I just wanted to communicate my excitement/encouragement to ILSWriter that you are working on a game. Yay!

Thank you but...

First, it is not a game. I am using tlaero's AdventureCreater to display an illustrated story.

Second, I have no idea what I'm doing.

I have the story and am making the illustrations as I go along. I have it from start to finish with no branches. In other words, whenever the characters could make a decision, I left a deadend branch and continued on the main route. For example, the four main characters are in a meeting. The boss says he would like to see (the readers choice) character A; or character B; or character C after the meeting. My story depends on character A being selected. So there are two deadend branches there as I proceed on with the story using character A. I have come to the end of the story. Now I am going back and finding an end for each of the deadends I have.

Does this make sense? Is this how somebody who knows what he's doing would do it?

This can't be done in chapters as I have done most of my stories. So I am going to ask for beta testers (I prefer to call them editors) to help me out before I publish this thing. Because of the controversal theme of this story it may very well never be publihed. That is one of the inputs I will be asking my editors for.

ILSWriter wrote:

Does this make sense? Is this how somebody who knows what he's doing would do it?

That makes perfect sense. You're essentially writing out each scenario individually. My only caveat would be that as you go along the quality of your work is going to go up. You may end up feeling that parts of your story that you worked on earlier might not be up to par with the quality of the parts you worked on near the end of your project.

As for testers/editors, I am not one to shy away from controversy. But, do keep in mind the content rules of the Lagoon if you intend to share your story here.

Cool ILS. I'm glad to hear you're making progress. Anything I can do to help your understanding of things?

Tlaero

I remember books written back somewhere in the 1980's (?) under a series "Choose your own adventure". That may well have been because of earlier computer games, the period may not be accurate.

Ok. Those books lead the reader, page to page, to a decision point after which the path was defined.

It would be good to see that each path had some ending consummate with the decision rather than, as I think you are inferring, arriving at a page that merely suggests that you terminated the story by a poor choice. Yes, that may not be what you implied but that is my interpretation.

Squeeky wrote:It would be good to see that each path had some ending consummate with the decision rather than, as I think you are inferring, arriving at a page that merely suggests that you terminated the story by a poor choice. Yes, that may not be what you implied but that is my interpretation.

No, what he's saying is that he has made one linear path with choices now, where all the branches lead to dead ends. And now he will start to add new ends for the branches. I think there's conceptually nothing wrong with this approach, as long as there aren't too many branches.

But I think you should take care of thinking about where and when you allow the story to branch, because it won't be much fun (in my opinion) if you don't allow the branches themselfs to branch out a bit as well. The problem you could then run in to is that you simply have too many combinations to write endings for (for example, one binary choice (two options) following another binary choice in the two branches will already lead to 4 endings). Of course the number of combinations can be reduced, for example by merging paths back into eachother and/or by keeping variables (there are probably a lot more options..)

This sounds like a great project. I'll be happy to help in any way, including beta testing/editing.

while i would love to help,my only experience in any way is a small bit of c++ coding,so i doubt i could be much help.
if however you could find a use for me,i would be glad to assist in any way i can.

I have written the story and put it into Tlaero’s Adventure Creater program. It is not a game. It is a story where at different points the reader has a choice of what the characters will do next.
I would like some help in fine tuning it. It would go something like this:
1. You send your email address to me at jane@illustratedlovestories.com.
2. If you pass my extensive background check, I will send you the link.
3. You will make comments and recommendations.
4. I will make the changes.
5. After a reasonable time (one to two weeks) I will publish the story on my web site.
6. I don’t know what you will do next.