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laurentlb | 7 months ago

Interesting project!

When I looked into CYOA, I opted for Ink. It's using a nice text-based language, a bit like markdown. It worked well for me, and I think it's a good option if you want to use a text editor.

I wrote about my experiments here: https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/my-adventures-with-narrative...

discuss

order

NoMoreNicksLeft|7 months ago

Theoretically, epub format is ideal for a cyoa format book. Each choice at the end of the page can be a hyperlink to the next (internal) file, and the pages/files themselves could be marked non-linear (so that someone can't just page through to see all the pages).

Unfortunately, Apple and the others who have authored epub clients do not implement it correctly and behave as if non-linear pages are supposed to be some sort of footnote, and pop up models to display them, rather than just treating them as the reflowable content that they should be. Not marking them as non-linear is also problematic, because something about it seems off when you can just scrub through pages in linear order. It's unlikely to ever be fixed either, so the format itself is ruined for this purpose.

tomjakubowski|7 months ago

It's a shame that Apple didn't get non-linear epubs right, considering they're the ones who made HyperCard!

dskhatri|7 months ago

Ink looks iteresting! Twinery provides a nice visual editor for the passages and branches which I found appealing. Ultimately, I used Mermaid to create visual snapshots of the story which were useful when editing the physical book.