No, don't be sorry. This is actually really interesting and informative. Please allow me to get my nerd on for a moment.
Most of those examples seem to be some form of visual novels. Visual novels are a Japanese kind of video game, or at least they're most popular in Japan. They're pretty much a fancy Choose You Own Adventure novel. You click along, reading a story, and eventually get to a choice. Then whichever you choose takes you on a different branch of the story and eventually you get a different ending. There's more complicated versions but that's the basic idea. The most popular ones are dating sims, where your choices lead you to wooing different characters. Japanese ones are famous for having "Bad Ends" where if you choose the wrong thing you or your love interest gets horrifically killed. So yeah, dating sim/visual novel/choose your own adventure game are all kind of a same thing. They can be pretty flashy with sound and pictures while still being simple to play, so I can see why they were popular choices last year.
Visual novels are pretty easy to transcribe, which would be one advantage if we wanted to make something that was also accessible to people who didn't want to play the game itself for whatever reason. You can just write out the whole branch of the story on a page and have links to the next bits. For example, you would write the whole chapter and then instead of saying "turn to page five to head home" and "turn to page twenty to continue along the road" you would have hyperlinked choices that take you to a new webpage with the next chapter depending on the branch you took.
I get what you're saying about straightforwardness. Some of the games from last year didn't really need to be games. The Dave/Jade one in particular struck me as something that would have worked just as well in text with illustrations throughout. But again, that's true for a lot of the mini flash games in Homestuck itself.
It's a matter of taste I suppose? I like the idea that we could make a game about a mystery, so the player gets to be Jane playing detective, but for everyone who likes that there would be someone who found it too tricky and annoying. We would probably want to include a walkthrough if we did one like that.
On a silly personal note, I like the idea of a visual novel/choose your own adventure thing because we could throw in bad ends. I just love ridiculous over the top bad ends.
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Most of those examples seem to be some form of visual novels. Visual novels are a Japanese kind of video game, or at least they're most popular in Japan. They're pretty much a fancy Choose You Own Adventure novel. You click along, reading a story, and eventually get to a choice. Then whichever you choose takes you on a different branch of the story and eventually you get a different ending. There's more complicated versions but that's the basic idea. The most popular ones are dating sims, where your choices lead you to wooing different characters. Japanese ones are famous for having "Bad Ends" where if you choose the wrong thing you or your love interest gets horrifically killed. So yeah, dating sim/visual novel/choose your own adventure game are all kind of a same thing. They can be pretty flashy with sound and pictures while still being simple to play, so I can see why they were popular choices last year.
Visual novels are pretty easy to transcribe, which would be one advantage if we wanted to make something that was also accessible to people who didn't want to play the game itself for whatever reason. You can just write out the whole branch of the story on a page and have links to the next bits. For example, you would write the whole chapter and then instead of saying "turn to page five to head home" and "turn to page twenty to continue along the road" you would have hyperlinked choices that take you to a new webpage with the next chapter depending on the branch you took.
I get what you're saying about straightforwardness. Some of the games from last year didn't really need to be games. The Dave/Jade one in particular struck me as something that would have worked just as well in text with illustrations throughout. But again, that's true for a lot of the mini flash games in Homestuck itself.
It's a matter of taste I suppose? I like the idea that we could make a game about a mystery, so the player gets to be Jane playing detective, but for everyone who likes that there would be someone who found it too tricky and annoying. We would probably want to include a walkthrough if we did one like that.
On a silly personal note, I like the idea of a visual novel/choose your own adventure thing because we could throw in bad ends. I just love ridiculous over the top bad ends.