How you doin'?

...so it'd be easier to navigate in this mess I've created.

Let’s Talk About What’s Next For Choices

Hi everyone, Today, we want to share our vision for the future of Choices, and how we’re investing in the stories you love.

The Vision: More Content, Better Tools

Our investment in Choices content is increasing. To deliver the high-quality stories and diverse representation you expect, we’ve been evolving our internal technology stack and workflows. We’ve reached the limits of what our older systems could do, and are implementing new tools and workflows using our RUN platform to help us create even more incredible 🐂💩 characters and storylines.

Traditional IF and "The Power of And"

We want to be very clear about our commitment to Interactive Fiction. The traditional Choices format is the heart of what we do.

We are committed to continuing to ship traditional Choices IF content through August as laid out in our shared release schedule.

At the same time we are working in parallel to bring the high-quality visual, customization, and functional IF standards to RUN so we can continue to bring you new Choices stories in the format you love.

Hero: Homecoming represents an opportunity for us to explore Choices stories in different modals and formats. We’re excited to see how these new ways of storytelling can live alongside the books you already know and love.

Moving Forward Together

We know that seeing change in progress can lead to questions, and we want to be more transparent about our journey, even the parts that are still evolving. We’re excited about the opportunity of building a more robust, dynamic content system, and we’re grateful to have a community that cares enough to hold us to a high standard 🤣. We’ve been following the conversations across Discord, Reddit, and our social channels closely, and are committed to keeping this dialogue open as we move into this next chapter of Choices. Thank you for being part of the journey.

— The Choices Team

Seems like they're working on a new version to replace the current Choices app which, as far as I've researched, is based on Cocos2d-x engine that hasn't received any updates for several years already. This reminded me that I once found clues of PB working on a Unity based "Choices 2.0" before Nexon sold the company:

👆 Looks like it wasn't just senior Pixelberry staff who were affected but more folks across the parent company.

Though if this farewell letter from a PB staff member is of any indication, there's likely not much left of the Choices team 👇

Not sure what even can save the company at this point, they've alienated the fan base with so many unpopular cost cutting decisions over the years and relying too much on AI clearly hasn't helped either. It's very difficult to get back those players who've already abandoned the app, so their only hope is to retain those few still playing. I've probably already said it many times before but California's tech hubs are way too expensive areas for small game devs like PB. Romance Club dev is headquartered in Moldova and seems to be doing fine as far as I'm aware.

(Sorry for a repeated ask if you recieved one like this before. i had to remake it cause tumblr said something went wrong with my previous ask)

Sorry to say but there's no forward moving and innovation with AI, but since the company is adamant on not returning to human creativity and looking into other more affordable ways to create art besides digital painting, I'll keep that in mind while giving this following constructive criticism.

Regarding the change in visual style, the "art" team is completely missing the point. The issues were never rooted in the wrong or bad style, it was about the lack of quality control. The artists-prompters just have too low quality standards and changing the visual style won't magically fix the errors, uncanniness or inconsistencies that can appear in the generated images. Weird smiles were never the fault of whatever AI tools they've been using, they were always up to the person working with the tool to notice and fix. After all, it's the human not the machine that approves the final work.

There's still plenty of errors, uncanny weirdness and inconsistencies in the upcoming books and they will always remain there, unless the human part starts doing better quality control. Instead of scrapping more than a year of work fine tuning its AI tools based on existing Choices art over completely different styles stolen from the web, PB should train its staff to better notice the issues.

Dude, these two characters are not even the same art style. Girl looks like straight out of a Disney animation next to the guy. Was the "art" team on vacation when people complained about the character designs in that tiktoker book?

Those are some disproportionately huge heads, especially female characters, the smiling face is uncannily photorealistic while the rest tries to mimic a more stylised digital art. Those starting lights are an entangled mess as if they're malfunctioning and why are the curbs on the outer edge of the corner not the apex?

There is no asset file where Nia's body type is without any clothes so I had to digitally paint the necessary parts myself. I'm not stingy though, so I can share mine:

Since once again it's a book involving a poor commoner MC vs LI in a power position, the only other perspective of power dynamics we've never explored before I can come up with is if the LI is the one wanting to be punished during bedroom games, opposite of Kieran or Reagan in a sense. The word play with the expression "at your royal service" in the title could suggest that. Otherwise I have no idea what PB could be talking about here.

First of all, didn't you already learn it the hard way with the consecutive hiatuses of COP and WTD that you don't release a book before it's actually finished, dear PB? No wonder people continue to feel like books are half-*ssed and rushed if final chapters are still being worked on while first ones are already releasing. You're not giving your people more breathing room if you also don't delay the rest of the book. The pressure will only carry over to next projects and eventually those deadlines will still pile up.

Secondly, what do you mean by artists? Every single outfit, character, background, not to mention book cover has been generated by AI for well over a year now. Can't your "artists" just write their prompts faster? Or did you mean to say you ran out of your monthly token allowance? (BTW, to anyone arguing that the stories are still human written, PB's sugar daddy has already confirmed in their press release that AI is at least partially used for dialogue as well)

EDIT: Yep, looks like the visual upgrade could be coming from the 1001 app that made Chinese versions of Choices stories. Kenna's belt is 1-to-1 same as on the banner, plus the color scheme and anime art style are similar: