I had a ton of these growing up. I also had a bunch of Nintendo themed ones starring Mario and Zelda characters. I used to cheat a lot. Always had my fingers between the pages marking the last...
I had a ton of these growing up. I also had a bunch of Nintendo themed ones starring Mario and Zelda characters.
I used to cheat a lot. Always had my fingers between the pages marking the last spot so I could go back of I didn't like how a decision was going. You kind of had to with how random the choices were sometimes.
Same! I didn't have this vocabulary at the time, but in hindsight, I realize I treated them more like a multiverse where you see all the differences that your choices make.
I used to cheat a lot.
Same! I didn't have this vocabulary at the time, but in hindsight, I realize I treated them more like a multiverse where you see all the differences that your choices make.
I remember one where I chose to take a bath and that naturally resulted in dropping a hair dryer in the bath (as we are all wont to do) and dying. Everything really was a crap shoot.
I remember one where I chose to take a bath and that naturally resulted in dropping a hair dryer in the bath (as we are all wont to do) and dying. Everything really was a crap shoot.
I still had several dozen CYOA books in my possession, but recently passed them on to my nephew since he enjoyed reading them so much when he was visiting. And I also still have quite a few...
I still had several dozen CYOA books in my possession, but recently passed them on to my nephew since he enjoyed reading them so much when he was visiting. And I also still have quite a few Fighting Fantasy books as well, which I also plan on passing on to him at some point too... although some of them are in pretty rough shape due to how often I read/played them growing up.
Anyone else read and hold onto their CYOA/FF books too?
I never owned any, but I checked out a LOT from my local library. I've always loved this format, and I've written several "short stories" in CYOA format, as well as one "screenplay" for a (set of)...
I never owned any, but I checked out a LOT from my local library. I've always loved this format, and I've written several "short stories" in CYOA format, as well as one "screenplay" for a (set of) YT video(s) we made in college (very un-serious, fun kinda thing, not real film).
A dream of mine has been to make a puzzle hunt in CYOA format, where each stage has 2 puzzles per outcome-so-far, and you can choose to solve one or the other in order to get the next clue.
Do you know about Twine? It is an open source tool for creating interactive fiction. I have not made anything with it, but it is definitely bookmarked as anything I'd like to try sometime.
Do you know about Twine? It is an open source tool for creating interactive fiction. I have not made anything with it, but it is definitely bookmarked as anything I'd like to try sometime.
No, I'd never heard of this! TBH I'm a web developer so I think I'd be a lot more likely to write my own code for this if I were going to publish something, but that looks really cool!
No, I'd never heard of this! TBH I'm a web developer so I think I'd be a lot more likely to write my own code for this if I were going to publish something, but that looks really cool!
Twine isn't just for publishing though, it also makes planning and writing multi-branch and non-linear stories a lot easier thanks to the story map tool - E.g. You could probably use a flowchart...
Twine isn't just for publishing though, it also makes planning and writing multi-branch and non-linear stories a lot easier thanks to the story map tool - E.g.
You could probably use a flowchart or diagram tool like draw.io to do similar, but why do that when with Twine you can turn it a fully functional interactive story with only a tiny bit more effort instead.
There is also renpy as another big one. I belive inkle has another one too. If you can ever catch any dev or talks from the head of inkle he has some great insight on producing interactive...
There is also renpy as another big one. I belive inkle has another one too. If you can ever catch any dev or talks from the head of inkle he has some great insight on producing interactive function as he has been doing it for years.
There are also engines for if you want to do old school IF with all the verbs and actions like 'pickup wallet' style interactions.
Depending if you want to write the engine vs the story I would highly reccomend picking one of the existing engines as, despite being just a text adventure, you can really get lost in the writing of the engine and not have much game to show for it.
Text adventures can balloon into complex animals as you track state and flags through a huge branch, and, debugging all of that can be very hard, which will lead you down a path of needing more and more debug options that are already present in the existing engines.
But yeah if the fun is also writing the engine then it's a manageable job for one. A few years back I leaned some javascript by making a text style adventure. I learned a lot of JS along the way as intended, but still after a year of some fun nightly coding I had very little content to experience for the amount of time I put in.
There is something powerful with those existing engines where you can just start making a world with your words immediately and it is very worth grabbing and making something with them right off is your goal isn't engine writing.
I was thinking like, the types of puzzles would be radically different. Like at one juncture, you might put some word-clue puzzle and also a pattern-matching puzzle or something. So it wouldn't be...
I was thinking like, the types of puzzles would be radically different. Like at one juncture, you might put some word-clue puzzle and also a pattern-matching puzzle or something. So it wouldn't be so much about one puzzle being easier or harder than the other, but about what people find fun.
Also it definitely wouldn't be a competitive thing, I'd just want to do this if I had a group of friends who hung out and made puzzle hunts for each other ever again. (Which I did in college, but I never got a chance to do a CYOA puzzle hunt.)
One clue I made in the past in a Skyrim-based hunt was to give them a bunch of "ingredients" (origami using translucent paper) that they had to "craft" (unfold, and then stack one on top of the other). There were letters on alternating sides of the paper, like on the top and bottom 1 3 5 7 and on the sides 2 4 6 (all facing the center). So when you stacked them you'd see either gibberish or a 7-letter word. The 7-letter words then needed to be sorted in some way (can't remember) and the nth letters in each spelled out a word vertically.
Ah, yeah if you're not doing it as a competitive thing then balance doesn't matter. In any case, I wish I had some friends in RL who were into making puzzles for each other. That sounds like fun! :)
Ah, yeah if you're not doing it as a competitive thing then balance doesn't matter. In any case, I wish I had some friends in RL who were into making puzzles for each other. That sounds like fun! :)
Shout out to Inkle and their clever recreations of Steve Jackson's Sorcery series. They really kept a lot of the feeling of the series in a digital format.
Shout out to Inkle and their clever recreations of Steve Jackson's Sorcery series. They really kept a lot of the feeling of the series in a digital format.
I had a ton of these growing up. I also had a bunch of Nintendo themed ones starring Mario and Zelda characters.
I used to cheat a lot. Always had my fingers between the pages marking the last spot so I could go back of I didn't like how a decision was going. You kind of had to with how random the choices were sometimes.
"Do you take the door on the left or the right?"
"Left"
"You die. The end!"
Same! I didn't have this vocabulary at the time, but in hindsight, I realize I treated them more like a multiverse where you see all the differences that your choices make.
I remember one where I chose to take a bath and that naturally resulted in dropping a hair dryer in the bath (as we are all wont to do) and dying. Everything really was a crap shoot.
Yeah, I used to do that too. But, IMO, that's not cheating. It's basically the CYOA version of save scumming. And there is nothing wrong with that! :P
I did the same, but not because I wanted to get the best outcome, but to be able to traverse the entire tree of possible outcomes.
Retro quicksave.
I still had several dozen CYOA books in my possession, but recently passed them on to my nephew since he enjoyed reading them so much when he was visiting. And I also still have quite a few Fighting Fantasy books as well, which I also plan on passing on to him at some point too... although some of them are in pretty rough shape due to how often I read/played them growing up.
Anyone else read and hold onto their CYOA/FF books too?
p.s. I recently found out that there is a FF books Steam game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/856880/Fighting_Fantasy_Classics/
I never owned any, but I checked out a LOT from my local library. I've always loved this format, and I've written several "short stories" in CYOA format, as well as one "screenplay" for a (set of) YT video(s) we made in college (very un-serious, fun kinda thing, not real film).
A dream of mine has been to make a puzzle hunt in CYOA format, where each stage has 2 puzzles per outcome-so-far, and you can choose to solve one or the other in order to get the next clue.
Do you know about Twine? It is an open source tool for creating interactive fiction. I have not made anything with it, but it is definitely bookmarked as anything I'd like to try sometime.
No, I'd never heard of this! TBH I'm a web developer so I think I'd be a lot more likely to write my own code for this if I were going to publish something, but that looks really cool!
Twine isn't just for publishing though, it also makes planning and writing multi-branch and non-linear stories a lot easier thanks to the story map tool - E.g.
You could probably use a flowchart or diagram tool like draw.io to do similar, but why do that when with Twine you can turn it a fully functional interactive story with only a tiny bit more effort instead.
There is also renpy as another big one. I belive inkle has another one too. If you can ever catch any dev or talks from the head of inkle he has some great insight on producing interactive function as he has been doing it for years.
There are also engines for if you want to do old school IF with all the verbs and actions like 'pickup wallet' style interactions.
Depending if you want to write the engine vs the story I would highly reccomend picking one of the existing engines as, despite being just a text adventure, you can really get lost in the writing of the engine and not have much game to show for it.
Text adventures can balloon into complex animals as you track state and flags through a huge branch, and, debugging all of that can be very hard, which will lead you down a path of needing more and more debug options that are already present in the existing engines.
But yeah if the fun is also writing the engine then it's a manageable job for one. A few years back I leaned some javascript by making a text style adventure. I learned a lot of JS along the way as intended, but still after a year of some fun nightly coding I had very little content to experience for the amount of time I put in.
There is something powerful with those existing engines where you can just start making a world with your words immediately and it is very worth grabbing and making something with them right off is your goal isn't engine writing.
Cool idea! But isn't balancing a CYOA puzzle hunt going to be incredibly difficult?
I was thinking like, the types of puzzles would be radically different. Like at one juncture, you might put some word-clue puzzle and also a pattern-matching puzzle or something. So it wouldn't be so much about one puzzle being easier or harder than the other, but about what people find fun.
Also it definitely wouldn't be a competitive thing, I'd just want to do this if I had a group of friends who hung out and made puzzle hunts for each other ever again. (Which I did in college, but I never got a chance to do a CYOA puzzle hunt.)
One clue I made in the past in a Skyrim-based hunt was to give them a bunch of "ingredients" (origami using translucent paper) that they had to "craft" (unfold, and then stack one on top of the other). There were letters on alternating sides of the paper, like on the top and bottom 1 3 5 7 and on the sides 2 4 6 (all facing the center). So when you stacked them you'd see either gibberish or a 7-letter word. The 7-letter words then needed to be sorted in some way (can't remember) and the
nth letters in each spelled out a word vertically.Ah, yeah if you're not doing it as a competitive thing then balance doesn't matter. In any case, I wish I had some friends in RL who were into making puzzles for each other. That sounds like fun! :)
Shout out to Inkle and their clever recreations of Steve Jackson's Sorcery series. They really kept a lot of the feeling of the series in a digital format.