=For End Master's Manifest Destiny contest=

When Alexsis starts trying to steal your favorite seat in the school cafeteria, things get serious.  The pair of you decide to resolve this dispute in combat:  a game of capture the flag.  Can you beat your nemesis in a game of capture the flag, and reclaim what is rightfully yours?

This story is a short cave-of-time style game with seven possible victory endings.  Happy flag-hunting!

As humanity begins to leave their corner of the galaxy for the first time, they encounter previously uncontacted alien races.  As one of earth's leading diplomats, you will play a key role in shaping the future of your species in this unfamiliar world.

A mostly cave-of-time style story with limited rebranching in a few places, and five victory endings.

Winner of End Master's Culture Clash Contest

In this short RPG game, you explore your local village, solving challenges and puzzles, as you try to decide what to do in your future career.

When a thunderbird attacks you while you search for the missing Professor Keirz, you crash-land on a plateau near the legendary ruins of a ruined Anzaran city.  You must make use of the resources around you to repair your damaged flyer, find your missing friend, and unlock the secrets of the ancient Anzaran temple.

An open-map item-based puzzle game with one good victory ending, and one great victory ending.  Good luck exploring the ancient Anzaran plateau!

For End Master's Manifest Destiny Contest

Discover the dungeon's secrets, fight deadly monsters, learn magical spells, and more in this traditional dungeon crawl adventure!  Can you survive the dangers of the legendary Crag?

An open-map dungeon exploration game using player stats and items, with eleven victory epilogues, as indicated by the first two digits of your score.

Thanks to Nightwatch for the fantastic cover art!

An unexpected supernatural disaster leaves you and your your younger cousins adrift in a strange sea full of mythical creatures and beings. Can you and your cousins escape, or will you succumb to the deadly sea?

Currently, this is a short cave-of-time style game with three victory endings. It is complete in its current form, consisting of the first of many planned "episodes" for the game.  It will eventually be expanded into an episodic gauntlet-style game.

Your score indicates which ending you reached.  0 for a death ending, and a score of 1, 2, or 3 corresponds to one the game's victory endings.

Well, uh... I commended this excerpt before I finished reading it, lol. But this seems like a cool story concept, I always liked hearing more about the Derro, looking forward to reading a story focusing on them!

Lol, I already responded saying all 30. Does it wrap back around for me?

Ack. I'll try and get to that this week. It needs some proper endings in addition to a title change, though, so I want to make sure to give it the effort it needs.

Still alive! Finals ended, but now I'm busy with my summer job lol. Still checking in here & the discord once or twice a week though.

(P.S. Thanks for the ratings EndMaster!)

This is a great breakdown, Mystic saved me the bother of an effortpost. Here's some additional thoughts:

For my part I consider only types 5, 6, and 7 to be meaningful choices, and type 5 is frankly on thin ice, since it just leads to a dead end. So if you want to create a story that has a lot of choices, and for all those choices to be meaningful, here's some options:

1) Have a lot of type 5 choices, and some type 7 choices at key points. This one of the most favored models on this site, since it has a low burden on the author, and allows the reader to manageably explore every branch while still having plenty of agency. The downside is that, as I said above, some people don't consider type 5 choices to be meaningful.

2) Use variables to make the majority of your choices type 6 choices. This is a little more work since it requires you learn how to use the advanced editor, but it's a really good way to make sure every choice is important. You'll probably also want to sprinkle in some type 5 and type 7 choices for variety, but you can make those influenced by variables too.

Here are some ways you can use variables to make a lot of type 6 choices:

   A) Player stats. Have choices impact stats, and make future choices & success rates influenced by those stats. For example, choosing to train increases your strength stat, which then unlocks the future option to bend steel bars; or makes it more likely that you will succeed at doing so. Alternatively, making a poor choice might penalize your stats.

   B) Relationship trackers. This is the same as option A, but instead, the variables track your relationship with major side characters. Things you say and do will positively or negatively impact what they think of you. If you have a high value they'll be more helpful, and you'll unlock extra options with them. If it's low, they might refuse to help you, or betray you at a key juncture.

   C) Ending trackers. These variables are similar, but don't become important until the end. Say you have one ending where the protagonist becomes a professional baker. You might increase the baker ending variable every time they choose to make cookies or buy a spatula. Then if at the end the baker variable is above a certain threshold, the baker ending is unlocked. You can combine this with stats and relationship trackers too.

   D) Items. Again, this requires some scripting knowledge, but what items a player does and doesn't find can go a long way towards increasing player agency.

In sum: choices affect hidden variables. Then, those hidden variables influence later outcomes, such as by unlocking or restricting certain options, making chances of success for a certain choice higher or lower, or unlocking certain endings.

3) Time limits. Give the player a limited amount of clicks to accomplish their goals. Then, every choice matters because there is a limited clock. Will11's detective series does this.

Serious answer: No one can give you a good idea, because the most important factor in what is a good idea is what you personally are most passionate about. Any idea can potentially be turned into something fantastic as long as you care about it enough. (I wrote an effort-post on this once that I spent ten minutes trying to find and couldn't. Oh well.)

As far as finding out what you care about, start thinking about what works of fiction you enjoy reading/watching the most, and see what they have in common. Genre? Are there certain themes, plotlines, or character types you always love? Then see if you can unite those ideas into something that means something to you.

Start thinking about what conflicts in your real life matter to you most, and possible ways to fictionalize and dramatize them. (Though be careful not to write a self-insert; doing so prevents you from being as objective as you need to be about your story.) This can be personal things like career anxieties, drama in personal relationships, or health struggles, or more large-scale impersonal things like worries about some political issue, an exploration of what redemption means, or existential reflections about whether humans are alone in the galaxy. Any topic that you feel you have something to say about can be a good throughline for a story.

The best story ideas come from combining multiple independent ideas that interact in an interesting way. Ideally you'll come up with some external conflicts to pair with some interesting characters and emotional centers, all of which should be based on core ideas that you, personally feel excited about.

You'll know you have the right story idea because you won't get bored of it quickly, and you'll be excited enough about it to take it all the way to completion.

Congrats to Sherbert and everyone who participated!

I'd suggest asking. I usually post my games for beta-reading in the writer's workshop before publishing them, and virtually every time I've been wildly wrong in my guess for difficulty level and people told me to change it. So maybe get a few people to play through before you publish and ask them.

This is a pretty accurate summary of my own thoughts on the subject. People will always be making art, seeking art created by other humans, forming communities around shared art, and funding artists whose work they know and like. But we're probably not going to see artists getting employed by multi-million dollar companies or becoming world famous, or not nearly as much.

I have a lot of friends who make hats and bags and whatnot in their spare time as gifts for their loved ones. I know of others who do this and make money off of it, despite the centuries-old development of clothes-making machines. There's a huge tight-knit (sorry) community among people who like making and buying these crafts. Even if AI does take over most paid opportunities--and considering the priorities of today's CEOs it unfortunately probably will--there will always be people making art, and there will always be people who prioritize the time and effort a human put into it over cost and ease of access.

Even prior to AI, I think things were headed this way, thanks to how much easier art creation has gotten in general. It used to be that everyone would listen to the same big artists on the radio, and as Sent says, watch the same mainstream shows. But in recent years with the internet, people have been much more able to find sub-communities that appeal to their personal tastes, and many people spend most of their time engaging with anonymous small-time creators who post their creations for free. Even if AI never existed, this process probably would have happened anyways, at least to some extent.

My work here is done.