talking about the technical limitations and how far can things be pushed. I'm assuming things aren't going to be drastically different going forward on the technical side of things, but that they may be different regarding the story content instead, is this assumption correct?

The way the stories are currently handled there is vastly different to here, and lacks a certain type of appeal due to there not being as much space or room to convey information (I'm oversimplifying here, I'd say it is far more complicated than that, but suffice to say, it is different).

Obviously, this is not going to be for everyone, you have to work within your limitations and what have you, and I'm sure there are people who like that form of stories as well anyway, so the question is, are the current works there, broadly speaking, the type of stories you are looking for? (Again not talking about genre or themes, rather the style of execution).

I hope my questions are clear enough here, so that you hopefully understand what I'm trying to say, as I may be a bit general in some areas, but alas, this post is a bit too long anyway, so I'll stop here. Got some things I need to go take care of, heh.

What makes this different from Choices or Episode?  I hope the story quality itself is better than Episode, but what makes this original?

I think games have a fantastic and untapped storytelling potential, especially games that have a lot of procedural content and run simulations rather than scripted events. It hasn't really appeared yet, but it has huge potential, and is going to happen sooner or later. Sooner if indie producers are smart, later if I have to do it myself.

When I hear procedural I think of game maps which make the map as you play, thus not being handcrafted but rather something made following rules given by the developers. Think Minecraft, the 'world' has a seed which determines how things are made. Is that the kind of "procedural content" you are talking about?

Simulations makes me think of imitating real life, or just aiming for great realism or being very in depth. Putting it together with procedural, I take you are thinking of stuff which is not hard scripted, but rather made by the computer so as to be considerably more open to great influence by the reader/player while being extremely in depth?

According to my very rudimentary understanding of computers generating stories, it is not a technology that has been anywhere close to perfected. Computers may be able to find patterns, and with self learning stuff even create things that make some sense, but generally you won't be having a quality story without a person going over it to give it the necessary polish. As I understand, a major issue lies in language not being 100% concrete, meaning changes over time, and people change the way they speak. Combine this with stories being pretty long and thus difficult to keep everything fitting together nicely as a complete picture, and it makes it pretty hard for computers to generate stories.

I don't recall hearing stuff regarding computer generated stories for a while, so the technology has probably gotten considerably better since I last heard about it, but as I understood, making it perfectly capable of quality story telling was something that was at the time viewed as boarder line impossible, due to storytelling being considerably complex for the type of stuff computers are good at.

Now throw in readers influencing the story through choices/actions and I really do not see how you will have something beyond a bare bones tech demo created in this day and age. Again, I am not an expert, and I'm far from informed, so feel free to correct my misunderstandings.

I certainly think it'd be really cool, but if you are talking about what I think you are, I really don't see it happening to a capacity that works on the scale and with the scope I feel you are hinting at. Again, I could be wrong, I am being at least somewhat cynical as well, so feel free to correct me.

Granted, another way I might look at what you are referring to is more so to do with players influencing the story more with less, as you mentioned, scripted events. So say you are talking to someone, rather than it being some cut-scene, you are in control and can shoot the person. Something like this is certainly possible according to my understanding, as that is more on the side of gaming and player input influencing stuff as opposed to a computer writing.

Anyway, you do appear passionate, which means you almost certainly have a better idea of all this than I do, so I'd love to hear some more about it (if you are willing), or at the very least, for you to expand on what you mean a bit more, as I am making an unhealthy amount of assumptions in this here post.

TL;DR
I think this isn't really relevant to this thread, seeing as the thread is about a company of a more traditional branching narrative game looking for writers, but I might be misunderstanding what you mean, so feel free to elaborate, as it does sound interesting.

The game they are working on isn't directly related to what I'm talking about, but it is about telling stories within games. Procedural generation relies on repeating patterns and rules, and has been used to create maps, spaceships, creatures, civilizations, buildings, cultures, and languages.

Stories are not that different. They are built from characters, settings, and plot, each of which has its own pieces that can be broken down into segments that can then be fit together again like legos. In short, they have the potential to be procedural. Many stories are already criticized as following formulas. The trick is to hide the repetitive elements well enough that the reader doesn't realize what's going on.

Books and chatterbots are already being written by computers, and their biggest problem is that their texts have no reference. Virtual environments, such as games, can provide that reference. Simulations have the potential to create stories, based on that principle.

But even without that, stories can be created based on their units of progression alone. I'm currently working on a system that does just that. It starts with the core conflict and character goals, and combines them with potential events associated with each goal, branching at junctions with player decisions associated with the starting goals. It's a work in progress, but I've already written story generation code designed for RPGs. They always have a bad ending that the players are trying to avert, at least in theory.

 

You hit the nail on the head. That's one of the problems we are having. When we have an ending in mind, we write to get to the end. So we have to follow a formula or we could end up writing 5 different endings for one story. Honestly, I don't think that is a bad thing. Choices made should reflect different outcomes in a story. Even if there are 3 endings. Its better than tying everything to one. My opinion the story feels forced if the writing is weak. Which is the trap I found myself in. 

Ah fascinating stuff, now I'm somewhat looking forward to it! Although it doesn't sound like something that'll be made overnight, but I feel I understand it better now. Will be interesting to see all the potential this has realized, since it appears to have a lot, which is definitely a good thing.

Could I trouble you to try the game, and tell me where we can fix problems so we can keep players interested? If this is not the type of game you play then your opinion really matters. Because I want to attract players that don't play these types of games. 

I think the issue for me is more in the style and the way the story ends up being presented.

The issue with this bias is that it means my 'opinion' would likely just end up being 'change lots of stuff because I personally like something else better'. And I'm not talking about changing things that would make some sense, but rather stupid things (things that aren't inherently wrong/bad), like the format which the story is presented through.

As an example to try and explain, it is like watching a web series with many episodes and saying: 'Eh, I'd prefer if it was just one big thing that goes on for an hour or two'. Or watching a movie and saying: 'Wish it was longer, with like many episodes and stuff'.

The medium/style of something shouldn't be getting changed just because some people prefer other things. Heck, here is another example, I read a book and go: 'Not bad... but maybe add pictures? Heck make it all animated, or maybe live action, and have it go for an hour or two'.

Books and movies can both exist! People can have a preference without it meaning that the thing they don't prefer should be changed to one that they do (unless, you know, you are specifically trying to target those people, but that is a bit of a different discussion to what I'm talking about).

It also doesn't help that I'm rather... lazy.

Look, as long as you are clearly advertising what the application provides on the app page, people who see it should be more than capable of figuring out if it is for them.

I will add that Mizal brought up some good questions regarding the word count and what the available screenshots show, so figuring out if they are misleading as to the actual content might be a good idea, since if they are, then adding just a few more screenshots may be a good idea, so as to ensure it is clear what the application is offering.

If I do find myself in a better spot to actually take a closer look, I'll make sure to send my feedback, one way or the other. Just at the current moment, I can't make any promises, and I wouldn't advise holding your breath.

I will mention that being open to feedback is definitely good, and something that is nice to see, especially considering how some companies can be a bit... ignorant towards public opinion. Goodwill with consumers is something I certainly view as great (but seeing as I am a consumer, that is probably to be expected, aha).

TL;DR
Regrettably, I don't think I'll be able to help in this regard (feedback), but if things do change, rest assured you'll know. However, I don't think you're missing out, as I think my feedback would likely end up being rather biased, potentially enough so that it'd be rendered practically useless.

We do have an art team that will make the characters and scenes based on the writer's descriptions. We do have to have a limit of around 10 to 15 characters. NPC's we can cheat. Like all shopkeepers can look the same unless there is one shopkeeper that holds importance. I think it would be great to leave descriptions for the narrator to use and move the story along. Also, it's a good way to cheat the word count for the chapters.   To answer your question about future stories. Consider new stories as standalone. What we did in the past stays in the past. What you do is the here and now. If the story is popular and readers want more. You write a sequel and move forward from there. If the opposite is true. Write a new story and see where that goes. I've written 5 stories and they all flopped LOL. That's not true College Desires has been doing good but I helped write that story. I can't take full credit for it. But I move on because I like writing. To answer your other question for technical parts. We have guides and samples stories you can study. We also send a simple test which is 100 lines of dialog. The first 25 lines have the full rundown. You see how choices are written and how they lead back into the main story. You see how we write ID's for characters, scenes and facial emotions. On line 26 you take over the story from there to line 100. You send it back to me and I go over the finer details of what to look out for. Error, mistakes or answering questions you had while writing the story. Once the test is done. All the technical parts just become repetitive eyes sores lol.  I hope I answered your questions.

Anytime 

Can anyone recommend other sites where I can an awesome forum group like this one? You all have been great, and the feedback has been top notch.

Choice of Games.

Wait, you mean a place with freedom of expression. nvm.

LMAO

I'm down for YouTube, but my company has to let me start pumping out videos. Even if they're just teasers. Btw love your profile pic!  

Gorgeous. Loyal. Loving. Alive. 3/4's reasonable.

The rotting started. She's still perfect.

Even cold, her embrace is heartwarming.

I miss her. Where's my shovel?

I can do these all day, these are great fun.

Oh, I'm happy to associate with the game, I'm just not going to let Ford figure out my Facebook account.