4/16/2021

3/22/2026 11:31 PM

605

6

0 wins / 2 losses

Lauded Sage Exemplar

Capture the Flag

=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!

Diplomat

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

One Day's Adventure

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.

Ruins of Anzar

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

Secrets of the Crag

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!

The Sea of Legends

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.

Gryphon Review Archive

unpublished

Point and Click

unpublished

2 minute demo image-based point and click game made with the cys editor and javascript.

Click on the treasure pile when you reach the end of the demo, and it will take you to an explanation on how to code one of these games, and a copy of all the code used to build this one.

To use an item in your inventory, click on it to select. You'll know it is selected because it turns grey. Then you can 'use' it by clicking on the area you intend to use it on.

So You Wanna Be An Evil Wizard

unpublished

Can you survive your first semester at wizard college?

A submission to the one-day storygame contest.

A general guide to character creation, and tips tailored specifically for characterization in an interactive format.

Use this system to code flexible battle sequences using items, link options, and player stats.

How to create a system that will keep track of which item a player has equipped into a specific slot, such as having a "sword" in a "weapon" slot.

Glad you appreciate the comment, and glad you liked my game as well! It means a lot to hear it's inspiring others in their own projects :)

Ah quick clarification on my part--I said I planned to *commend* the story (I don't have any say in what gets featured), and then realized the commend-storygame button on my view doesn't actually work with my permissions, so Sherbet did it. I have no idea whether featuring is being discussed for your game

Counterpoint:

Very cool!

Impressive that 2026 is at 6k after less than 3 full months. If the trend continues we'd get 24k, which would be the biggest year since 2017. Forum brawls must be good for the site!

CYS shitpost reserve forces, reporting for poop duty! We must protect the front sidewalk from Malk's artful swastikas at all costs because mine are so much better.

I HATE puzzle games with the fire of a thousand suns. All hail Mizal as dictator for life, ban every other account on the site (including mizal) 6-moozal-7 EDIT: Capitalism is great

People are reacting pretty strongly because the philosophy you've been very seriously and passionately advocating has *directly* caused immense pain and suffering to many. I'll concede that my using terms like "extremely stupid" and "intentionally evil" was inflammatory, and I could have phrased that better. But I want to impress that getting up in arms is a very normal thing for people to do when someone advocates a philosophy that describes them or their friends as illogical or unable to handle their own decision-making, and encourages others to manipulate them and flagrantly disrespect their agency. At times like that, protecting and defending oneself and one's friends becomes a much more important priority than thinking carefully about the other side's nuanced and complex motivations.

I really respect your willingness to reconsider your position in light of criticism and new ideas. A lot of people would just double down and turn a blind eye to new perspectives, and I'm glad you're remaining open. I hope you keep thinking about what everyone here is saying, and wish you the best.

However, I really do not appreciate your describing my good friends expressing their very reasonable and largely well-argued points as "PMS'd up", among other things.

Ah, it seems you've been banned since I last checked the thread. Well, best of luck going forward.

I'm relieved you're conceding that this is a real issue, but I'm really confused by your apparent willingness to throw up your arms and say "shucks, you got me on that one point!" as if it's not a massive problem that undermines literally everything remotely good you've said.

You say it's not your responsibility to make sure your readers don't rape a girl. Except it is your responsibility. You made it your responsibility when you wrote a self-help book on sex and advertised yourself as an expert. The people reading your work believe you that you are an expert on determining consent, and more importantly, they believe that to become an expert on determining consent, all they need to do is read your book. If your book does not actually teach this expertise, you are absolutely responsible for the harm done by people who read your book, then decide they believe they know what a real "no" is, when they don't.

Having seen some of the posts lower down, I want to add: you seem to think that if your partner is chill with it after the sex, it retroactively justifies everything that happened. That's not at all true for several reasons:

A) People are different: For a variety of reasons, some people actually do like and want the boundary-pushing you advocate. However this is NOT even remotely true of all people. Just because a specific person was okay with something you did, that doesn't mean the behavior itself was acceptable. Maybe your partners have all genuinely liked your behavior. I don't know. I hope so. But nothing about your behavior left room for you to identify whether or not they would, beyond just an extremely fallible judgment call on your end. The exact behavior that you're describing from yourself is rape in a situation where you've made the slightest misjudgment of your partner's wants.

B) As others have already pointed out, passive acceptance during sex, and even retroactive approval is not enough to determine whether a person actually wanted something. People can freeze up from anything from mortal fear to just social awkwardness, and go along with something they DON'T want to do. And if they do that during sex, they'll do it afterward too. They might feel the need to do it for years. If you put the onus entirely on your partner to forcefully stand up for themselves before you'll respect their boundaries, you are not respecting their boundaries. You're stomping all over them.

C) You seem to think if a person enjoys the sex, that means they wanted it and consented. But people sometimes have practical goals that go against their physical desires. If a person really wants to eat a chocolate cake, but is trying to stick to a no chocolate diet for personal reasons, you are an asshole if you keep offering them the cake. Systemmatically wearing someone down until they "voluntarily" give up on their own boundaries is sexual harrassment at best, and in many cases just plain rape.

Others on the thread will definitely call me naive for saying this, but your posts come across as more "extremely stupid" than "intentionally evil" to me. There is some genuinely good self-help advice in the screenshots you've posted, and I guess I believe that this is all some very misguided attempt to help struggling people gain confidence. That's a good goal. But holy shit, any good stuff here is MASSIVELY outweighted by the encouragement of boundary pushing, sexism, gaslighting, and basic respect for your partner's agency in setting and communicating their own limits. By sending this message out there, and the way you've described yourself as interacting with your partners, you are setting yourself up to do FAR more harm than good. And you probably already have.

I'm with you on most of your points (as I've stated elsewhere). But I have a few things to quibble with here:

As Mizal has already pointed out, dismissing the entire genre of interactive fiction as "fan-fiction of what is basically a set of childrens' adventure tales" is an extremely pejorative and condescending thing to say to a group of people who've dedicated so much time to working in the medium.

I disagree with your last point: "If you don't like it here you can go somewhere else" is exactly how online communities work. I'd argue it's a foundational reason online communities exist at all. Communities dedicated to molding themselves to appeal to everyone will all eventually become alike. This is good for something like a country or government, but hobby sites and friend groups become beloved and strong because of their unique idiosyncracies. I'm not saying communities shouldn't take in outside feedback and improve--they absolutely should. But not when that outside feedback is about making a place fundamentally different from what it is.

Obviously I don't think cruelty or cyberbullying is fundamental to CYS, or I wouldn't be using the site. I think CYS has gotten better about these things over time; and I hope it continues to do so, hopefully using some of the suggestions in this thread. But I do think our abrasive critique & forum banter culture is integral to CYStian culture. And I do think people who really don't like that will be better off finding another community than expecting CYS to change. And I don't agree at all with your characterization of CYS as a struggling community. This is one of the most long-lived, active, and involved writing commuities--or internet communities period--I've ever seen. Our goal shouldn't be to grow CYS's numbers in ways that may not reflect actual community involvement, but to make the community as active, welcoming, and useful as possible for those who like what we do; and as harmless and avoidable as possible to those who don't.

This differentiation between literary/personal criticism is a good point, and I also like your differentiation between destructive vs constructive criticism.

I don't remember that specific review, and my feelings about it would depend a lot on context. Jokingly saying that to a longtime CYStian friend is probably fine. Saying that to a stranger is pretty blatantly mean. Actually ACTING on that is damaging to the site. I also agree that attacking people for having different viewpoints is rude and unhelpful, which is why I don't engage with it.

I'm seeing a few themes in people's posts in this thread (that I also very much agree with):
A) Most of us seem to agree encouaring suicide is bad
B) Several people have suggested changing the welcome message PM to explicitly warn about site culture
C) Post editing in particular damages a person's ability to defend themselves in their own words.

I'm still very leery of most of the forum rule changes I see being suggested. At best they're impossible to implement; at worst they put too much control over forum activity on a couple people's judgment. When you start making rules about the content of people's posts, it fundamentally changes a place in ways I think most users wouldn't like.

But I really like idea of increasing transparency for new site members (especially kids and teens) about what to expect when they join. Altering the welcome PM to clarify forum culture is a great idea, maybe it can link to the many useful articles about site ettiquette and expectations. That way people who don't like site culture have more chances to investigate, and potentially leave if they don't like the culture. Similarly, I like the idea of all of us being more thoughtful about bantering with strangers (especially kids) vs what we say to our friends.

Another observation: Having been here for a while, I know that often post editing/bannings/etc have good reasons behind them (such as alt account armies, harassing/creepy PMs, plagiarism, etc) that people who just read the forums won't know about. This creates a situation where new people have no idea what is and isn't a bannable offense, and end up objecting to what it *looks* like someone were banned/edited for, since they have no idea what the *actual* reason was. This can also make new site members nervous to express their viewpoints, since they don't realize their opinions will never be a bannable/editable offense. So I don't know... maybe a little more public clarity about these things would help with that?