Hi everybody.
I’m an old member but a new author within the site. For the most part, what I am going to say will reiterate points which have already been made, but since this is the place for feedback on site features, I’m going to state my desires regardless of whether or not they have been previously mentioned. Forgive the repetition.
The single biggest missing feature to me is a way to create a node within a story. A “goto” scene function if you will. As things stand now, if I want to create a simple loop within a story, where scene ‘a’ goes to scenes ‘b’ and ‘c’, but both scenes ‘b’ and ‘c’ links to scene ‘d’, I have to write scene ‘d’ twice, and copy and paste it at the end of scenes ‘b’ and ‘c’. This doubles all output downstream and increases room for error.
I should be able to label each scene and then link scenes together by there labels. I can then plan events in such a way that a character has options, but can end up in the same place regardless of which options he chooses. (By the way, all my characters suffer in a Kafkaesque world where nothing they choose matters, in the end their tyrannical author has his way with them.) This brings up my second feature, variables.
I know that CHYOA has variables, but I hate the tools CHYOA gives me as a writer. I know I can use java style scripting to control my scenes, to add variables that I reuses, and to do a number of useful things that I want. I just don’t want to have to do or think about scripting during the writing process. I don’t want to think about scripting at all. I want to have a GUI that lets me add variables and tags to a scene. I want some sort of a system that tracks the labels and variables that I have used. I would not mind a drag and drop feature for such labels. I would like to be able to write easy “if” statements. If the reader has his variable ‘x’ show paragraph ‘y’. I’d like to be able to do all of these things within one document. I’d like to be able to write a scene in which I could have paragraphs for the reader if he went down path ‘a’ or path ‘b’ but still have new content regardless of where the reader had been and to not have to rewrite the scenes for each branch of the tree. I’d like to do all that with a fancy graphical interface that helps track it all so there is almost no scripting involved. I’m hard to please, I’m sorry.
I also want better tools for how my text is displayed. I’d like to insert page breaks without adding “depth” to my story tree. I like my readers. I’d rather not give them 10,000 words at a time, but I also would like to write a scene that is 10-20k words in length with no choices. I want to be able to display that with different texts sizes or even fonts, and most importantly, page breaks without adding chapter depth. I’d like a lot of control over the typography of the work, but I understand that these features maybe difficult.
These are the thoughts and features that seem most unintuitive or lacking when writing with CHYOA
Sorry that some of these are listed elsewhere, and thank you for reading.