How to Win

How to Win is an online adventure game where the story is controlled by player’s suggestions and votes. Whatever you decide, that’s what happens next. Created by multi-award winning UK theatre company Hidden Track, and commissioned by Harrogate Theatre as one of Manchester HOME’s HOMEMakers commissions, How to Win tries to capture the frenetic energy of a live performance within an adventure game where the ideas of a few can affect the story for everyone. New chapters are being made and released throughout Summer 2020. Created in Unity, and designed to be played in-browser, players make a series of moral and dialogue choices within each chapter, before being presented a larger question at the end of each chapter, asking what should happen next in the story. Players are then invited to send in their own suggestions for the next chapter via an online form, and a selection of those suggestions are put to a live public vote. The winning selection then becomes the main subject of the next chapter to be released, while alternative suggestions that did not win the vote still feature in the game, but in a smaller way. The game plays largely like a visual novel, with occasional extra gameplay elements and minigames taking inspiration from various genres including clicker games, tycoon games, and RPGs.