by Moonlit Naiad » Tue Apr 03, 2007 12:05 pm
Thanks for the comments.
*nods* More endings and branches would've been nice, but I started on this late (more than half way into the month), and had some things come up, so there was less time to work on it than I would've liked... But that's deadlines for you.
Plotted out on paper, there were two main branches - the left (don't follow the girls) and the right (follow the girls), with the right side leading back into the left at one episode.
For the longest time while I was working on it, most of the right side wasn't plotted past the three search options. Meanwhile, I continued to add on to the side that I was working on. I finally finished everything on the left side on the evening of the 30th, giving me only one day left to to finish writing the right side, troubleshoot/debug, spellcheck, and send it in.
Thus, unfortunately, the side that I had planned to be less developed weighs in with the longest arcs at 11 episodes and the side I had planned to do more with gets only 7 episodes in their longest arcs. Part of that, though, is on the left side there are several places where there's only one choice, effectively splitting one episode into two. But, I accomplished pretty much everything I wanted to do plotwise with minimal difficulties.
Writing in second person was definitely a challenge, especially since it makes difficult or eliminates the bulk of dialouge options - and it's no easy feat to write a story without dialogue (did end up with one line of it, though, and I forgot to change it out).
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As for the CYOA that most of us read when we were younger, that's kind of where I took the idea from (well, that and the addventures and addventure-type stories out and about), and while those may not exactly be high literature, they aren't bad for their target age group. I don't remember a lot of them so much anymore (been a long while for me), the one that sticks out in my mind the most was the one where you were force-reincarnated into a bunch of different animals due to offending an out-of-the-way temple...