I have been thinking recently about CYOA games recently, and thought I would share my ideas and see what other do and think.

Traditional IF tends to revolve around puzzles, and I am not sure how well that can be done in a CYOA, where it is relatively easy to try every possibility and see what works. I think that what a CYOA does best is to allow a story to evolve in a way that the player can influence the outcome. That means you need a variety of meaningful outcomes (the character dying is not a meaningful outcome, no matter how bizarre it happened).

On the subject of meaningful, you also need the choices presented to the player to be meaningful. If it is clear that A is the right choice and B the wrong choice, why bother giving the option of B? If choosing A and B both take the player to the same place, why bother with the choice? Okay, sometimes choices will be like this, but you should aim to minimise them.

On the other hand, you do not want to have each thread leading to its own meaningful outcome. If the player goes through six pages, with two choices on each page, you need 32 outcomes (assuming no recombination or pruning). Good luck making all of them meaningful!

The solution is to have threads converge at chokepoints. To make the choices before a chokepoint meaningful, your game needs to remember which pages the player has visited and to be able to react to that later on.

Given all that, here is how I would approach designing a CYOA game:


Genre and Setting

Decide where it is set.

What is happening

A simple overview of what will happen. If the player is reacting to events in the world, then what are those events? If she is to foil the plot of the evil supergenius, exactly what is that evil supergenius trying to do.

On the other hand, if the world is carrying on as normal, a simple one sentence description might be enough.

Outcomes

What are the meaningful outcomes? Aim for about half a dozen, and try to have some good aspect to all of them, even if there is a downside too. You died, but you thwarted the evil genius. Or each outcome could be a success for a different faction, and the player has influenced which one.

You might choose to write these out as they will appear in game at this stage.

Choke points

Identify pages that the player will always go through (or usually go through or...). Of course, this will depend on your game, maybe there are broadly two ways through, each with their own set of choke points, the player does one or the other.

Again, you may choose to write these out as they will appear in game at this stage.

A beginning

Write that first page!

Join the dots

Now all you have to do is create the pages linking the beginning to the chokepoints to the outcomes. Simples.

A conceptual different between CYOA and text adventures is that the former tend to be time-based, the player moving from one event to the next, and geography-based, with the player moving between locations. I guess that that is at least in part because in a text adventure you can readily go back and form between locations, in CYOA, you can usually only go forward.

this seems similar to games with "alignment" (good~law, neutral~neutral, or evil~chaos) game paths.

as they too merge at choke points where your "alignment" (ie event choices made) affect the situation of that choke point for you.

(forgive my text drawing visual picture's lack of ability, lol)

.......______ good _____
....../.......................\
start-------- neutral ------- choke point 1
.....\______ evil _______/

as obviously... you don't want a masssive branching tree... lol. You must have (re-)merging of the branches!

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here's an example of it in action in a game (Ogre Battle Series: Tactics Ogre for PS1):

http://luct.tacticsogre.com/valeria.html

home page of the site:

http://luct.tacticsogre.com/

(Final Fantasy Tactics is NOTHING compared to the Ogre Battle Series, hehe)

you can see how it branches and then re-merges at choke points