Inspired by "A Conversation with Ophion" by gnustoboz as well as the Car Wars Adventure Gamebooks, "Ring of Thieves" by S. John Ross, and, of course, the Choose Your Own Adventure books, I've decided to make a branching-path gamebook for my One Game a Month game for April.
I've already done some work to take a text file and turn it into an .EPUB file, which is going to be my delivery format. There remains a little bit of work to do there (shuffling pages, making sure linkages work), but the majority of the work that remains is to actually write the story.
Again, taking a page from gnustoboz, I'm using Twine to manage my text. I could write it all in any text editor, but having a little bit of feedback about what pages link to other pages is appealing to me.
So far, I've created:
- 15 pages
- 20 dangling links to pages I haven't created yet
- 1042 words of (non-link) text
- 1 ending (where the character falls, trips, and is eaten. Be careful!)
I think I want somewhere between 64 and 100 pages, and somewhere around 10-16 endings. This isn't going to be a big book; in comparison, the old CYOA books had around 120 pages, with something like 30-40 endings. Perhaps I should scale down the number of pages I'm targeting - perhaps 60 pages with 20 endings is reasonable.
Sometimes, I feel like I'm writing a text adventure game, but then I remind myself not to give the reader/player any reason to want to backtrack as they explore the world. Then, I lurch into more narrative mode, and I have to remind myself to give the player meaningful choices every few paragraphs.
Perhaps, if I'm pleased with the outcome, I'll end up formatting a print copy that is available on Lulu. Perhaps some Creative Commons licensed clip art could be pressed into service to make it feel more like a real book.
It'd be kind of funny, kind of strange, if the first money I make from this One Game a Month project comes from a book.
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