A place to collect my thoughts, ask questions, solicit feedback, etc. Hopefully without too many spoilers. The gist of it is I've got the outline of it planned out - all 334 chapters. This is going to be very much in the mode of the Lone Wolf gamebooks: - Fantasy world. Magic exists, but is limited and in this game, mostly sexual. - There are going to be 15 skills. You'll have up to 8, but you don't have to pick them right away. When you choose a choice requiring a skill, that skill is added to your list. When you have 8 skills, the other options are locked out for you. - Combat is going to be a simple up/down affair. If your Combat Skill is higher, you win; if it's lower, you lose and suffer whatever the fate is. Some modifiers for CS will be available, but there are routes through the game without combat - if you can find them. - Not tracking health points or healing; there will be stats tracking other attributes, like breast size. - Sexual scenarios and content, but sex isn't the main point of this game (unlike Lois Lane's Night Out or Bad Sex). Much more adventure-focused. - Multiple endings. Most of them are bad, but there are multiple paths to the "true" ending. I'm working on the mechanics right now - I haven't done a game mode story before so this is new territory for me, and if I wasn't such a lazy bastard I'd just code everything in twine and be done with it. First question: Because there's a lot of looping in the story, I'm wondering if instead of having the normal descriptive chapter titles I might do an oldschool "If you have Detect Magic, turn to 313, if you don't turn to 310." and the two options are 310 and (if you have Detect Magic) 313. What do y'all think?
I think that's a fun gimmick, but as I mentioned elsewhere recently, "313" is not exactly an enticing chapter title. Maybe a compromise? Prefix your each chapter's title with a 'page number', and then you could refer to that number in the 'what happens next?' prompt. Preserves the old-school adventure book style while also playing up the strengths of the ability to use and refer to chapter by title in the online format.
This seems like an excellent outline that's well thought out. The idea of a complete, functional game mode story like this is not a very well traveled road on CHYOA, but a chapter-by-chapter plan will help you immensely. I got about 80% of the way with a game mode story of similar size using a chapter-by-chapter plan before abandoning it a couple of years ago (I had made several awkward and irreversible design decisions early on; might revisit the concept eventually). My first reaction is that this is a bad idea. It doesn't utilise game mode very effectively, and depending on your story's complexity, you might want to have multiple identically named chapters that link to the same chapter but set different variables, which is awkward if you let the reader see all of them at once. The numbers are also not very user-friendly. If the reader has to look at the score to understand and navigate the story, that also could be an issue, since mobile users need to open the burger menu to see that information. That said, literally phrasing it as "turn to page X" is kind of charming and a point in its favour. If you would like an extra pair of eyes to test the story, I'm able to view drafts if I have the url.
I'm drafting it in docs before I start the story thread proper. Will probably need some playtesting and fine-tuning.
Okay, I think I've worked out the syntax for variables and conditional statements, although a lot will be done in assembling the story. So now I just need to get to writing. Some of this would be easier if done during HTML - or a nudge-nudge-wink-wink track-your-own-damn-variables a la Lone Wolf or Fighting Fantasy - but I'm going to try and work within the mechanics of CHYOA and see if I can make it work. And as a taste of the setting:
Debating nixing the Combat Skill and just making combat more of a storytelling affair. Do people like Combat Skill as a stat?
It might be of advantage if you number the destination chapters to better find them when creating link chapters. If you have many chapters with the same name, you can't link them as the right chapter won't show up in the 10 (?) results of the type-away menu. If you use link chapters for decisions, it might also be useful to use inaccessible chapters for the destination chapters that are child chapters of the origin chapters. And the link chapters would be child chapters of the origin chapter as well.
I haven't given up on this, but I've been stuck mostly doing background material because: 1) Life has been super busy 2) I had approx. 670 notifications today because somebody archive-binged LLNO, and my time scheduled for writing was busy updating the spreadsheet
