Review: Rogue’s Choice

This article is something between a review and a case study, and it would have been even longer if I could have gotten hold of the producers: It’s a collaboration between some of the finest interactive story creators in voice, mobile and ebooks! Let’s dive right into what this is about, and how great and successful it is!

Oh wait! Does it say ‘The Magic Door’ as the developer name here?

Very well observed! It’s true, ‘Rogue’s Choice’ is the only other Alexa Skill that Laura and Andy Huntwork published under this developer name, apart from ‘The Magic Door’ itself.
This raises some high expectations towards this game: Probably the best features of Magic Door, such as exploring an interesting game world with a dense atmosphere, especially including a rich soundscape (as a refresher, they also built Talestreamer, a tool for blending TTS and background sounds), but with more of a story and relatable characters (that was my conclusion of what’s missing from Magic Door).

Didn’t you mention that it’s a collaborative work?

Images of Sam Landstrom (top, source: delightgamesllc.com/authors) of Delight Games, with some of their apps from the Android Play Store

Absolutely, and this is where things get interesting! Delight Games, the company of author and developer Sam Landstrom, is listed as a partner of Magic Door LLC. According to their website, Delight Games is all about making reading addictive, mainly by creating mobile apps with interactive stories.

Their portfolio includes a relatively wide range of themes and genres, from medieval high-fantasy over zombies, pirates, superheroes and detectives, some of which by authors other than Sam Landstrom himself. He’s behind most of the medieval fantasy stories though, including Rogue’s Choice.

Oh! So Rogue’s Choice is the voice adaptation of a mobile app?

Yes, exactly. According to Sam Landstrom, he started out with publishing his interactive stories on the Amazon Kindle devices, and just played around with publishing them as mobile apps. However:

To my surprise, customers responded stronger to reading on their phones than they did on the Kindle

Sam Landstrom

So now most of his work is available via mobile apps in the Apple Appstore and the Google Playstore.

This seems like a good choice to me for several reasons:

Screenshot of a typical scene of the ‘Rogue’s Choice’ mobile app, in this case a card game with a group of human miners (see below)

• People are faster to turn to their mobile devices than to their ebooks for entertainment
• Push notifications can be used as a retention mechanism
• Dynamic stats enable more interesting choices (more on that soon)
• There are various monetization mechanisms, such as displaying ads and upsell notifications
• Gamification, i.e. users can collect unlocked achievements and points

Just to get us a sense of how successful this mobile ‘game’ is: His free ‘Medieval Fantasy RPG’ app for Android has more than 500.000 total downloads, and his premium ‘Delight Games’ app with access to all content for 31 € has more than 10.000 downloads. Pretty impressive to me!

Alright, thanks for the context. Now, how’s the actual content like?

Rogue’s Choice is about the adventures of the titular rogue character, whom you have to guide through his conflicts with Ring City’s underworld, authorities and various ladyfolks.
The narration is in the abstract second person perspective, i.e. the narrator is not a character in the story, and talks to you as if you were the player (except very seldom where it breaks the fourth wall ).

In the first of the Skill’s five chapters, you just arrived in Ring City after having deserted the king’s army, and need to get at least 10 gold coins by the day’s end. Quite typically for role-play games, your story starts in an inn, where you interact with some of the resident parties:

• First you play cards with a merry group of human miners. How much money you can extract? Do you go for a risk, or play it safe?
  The function of this encounter is to introduce the game mechanics.
• The second party you meet is a more grumpy group of dwarven miners. This encounter has fewer degrees of freedom, and is more about introducing the game world — And to teach the player to listen carefully, because some information can become useful later in the game!
• The third party are two fair ladies whom you can banter with, and maybe even pickpocket from. The main function of this encounter is to introduce the player character in some more depth, and also to leverage some information that you received from the dwarves earlier.
• The fourth and final party you meet at the inn is a mysterious sorceress named Krea, who turns out to be your companion for most of the remaining story. The main function of this encounter is to introduce Krea, provide more background on the player character, and set the scene for the next chapter.

As you can already see from the fact that these encounters have a fixed order, the main plot is linear. There are very few (‘progress’) choices where you can deviate from the main plot, but these typically result in a ‘game over’.
Most choices you have are about how your solve a particular challenge, and then converge back onto the main strand. To make this more clear, here’s the diagram of the first chapter’s first three and a half encounters:

As you can see, some choices are relatively ‘shallow’ and loop back onto the main plot immediately (such as ‘nod in greeting’ vs ‘look away’, or ‘the best’ vs ‘normal ale’), whereas others (especially the entire ‘miners’ encounter) branch off significantly and give you a good amount of control.

What’s the meaning of ‘+1 Morale’, ‘-3 Gold’ and such in the diagram?

Well observed! This is particularly clever and unique aspect of the game’s mechanics: Your prosperity is modelled using three ‘survival’ stats:

• Life is your current health, which you lose by taking damage and gain by sleep, food and magic. There’s no upper limit to it, but once it drops to zero or below, you game character dies.
• Gold is the amount of money your game character has with them. There are ways to spend and earn money, and if your ‘gold’ level is too low, you can’t take actions that require gold.
• Morale is pretty much your self-confidence, or the degree to which your actions are aligned with you game character’s values. Typically you gain morale for being bold, smart and charming. You start out with zero morale, and you’re not actively penalized if your ‘poor’ choices push it into the negative zone.

The lovely thing about these stats is that they extend the consequences of your game choices: For example, you could play it safe and avoid a risk or a costly choice at some point (let’s say, you don’t cheat in the card game with the miners), but miss out on a bigger reward and need to compensate later (e.g. you have to make the risky choice of pickpocketing the ladies).

Another screenshot from the mobile app, this time showing the performance review at the end of the chapter.

These stats also provide a gamification mechanism that interactive stories typically don’t have: At the end of each chapter, your performance gets evaluated as a score, which in turn places you in one of five tiers (as seen in the screenshot from the mobile app to the left, where I have scored a dashing 690 points, which places me firmly in the top tier).
Your total score is determined using a weighted sum of your stats, with morale having three times the weight of of gold and health — In a sense this makes morale more of a meta-game and less of an in-game stat.

At least in the mobile app, this provides a strong retention mechanism: You can go through the chapter multiple times, exploring how different choices would have turned out and thereby optimizing your score.
(Side note: There‘s even more ingenious game mechanics in the mobile app, such as unlocking hidden achievements and earning points of luck that you can use to boost your stats or redo choices, but they are not part of the Skill, so I omit them here.)

OK, we’ve heard a lot about the story itself and how the experience is tailored to the mobile platform. Now, how well is is adapted to voice?

Yes, that’s a key question of this review! Let’s start off with what wasn’t adapted for the Skill: The story is the same, and you can make the same in-game choices. You also have the same stats, i.e. life, gold and morale.
One obvious feature that’s different is the presentation, since the Skill presents the content on the audio instead of the visual channel.
Here’s a sample:

Sample text from the first chapter, featuring Brian as the player character, Amy as the narrator, and Russell as the blonde miner.

Some observations:

• The most striking feature is the use of text-to-speech (TTS), i.e. synthetic voices — In this case all from AWS Polly. The protagonist’s voice can easily be identified as Brian (generally considered the most expressive Polly voice), and the narrator is Amy. Other characters either have voices of their own, or re-use voices with a different prosody (for example, one of the dwarven miners also uses Brian’s voice, but with a pitch of about 115%).
• Another relevant feature is the use of soft background sounds, both in the streets and in the inn. They are easy to get used to, and I had to listen to my recorded session to make sure they were actually there — But they certainly contribute to the Skill’s atmosphere.
• The Skill uses sound effects, but very sparsely. In fact, the only sound other than the one in the intro was the sound of coins when I paid for the miners’ drinks.
• The prompt enumerates the possible choices: ‘One, ask to join them, or two, buy them a round?’, which trades off some naturalness of the dialog in favor of ease of memorization.

Okay… And how about the summary? How is that adapted for voice?

Right, that’s a relevant question given the summary’s key role in the mobile app’s engagement and retention mechanisms. Here’s how it sounds like in the Skill:

This is easy to parse for you now that you know about the mobile app and have seen the screenshot of the summary screen, but for someone who isn’t familiar with it, it’s very hard to make sense of this information. What does it mean that you have the fourth highest of five ranks, and especially where do your points come from?
Even if it had been introduced, this highlights a general challenge for all #VoiceFirst games: Even moderately complex scoring systems are difficult to convey via voice, because the user can’t easily stop and follow the calculations.
The reason why this is an issue is because quite generally, games are about figuring out and mastering complex abstract systems. If you take away transparency of the scoring system, the system becomes harder to master, which might frustrate some users (but admittedly motivate others).

Let’s slowly wrap this up. How does retention and engagement compare between the Skill and the mobile app?

This is indeed the key issue: On the one hand you have the mobile app where you read longer passages of text on the mobile phone, but have stronger gamification mechanisms in place, and on the other hand you have the Skill that provides a more atmospheric audio drama experience — Which one gets more traction?
Of course it’s neither a real question (because we can’t easily compare the Android app’s 500k downloads with the Skill’s 32 reviews), nor a fair one (because the mobile app was there first, and had more opportunities to get discovered/promoted/reviewed). But it’s probably safe to say that the mobile app is more successful than the Skill, especially if you compare ‘Rogue’s Choice’s’ 32 reviews with ‘Magic Door’s’ 921 reviews.
It kind of should be more successful, right?

But from a user perspective, I have to say I enjoyed the mobile app more than the Alexa Skill. Let’s investigate why:

• The biggest issue is that even with different voices and background sounds, listening to longer text in TTS tiring. Some Polly voices don’t pronounce things properly, so I have to focus on actually understanding the text, which in turn alienates me from the experience.
• Personally, I find that a lot of the voices don’t match the personality of the characters (e.g. Brian sounds too dignified for the main character, Kendra too motherly for Krea, the high-pitched voice too comical for the dwarf etc). Overall, this limited the depth of the immersion for me.
• Another quite subjective impression of mine is that the scenes are too long, maybe because they are described in too much detail for voice. Compared to other interactive stories, either the ratio of listening vs action is too unfavorable, or it just appears particularly long because it’s not easy to listen to.
  In the mobile app, the length of the scenes hasn’t been an issue for me, but I had the advantage of pausing and continueing it at my convenience.
• One thing I like about the mobile app is how quickly I can try out different choices — I can just scroll to the bottom of each scene and thus traverse half the story in one minute, which greatly helps retention. With the Skill, there’s no easy way to ‘forward’ a scene and get only the decisions, so replaying a chapter takes far more time.

All of this sums up to the effect that despite the great story, relatable characters, nice background music and ingenious mechanics, I don’t enjoy consuming the content very much — Because the esthetics are lacking.

Bucket model of a game’s enjoyability. Wooden bucket by Maria Zamchy from the Noun Project

This brings up a general point about building Skills in general: The least enjoyable component determines the overall enjoyablility of the Skill. It’s like a wooden bucket: The capacity of the bucket is not determined by the height of the highest staves, but the length of the single shortest stave. In this case, the game esthetics is the shortest stave, and prevents this Skill from achieving the potential of the higher staves.

So, what’s your conclusion?

I’m really torn about this Skill… On the one hand, I love the content itself, how it came about (Amazing things can happen when tech and content embrace!), and especially the game mechanics that seem to perfectly hit the Goldilocks zone between complexity and ease of use.
On the other hand, I really wish the esthetics were better executed — Definitely with voice actors, at least one (like in Select A Story), or preferably one per character (like in Jurassic World Revealed). Interestingly, Sam Landstom has released at least one Android app that presents a related story in the same universe as an interactive audiobook. I hope it will come to Alexa soon to fulfill its potential!
Whereas, from the author’s point of view, this is also a question of monetization. When the Rogue’s Choice Skill was produced in the summer of 2017, there was no ISP, and Developer Rewards were the only possible revenue source, whereas with mobile apps you could at least get ad money. By now, you could sell chapters as entitlements, or the option to redo a choice as consumables. Let’s hope that this will prove to be lucrative enough to incentivize authors like Sam Landstom to invest in great audio content and bring their content to Alexa!

Wow, this was long… Thanks for bearing with me, and I hope this case is as interesting for you as it is for me. Please let me know your thoughts: Did you try Rogue’s Choice? Did the TTS reduce your immersion as much as they did for me? How do you like the ideas of the stats and the scoring system? What aspects of the Skill would you have liked to be covered in more, or less depth?

Sorry, I have to fit the featured image somewhere!