Thoughts From The Art Department

Hi everyone,

We recently walked down memory lane with members of the team who have been here from the very beginning of Pixelberry and Choices. We reminisced about High School Story and how we were trying to tell stories using vectors, with animated isometric characters that walked around in an isometric world.

That got us thinking about why Choices was started and thought it was worth sharing - When we started Choices, we wanted to bring everything that we had loved from that world into a more painterly world where we focused more on the characters, their outfits, and the stories we could tell.

We have always focused on how to tell a story that we, and our readers, could fall in love with. When you love these worlds we build, we celebrate.

In the 10+ years that we have been making interactive stories, we've had ups and downs as a company. 

When we had layoffs, we genuinely grieved for the loss of every single amazing team member. We know that a lot of fans think we had layoffs because we replaced artists with AI, but that’s not true. As many have seen, the gaming industry as a whole has had many rough years and talented game developers are struggling, Pixelberry included. We’ve had to adjust our team size and processes to better match changing expectations and playstyles with mobile gaming evolving so much over the years.

When we were purchased by Series Entertainment, players accused us again of replacing artists with robots, but we are still here and are striving every day to improve ourselves and our craft. Series is a start-up built by game makers that see the potential AI offers to the game development process. They believe in us and want to help with bringing more stories to life. 

We are learning together to create a better Choices: Our AI tools are created and managed by an incredible team of engineers and technical artists. Together with the artists that have been here since The Royal Romance and Blades III, we have spent months training these tools, to help us create assets using the thousands of assets that we have created in Choices over the last 10 years. This has created more jobs for artists with this combination of traditional and technical abilities. In fact, these tools have helped us lessen our overall workload while allowing us to push our creativity and explore new options to create a better experience for our readers.

We are learning and growing as we go. We care, as much as we have always cared (which is a lot). We are always trying to improve the experience. We want to deliver books that move you as you play them, as much as they move us as we create them. We are trying to create more books, faster, trying new ideas to see if you will like them, more customizable options, new backgrounds, more stories, more worlds, and hopefully return to some of our older worlds we think you love as much as we do.

We promise we are a team of real people, and we promise to continue being one and continue to do our best to make this product that we love so much something you can continue to love too.

<3 The Choices Art Department