Are CYOA books Veeky Forums?

We should make a gamebook full of Veeky Forums memes. The final boss can be the Dread Gazebo, the main quest object, the Head of Vecna.

There's one where you become a Kamen Rider in the end. You get a medallion that allows you to transform into a badass knight to kill the evil Black Knight.

One ending has you go home, but another ending has you ride off into the mists foe your next adventure. (I think it's the book 'Knight in Screaming Armor.')

I might check out my local Goodwills and see if anyone's dropped off any CYOA books.
If I do find some, I'll post 'em here.

I haven't given them much thought since my school days. Are there any cyoa books that have a fleshed out world? Something that focuses on the people of the world and their lives would be ideal. I want to see their struggles - both physical and emotional. I want to have everything laid bare about the characters and the world they live in so that I can see just how it all ticks.

I can't help but think cyoa would allow for an interesting way to mold a world. Use the reader's choices as a cheap way into jumping perspectives and characters. Focus more on character development than power fantasy and have fun with it. Political shit in low fantasy settings could be pretty rad as a cyoa.

CYOA books are usually just kid books with a set amount of endings, 50% which are shit and 5% which are ideal.

Oh yeah I remember those. I got a couple of those bad boys in my closet right now!

There is a CYOA General on this board. Its mostly homebrewed stuff but books are probably welcomed if you have scans.

I'm in the long-ass process of designing one of these (long because I'm indecisive and get bored easily), but given my programming tendencies, I might pitch it as a visual novel.
Wish me luck, Veeky Forums.

Luck brah

Does anybody remember an off-brand CYOA about an elf exploring a bunch of magic towers, so he could get to the middle and find a magic herb? I read it back in elementary school. It had some pretty fucked up losing scenarios too.

NIGGA SCAN EM AND POST EM

Bumping because I'm going to Goodwill this afternoon in the hopes of doing a GYG storytime.

if you can find this guys stuff he has pretty good military themed cyoas, the one depicted is an alternative desert storm for instance

How about Japanese Visual Novels?

As a side note, I've seen gamebooks in Japan that are REALLY elaborate. There was one which was entirely a manga, and you moved from chapter to chapter according to your decisions. (It was as thick as a phone book, but printed on cheap paper. If anyone's interested, it was a Gundam rip-off._

What do you think quersts are, user.

Any tips on how to write CYOA books? I'm writing a visual novel and I struggle at keeping track of decisions.

Make a chart
Something like "You can choose A, B, or C. If you choose A, you can then choose D or E, but if you chose B, you can choose F, G, or H, and if you choose C, you can pick between H, I, or J. Choosing H from B leads to K or L, but choosing it from C leads to L or M." etc.

Yeah, I had some charts going around, but before I realized it got so damn complex that it looked like some madman's scribbles.
Or maybe that's how exactly it must look like

Bump cuz cool thread

It really is, especially if you're brainstorming.
It's like programming where if you don't know what it's supposed to be saying, it takes four times as long to read.

yEd is your friend.

yworks.com/products/yed

based user

Hey! I'm a.. er, 'professional' (whatever that means) narrative designer and there's a different bunch of ways to do this!

The most basic way is to use any kind of flowchart maker.
suggestion of yEd being your friend is correct. It's a pretty commonly used tool to make flowcharts. I actually prefer webtools like draw.io, but I tend to avoid making flowcharts that I can't make by hand.

However, people use a bunch of different stuff, articy:draft, CeltX (although that's more scriptwriters, it can be used for these kinds of things), ChatMapper. They have different functions and uses. If you just need to keep track of decisions, then flowchart, but if you want more help to writing your VN, these are great tools.

My personal preference to make these kind of things is Twine.
I use Twine professionally to create story prototypes that can be played through for the programmers to make.

PS: if you're using Twine 2.0 to make anything that's huge (more than about 10-15k words with over 100 nodes), you'll NEED a proofing format called illume which will save your life.

Holy shit senpai, these are extremely useful resources! Thanks for sharing!

Twine will make my life so much easier! I was designing battles with a strong narrative focus (think in Radical Dreamers) and I was struggling to keep track of everything.
For example, while fighting a giant serpent, depending on a skill check you can avoid his attack and keep fighting without trouble, but if you can't, it grapples you and the battle turns into a whole different situation from that.

Downloaded Twine.
It looks fantastic, thanks based user.

>We should make a gamebook
I was thinking about something like this.

It would be made on a wiki and would use gurps rules.

>gurps rules WUT? We are talking about gamebooks here.

The writer would dm his own gurps session, playing the character and the npcs, he decide what the npc do and what the character do.

After X rolls, or Y in game hours, on the next roll he would roll 2 times instead of one, creating the choices that the player will choose from, he them must dm and write those 2 alternate universes, after some amount of time, you will have 4 stuff and then 8 different paths and 16.....

The writer would dm based on what he want to happen on the story, he would the dm this session and write how this session is happening, like you would read on cyoa books.

The talk page of the wiki article you are on (the cyoa page) would have the stat of the characters and etc....
The DM that started the thing dont need to write the entire book, others can get a unfinished path and continue from there.

It would be even possible to select infinite worlds as the setting, to allow multiple genres.

You could even start the book, in a way where the character create his char as he select his choices. The problem with that, is that in a cyoa every choice must be valid, if the game say "you drink the blue potion in front of you" and also have the choice "you drink the red potion in front of you", the character MUST have the 2 potions in front of him.

The point of using gurps instead of just writing a story, it to make the story have some logic, or whateaver you call this.
The point of using gurps instead of another rpg is that gurps have way more detail than other rpgs, this may be a bad thing if you are a rpg player that hate complexity, but since the reader wont see any rules or need to understand any rules, this complexity is gone, just the writer/dm will need to deal with this

How do you guys prefer combat in CYOA?
>FF's roll to do stamina damage
>Pick a choice and you either win, lose, or take damage.
Personally, I like FF's mechanically speaking, but it's sort of anticlimatic. Maybe a hidden roll that sends you to one of a couple of pages, with the yields and percent chances depending on your choice?

Huh, sounds like Ulysses: The Gamebook. Might be cool. The Dinosaur Comics guy did a Hamlet CYOA but obviously the focus is comedy.

Most gamebooks are squarely in the generic questin' vein. Not really what you're asking about, but for the record the most ambitious/interesting in terms of using the form I've seen were probably the Fighting Fantasy books Creature of Havoc and Crimson Tide.

...oh, and Cretan Chronicles just because the writers seemed to actually know some shit about Greek myths and were having fun with it.

Pick a choice desu senpai. Makes things more exciting

The second one if I wanted the first I would be playing a (non narrativist) rpg instead of reading a cyoa.

I've got a whole shelf full of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, got my first one years ago, they're good fun.

Glad I can help! If you're looking to make old-style CYOAs books, it's basically one of the most form-fitting and easy to use tools for these kinds of things.

For anyone who's interested in using twine here are some resources:
The Twine Wiki has some.. ok starting resources? twinery.org/wiki/twine2:guide

When you've made some simple stuff, having passages connect, getting some variables there, etc and you want to actually start making something interesting, (assuming you're using the standard format that Twine 2.0 comes with, Harlowe) this is your bible. twine2.neocities.org/ It's just as hard to understand as the real thing. I mean, I've read this a bunch of time, I 'got' what something did, but I didn't understand until I started using some of this stuff.

And when you have a question. The forums are a mess, but whatever your question is, it's already been answered there. It is a mess though, just saying. twinery.org/forum/

Last but not least, I would suggest googling 'Twine Games' and playing a bunch. You can also find a bunch in the Interactive Fiction Database, but it'd be mixed in with a bunch of other games.

OH and to publish your games! Twines are html files that can be distributed freely. You can put it up on a google drive, you can just give the file to someone, etc. A free hosting tool I like to use is philome.la for creating works you want to show off to the public.

if you have any specific questions about stuff, I can try to answer them?

Thanks for the links! Personally I'll use Twine to organize myself with the story since I'm using renpy for the final product, but I think that sharing the HTMLs could be a nice way to allow people to test the game before the final version.

What's the workflow in your job? You just write things up and then the programmers put it into the plot?

Fighting Fantasy are awesome, more combat and dice and character mechanics than CYOA

they reprinted the more standard fantasy ones a few years ago that exclude the space ones

Kinda, yeah. I find that for complex non-linear stories, the best game design document is a prototype in twine where they can read and play the story through with actual features and systems that should be in the game.

This way, the game can also be played by creative director/other designers and we can refine stuff like pacing, experience before any programmers/artists get their hands on it and no work is theoretically, wasted. which is false. some work always gets thrown out of the window for whatever reason. welcome to gamedev

Then programmers start working in engine to make features and structure and then I'm there in engine doing detail work, etc. The design team is small so I get to do level design alongside which is a lot of work, but merciful because when something needs to be changed for x reason, I can see if either the level design or the narrative has more room to wiggle than the other and fit the change that way.

maybe someone here can answer this, but what is a Livingstone Device, and why is it relelvant to CYOA Books?

Do they still make these books?

>Fighting Fantasy are awesome
No, no they are not. Half of those mistake random spikes of Tomb Of Horrors-level lethality for difficulty and good writing.

Lone Wolf was good. I mean, save for the mandatory derp in every book (like that fucking poisonous monster in Caverns of Kalte), you could somewhat anticipate the consequences of your actions and plan forward.

Fighting Fantasy was full of "Lol, you die" moments, terrible design choices and pure RNG. I mean, fuck, The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain has you die to triple-layered RNG after locking for hours (real-time) in a fucking maze. And it's one of the better books in the serie.

I have spend hours ripping characters to random bullshit in Dungeon Robber and it was more fair than the average choice in Fighting Fantasy.

>not preferring Fabled Lands
Seriously, open-world gamebooks. Amazing. Almost as good as Heart of Ice.

Hope they eventually do get to publish the six missing books.

the app store kind of kicked off a renaissance along with the choice of games people, then twine got big.

a lot of it's trash, but there's a lot of excellent stuff out there.

>I have spend hours ripping characters to random bullshit in Dungeon Robber and it was more fair than the average choice in Fighting Fantasy.
You're welcome! (I backed the kickstarter for the random dungeon generator as a map poster, dungeon robber came out of that. it's a great game)

>FF gamebooks be hard, yo
I don't think you get the point, user - you are NOT s'posed to breeze thru them your first time. No no. They were meant to CHALLENGE you, repeatedly, until you FINALLY found the right path. They were meant to be played again and again, not as one-shots.

Not that guy, but I know what you mean. I grew up with CYOAs and gamebooks. But even so, now that I'm not a kid anymore, "loludead start over" isn't fun for me, because I don't have loads of free time to kill like I used to.
I think gamebooks could benefit from a bit of the "fail forward" philosophy, where there isn't just one "right" path but a several paths to interesting outcomes, and where losing a fight means something other than "roll a new character and start again at page 1." Like what if I get captured instead? What if I wake up later floating on my back in the river where they dumped me?
(Granted that could bring the pagecount up a lot.)

yep, there used to be CYOA threads lifted from CYOA books but no one paid attention to them. I miss Goosebumps user. This will probably be more at home at /qst/.

Oh, I agree that more than one 'true' path should exist - the better cyoa's do this: Wizards, Warriors, and You! books had multiple 'correct' endings, and classic cyoa books had lots of weird different good and bad ends.
The problems you address are just lazy writing - an all-to-common problem in our modern hurry-up-and-consume world.

I think there was one where death boots you to the underworld, giving you a bit of agency.

Any games you would recommend?