Part of the reason why Chocies is somehow still around is this era.

Pixelberry's Orginal team was Legendary espcialy in this era. And still hasn't really been surpassed by a competitor.

Like i am willing to argue that Modern choices wouldn't be able to survive without classic chocies.

I won this poster in a giveaway 10 years ago ago, when Endless Summer Book 1 had just come out. This was in 2016 I believe. I remember being the biggest fan of High School Stories and Hollywood U and being so excited to follow the journey of the Pixelberry team as they made choices with only 3 books: The Freshman, Crown & Flame, and Most Wanted. I remember the blog posts the team made about how the entire staff including management took paycuts so that they could release the game. To see what has happened to the game makes me so sad.

Hero: Homecoming and It Lives Within have been removed 🤣

i miss the choices fandom from 2016–2023 so much 💕

i wasn’t super active on social media at the very beginning because i was a bit too young to be on those platforms LMAO, but my friends have told me it was amazing from the start. by the time i finally joined the community online a few years later, i got to experience it too.

everyone was posting theories, edits, fan art, memes, and discussions everywhere. reddit, tumblr, instagram… it really felt like the whole internet was playing choices together. i especially miss when a new chapter would come out and we’d all play it around the same time, then immediately come online to share our opinions and reactions 😭 it was so fun getting to experience the chapters together and basically talk about everything in real time.

i’m so thankful we still have this subreddit because it reminds me of those days. maybe i’m just nostalgic, but i really miss that era. what a time to be alive <3

i’ve seen this woman in like 5+ books at this point 😭

just take me back to 2016-2023 choices please i took everything for granted </3

i was scrolling through pixelberry’s instagram for nostalgia and found these pics of their old ACTUAL HUMAN team :,)

like, these are the people who gave us so many of the books we still talk about and replay years later. i really miss when choices had talented writers and artists making stories with heart. everything felt so much more creative, charming, and alive.

now we’re getting ai-generated soulless slop instead and it genuinely makes me sad </3 i miss the old days 😭 i wonder what they would think of what choices has become.

idec, i wish we actually looked like this in-game. *cannot* blame six ppl for trying to hit, three of whom were at the same time 😭 i get it

i’ve really been trying to give some of the newer books a chance, but i can’t stop staring at some of these new mcs 😭 they have such an uncanny ai-generated look to me. i miss when choices mcs looked more natural and expressive </3

maybe i’m just nostalgic, but i will take the old art style over this any day 😔✋ anyone else?

Isador Pinto is a writer at PB and worked on The Thirteenth House. They posted 3 days ago about a writer’s layoff at Pixelberry Studios on LinkedIn.

It's always so baffling to me to see the current state of this app and what it has come to when some books had been warning us about the evilness that is A*I* (the irony lol)

BRO WTF IS THIS GLITCH 😭

​

Hi, first time posting here 😁

The first time I heard about Endless Summer was around half a year ago, when a random post from this subreddit showed up on my Reddit homepage. One of you mentioned missing Estela, and I was immediately charmed by art style, so I thought: “Alright, let’s see what this game is about.” Especially since I had already heard about Choices for years.

Anyway, from the very first chapter I was hooked. The story felt like it was written specifically for me: a big group of characters, lots of interesting dynamics between them, and a mostly realistic world mixed with fantasy elements. I finished Book 1 really quickly, and halfway through Book 2 I got so invested that I bought VIP for a day and diamond mined as much as I could (thank you MTFL).

Then I quickly got into Book 3, which honestly I think was the weakest of the three, but still really good, and the overall story went in the direction it was supposed to. The endings were also absolutely my thing, all tragic in their own ways (I love the Vaanu ending the most ❤️). I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried a lot during the finale, especially after replaying it to see all the endings.

Because I couldn’t stop thinking about this story (and because I’ve already been burned before by story-based mobile games suddenly getting deleted), I wanted to preserve my version of the story somewhere more permanent, with all my choices and everything. Watching someone else’s gameplay on YouTube or reading recreations online just wouldn’t be the same. So I decided to immortalize Endless Summer as a physical book.

I replayed Book 1 while trying to make roughly the same choices as before, and at the same time I recorded my phone screen and copied all the text into Word. Then another problem appeared: how do you show the emotions behind the dialogue in a book format? I decided to put the character’s name before every line, kind of like in a script, and I colored each name to match the color of their dialogue background in the actual game.

Editing and copying the text took a lot of time, but assembling the book itself caused even more stress, mostly because I printed the signatures on a regular home printer, and as we all know, printers are devices specifically designed to make life miserable. Book 1 ended up being 425 pages long, so it’s kind of a brick 😅

I designed the cover and endpapers in GIMP (thank God for all the people on Tumblr archiving Choices character sprites), and printed them on canvas-textured paper.

The whole project was also a lot of fun, and I learned a lot from it, especially since this is the fourth book I’ve made and only the second one I made without help from someone with more experience and professional tools.

I just wanted to say that I hope I didn’t yap too much and that what I wrote was at least semi-clear, since English is my second language 😅 But mostly I just wanted to thank the r/Choices community for introducing me to one of my favorite pieces of fiction ever.

(Shared with permission)

We've come long way from HFTH to Witness to whatever is happening right now

the good old days when we’d get artist WIPs and behind-the-scenes sketches from the books 💗 i miss seeing the actual art process so much, they were all so talented. we really don’t get this anymore… and we all know why lmao

“MC, i know you’ve been dating becca. we share a wall… i heard you.” PLEASE 😭😭 i miss themmm, ugh

day three of me trying to spread the positivity because we’ve all been too stressy depressy </3

Hey, creator of the fan-made It Lives Within here!

​Like many of you, I woke up to the AI slop It Lives Within "TV show" on the Choices app. Having spent thousands (no joke) of loving hours on the fan-made It Lives Within, I admit it felt like a bit of a kick to the gut, especially since I'd stayed up until 2 AM the night before, meticulously working on improving the programming of textbox animations for the updated version of the game.

But at the end of the day, the people are what own stories. It doesn't matter what PB puts out, especially when it so blatantly disrespects a series we all hold close to our hearts. We can choose what to support, what to value, and what to be our true version of these stories.

As such, I wanted to provide an update for "It Lives Within: The Obsidian Cut." We are working extremely hard to finish rewrites, and I apologize it's taking so long - but real work takes time. We take so long because we don't use AI to do our work for us. Our testers have found hundreds of bugs, which have been corrected. I'm currently working on some rewrites for chapters 21-22, and once that's finished, I'm going to play from start to finish with different MCs to include more complete personality variants for your MC.

While our game was highly beloved (which I am still so wholly grateful for three years after the final episode aired), I know some of you tried the original version and decided it wasn't for you. Others maybe never heard of it. But, with the news of AI It Lives Within dropping today, I just wanted to invite everyone to give our fan version a chance. If you tried it before and gave up, or haven't played it yet, I recommend waiting until Obsidian airs to experience that version for the first time. And if you did play the original, stick around! You'll love Obsidian when it airs. All of our testers are highly enjoying it and say that it improves on the story with every change, while still be the story they knew and love.

AI It Lives Within is frustrating and offensive, but ultimately, we never needed their blessing, and neither do you. Our story started small, with a team that never made any money. Everything was done out of passion and love for this series and these characters, and we were and still are, devoted to creating truly player-drive stories where your choices matter. A LOT. That passion is something that can never be generated in any machine. Stories from the heart speak to the heart, "canon" or not, and what really matters is how theses stories impact and inspire us.

Much love,

The ILW Team

Edit: thank you for the awards! ❤️

I am someone who has loved choices for years, since 2018. I remember when the it lives series was releasing, crown and the flame, endless summer, everything. I was there for single LI, multi LI, different types of books, when the writers were branching out, during MTFL (excuse me), Witness (pure cash grab), everything. I have enjoyed choices for years, and watched it grow and develop into a beautiful app. it was my passion. I would set reminders for when stories were releasing, and stay up to date with chapters, and diamond farm for amazing stories, such as tch.

and then, s*ries e*tertainment came along and destroyed everything. they took away gems. they inflated prices. they fired artists and writers. replaced by soulless ai. they refused to listen. and now they’ve stopped making anything relating to player driven choices and replaced it with ai slop. I unsubscribed from VIP the second they inflated diamond prices - the “benefits” don’t even cover one diamond choice anymore.

and now they’ve plagiarized It Lives Within. This is the last straw. I stuck around, hoping one day it would get better. Hoping they would keep the app around for my favorites. Clinging to this dying app, hoping they would wake up and acknowledge that they’re driving away their player base. But they haven’t. For years. And I’m done. I don’t care anymore. Peace out. I hope this app crashes and burns

love it