More CYAO - Decision trees

Here's a sample of the decision tree for my CYAO:

It's pretty complicated already... and this is at a point when the hero is only just getting to Dragonstone Keep, the main area for the game. It's going to be pretty complex by the end. Those black ones are deaths; four chances to be dead already, and we're barely out of the starting blocks. I don't know about you, but my favourite bit of the CYAO games I read as a child was reading all the deaths. Some just copped out, with a 'You are dead' script, but the best ones were a bit more flavourful. The larger one at the bottom is a placeholder for something like this:

"A goblin club catches you on the back of the head. The sudden pain is quickly replaced by a warm, wet feeling, and you sink into darkness. You awake hours later, your shoulders burning in agony. As you reach over to see what's wrong, you realise your arms have been removed. The smell of sweet meat cooking finds your nostrils. A goblin looks up from where he is sucking the flesh off your fingers, growls something in a guttural language and grins, displaying a mouthful of fangs. You are (mostly) dead."

Grisly, fun and something worth going through the decision tree for? Or would most people see the words 'You are dead' in bold and immediately flip back? I can't think that both Sue and I are alone in wanting to know all the gory details...

Choose Your Own Adventures!

It's ok as long as you kept your thumb in the page, right?

I remember whiling away the hours reading through the Ian Livingstone/Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy books. They had green borders, wonderful cover illustrations, and the ending was almost always at paragraph 300. But I don't remember ever actually 'playing' one of them. Just reading through and assuming I'd won the fights, because it was fun to seek out all of the terrible deaths.

Then there were three stand-out series of video-game tie-in gamebooks, for Sonic the Hedgehog, the Mario Bros and Lemmings. I'm actually genuinely amazed that the first two have wikipedia pages, and that there were only two Lemmings gamebooks. I didn't just play those, I used to sit and trace the images. I can still draw a Lemming as a result of that book.

As a writing exercise, I'm trying my hand at creating a CYOA book, mostly inspired by those gamebooks of my childhood. It's complicated; thanks to this article by Karen Woodward, I'm using SimpleMind+ app on the iPad, which makes flowcharts fun and interesting to look at, and also simplifies it somewhat. I'm genuinely interested in inkle, a software for making interactive stories that are just a bit better than CYOA, as they feature sound, colour visuals and so on. I'm really interested to note that there are fighting fantasy games on the Nintendo DS and might see if I can check that out on my own 3DS.

Watch this space; I'll put the decision tree up as soon as it's finished.

I hope you had a great Christmas and that your new year has got off to a nice start!