Another thing that could be useful to display next to an option is the depth of the branch behind it. So it would simply a number telling that the longest branch past this option is X chapters long and do it again for each further choice. Would avoid the 3 chapters long branch bad surprises when someone wants to read something longer. Or to identify which of the sometimes dozen starting choices is the longest.
While I would normally not have an issue. The one problem is that it ruins the surprise for those who don't look at the story map when going through the story.
I am against this. For one thing, it makes it impossible to set up a story which is a morality play: where choosing the quick and easy path leads to your destruction. For another, why do we need it when there's a link to the story map at the bottom of every chapter?
Hmm... While I get the sense behind this option, ill agree that it kills the tradition of Bad Endings and other ChYOA tropes.
I was going to say I don't think that's a problem, but then I realized it could lead to infinite ones.
Well, more likely to happen is that the count would stop at the link chapter - so some chains would look shorter than they are in practice. The same kind of false impression can happen with "deepest chapter" as a unit of measure.
To solve this. I would suggest the depth number followed by a symbol like plus sign or something to indicate there are linked chapters. For example: Talk to the nude maid (6) Look in the cabinet (2+) But if the next chapter is a linked chapter it would display the depth of the chapter it links. Contiueing the example say looking in the cabinet had these options. Punch the dildo (1) Ignore it and talk to the nude maid (6) it has its own problems. One being that it probably isn't intuitive for new readers, and another being there is still a lack of information. But I think it would still be helpful.
Well, it's not necessarily making a bad end intuitively obvious as much as making it intuitively obvious that that branch is shorter - whether that is because of a bad end, or because it's a dangling plot thread that hasn't been addressed yet is unknown to the reader unless you specifically include an "end" tag. A lot of users go for the longest route by default because they want a more substantial storyline, but CYOA tend to be perpetual works-in-progress almost by default, with lots of storylines that end abruptly because no one wrote any more chapters. If you ever get to a chapter with two choices, and one choice says (7) and one choice says (0), you know that the first choice has a depth of 7 chapters and you know the second choice doesn't have any - but it isn't clear to the reader whether choice #2 is a bad end or just a storyline that hasn't been filled out yet.
hmm... I wonder if any sci-fi or demonic stories have pulled that off yet? Perhaps the author has to click a button that says continuing or ending. Some stories might have a choice that requires less story and ends faster where the longer choice could still be a work in progress.
If you add a chapter, you have to add +1 to every ancestor but only if a side branch isn't deeper. Maybe it would be possible to implement this but I'm not sure as I'm not quite familiar with the story map structure. There could also be problems with deep/big stories. You could link back to start... but well... It would also be quite useless if you have two branches, each with 10 chapters, while one has 10 words per chapter but the other 1000 words per chapter. So it would rather need counting words.
Nah, you'd just do it recursively. For each chapter, if it has no routes coming off it, return 0, else, return the maximum of their depths plus one. You could do the same thing with words, if you wanted.
Technically it would not show bad ends, some one chapter long off branches are sometimes just ideas thrown in that have not been furthered yet. There is no way to know if it is an ending, a dead branch or the start of something with more to come in the next few days, weeks, months
