Choose Your Own Adventure?

[DaHeckIzDat]

I'm thinking about trying to make my own Choose Your Own Adventure game with Twine. Not sure if I can call it a visual novel, since it likely won't have any art, but it'd still be something you play on the computer/phone. Any tips for writing one of these?

[DaHeckIzDat]

I went ahead and threw a few pages together. The story doesn't really go anywhere yet, but this is how the whole "game" would go. I intend to have branching paths based on the player's decisions. What do you guys think? https://twinery.org/2/#!/stories/94481a74-9cae-4db4-8eba-bd4e63f248e2/play

[Stalvern]

One of my absolute favorite library books as a little kid was The Third Planet from Altair – not the popular '80s paperback version, but the original '70s hardcover, which has some of the weirdest, lumpiest illustrations I've ever seen. (They rule, and while I can't find any scans or photos of them online, the cover art gives some idea of the style.) As much as I love the illustrations, though, what makes the book great is the way that its various adventures all add up to tell the book's real story, the truth of what happens on the third planet from Altair. The point of getting a good ending isn't that you "win" (although they are rather satisfying little yarns on their own) but that you know a little bit more about what's actually going on, and even some of the bad endings can be informative.

I'm not saying that your game needs to be structured around a big mystery like this, but this book illustrates what I think would be a good principle to keep in mind: Since the various stories contained in your game will all be part of the same game, they should build on each other to enhance the whole. My impulse should be to read more, not to get the good ending and get it over with. Keeping this larger structure in mind and setting up the various possible plots accordingly will go a long way toward giving this interactive fiction replay value – or even literary merit, depending on how you look at it.

[Stalvern]

I went ahead and threw a few pages together. The story doesn't really go anywhere yet, but this is how the whole "game" would go. I intend to have branching paths based on the player's decisions. What do you guys think? https://twinery.org/2/#!/stories/94481a74-9cae-4db4-8eba-bd4e63f248e2/play

The link doesn't work.

[DaHeckIzDat]

Yep, I'll have to find another way to share it around. For now, I'm trying to decide how deep I want to go with it. I could go full on Mass Effect and have everything you say change how people treat you, but that could easily take years to finish. It might be less immersive, but I could also just limit the choices to bigger things that have an immediate impact on the story, like saving one person vs another. The only choice I have implemented so far is which of the four magic rocks the reader wants to use, which will have an impact on fight scenes later because each rock does something different.

[ActRaiser]

One of my absolute favorite library books as a little kid was The Third Planet from Altair – not the popular '80s paperback version, but the original '70s hardcover, which has some of the weirdest, lumpiest illustrations I've ever seen. (They rule, and while I can't find any scans or photos of them online

You sold me. I ordered it via Amazon. I figure it will be a great book for my daughter...she's only two but we might as well have a few more books in the house.

[DaHeckIzDat]

Question: would you guys be willing to play a CYOA game on computer with absolutely no graphics whatsoever? Just a black screen with white text?

[Stalvern]

You sold me. I ordered it via Amazon. I figure it will be a great book for my daughter...she's only two but we might as well have a few more books in the house.

Aw, you have no idea how happy that makes me. I hope she likes it when she gets to it!

Question: would you guys be willing to play a CYOA game on computer with absolutely no graphics whatsoever? Just a black screen with white text?

Interactive fiction is a rich and beautiful medium. Illustrations are entirely irrelevant.

If you want a good introduction to the more artistic, modern side of interactive fiction (which is not to slight the classic text adventures of the '80s), I strongly recommend giving Photopia a go. It's relatively short, but it made a big impact in the late '90s and is still more than worth experiencing today.

[DaHeckIzDat]

Here's a link that should work. It's nowhere near done, but this'll give you an idea what I'm trying to do. http://philome.la/AdamBolander1/graylands-beta

[Stalvern]

Here's a link that should work. It's nowhere near done, but this'll give you an idea what I'm trying to do. http://philome.la/AdamBolander1/graylands-beta

This doesn't play to the medium's strengths, at least not in its current form. You're trying to put way too much background behind what should be an interactive experience, and the exposition is bogging everything down. I get that you're invested in this setting and want the player to have the same picture in their head as the one in yours, but there's nothing fun or even interesting about clicking a link to explain why everyone's hair is gray, let alone to explain that the Silver Chain represents a "dawniron" one or that the crowded hallway is crowded (!). For something like the gray hair, which at least is important to the setting, just mention in passing that it's been bleached by the Graylands. For the Silver Chain, understand that it's enough for the reader/player to know its significance from context without reading a separate description of its exact details. For the hallway... no. I get what's going on here – this is Twine's closest equivalent to the good old "examine" command in text adventures, and there would be no problem with any of this in that context – but in this case, the sheer number of links overwhelms whatever actual help they might provide.

My advice is to do everything that you can to avoid adding links, because they do the opposite of what your adventure needs: They make the player put in the time and effort of interacting without actually providing any interactivity. Leaving them out isn't a tall order anyway. I don't need a link explaining that a Kashni is a reptile when I already know that it has scales. I don't need to know everything about the Graylands and Vashiil and the Forbidden Gates to know that the Graylands are a dangerous place and that the Gray Rangers patrol it, which are what's relevant here. This is interactive fiction, not a wiki. The who/what/where links and the ones explaining the different stones are warranted because they convey necessary information that would be intrusive and burdensome in the main text, but all the rest do nothing except drag out the process of reading and postpone the actual choices that are the whole reason for this project. (I was going to point out that the only choice available so far, whether to applaud or remain seated, doesn't even affect anything, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt here and chalk that up to how early this proof of concept is.)

Presentation aside, I can't really comment on this as a game or as a story yet; there just isn't enough content to have an opinion about either side. But I do know that this should be a feasible undertaking for someone with several novels under his belt. Good luck!