The writing, editing and scripting process for Samurai of Hyuga went mostly the same way Fatehaven’s did. Choose-your-own-adventures require a unique blend of creative and logical thinking, and a decent one is going to take a serious amount of time. When approaching any quality project with the intent to finish it, a method is required. You don’t have to get it from a book and you definitely don’t have to get it from me,...

For all you min-maxing 100%’ers out there, here’s a guide to help get those tricky achievements. It’s impossible to get them all during a single play-through, so there’s no need to stress over them too much. I made many of these achievements to motivate players to pick less popular choices, as well as rewarding them for paying attention. Warning: spoilers ahead! Best Dumplings in Yamato In chapter 1, Kin Oyama asks a request from...

Samurai of Hyuga has been released! Check out it’s page here! At the risk of getting introspective, I want to go into why I created SoH in the first place. My main hope and goal is that it feels unlike any interactive story you’ve played before. I want it to hit you deeper and touch depths nothing in this genre has quite been able to reach. I threw out a few conventions and put...

Every choice a player makes (aside from obviously incorrect ones) should be justified by you as an author in some way. Whether it’s an “ah, of course!” or even just a figurative pat on the back–letting them know they made a good choice is always a good thing. Don’t just do what the player wants to do, make them feel good for doing it! Think of what ideas were going through their head, their...

The demo version for my newest interactive adventure is here! Samurai of Hyuga is a brutal, heart-pounding interactive tale. Prepare to enter the land of silk and steel, where fantasy clashes against grim reality, and where the good guys don’t always win in the end. It’s a harsh world with tough choices at every turn. Good thing you’re the toughest ronin around. This demo contains the first four chapters of the story. They are...

In interactive fiction, the protagonist name choice (if it exists) is often a no-brainer. You’ll be shown your gender-appropriate variations of “David” and “Joseph” and “William”, and you’ll probably opt to “enter your own name”. How can we make this choice more meaningful? How can pre-generated names not only have some appeal, but give off information as well? Here are the name choices for my upcoming game: Male Names Akio (昭雄). A name which...

The vast majority of the edits for Fatehaven were not scripting errors or pronoun mistakes. They weren’t second-person perspective missteps either, though I did grow tired of writing “You”! No, they were problems with present tense. Specifically, I naturally wrote in the past. It was a tendency that was hard to avoid even 100k words into the tale. The Wheel of Time, A Game of Thrones, Harry Potter—the books I’ve read and have been...