Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) Writing Tools

[Saturn]

I wanted to post this up here (and a few other CYOA 'Gamehubs' here on Steam)

There are some free, and easy to use, tools that can help you write your own adventure. Doing a google search came up with a few.

Inklewriter ( https://writer.inklestudios.com/) - I've been using inklewriter for a while, and it is very easy to use. It has a helpful tutorial, and intuitive UI. I'm not sure how well known Inklewriter is (their youtube video is around 15k views). You can share your stories online for people to read. The only major downside (that I'm aware of) is that you can't download your 'CYOA' (the feature just doesn't exist). It wont force ads on the website, and there wont be any on your story (just a nice blank page with words :) ).

(This website does a review of Inklewriter ( http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670294/write-choose-your-own-adventure-books-through-this-clever-html5-app ))

Quest ( http://textadventures.co.uk/quest )- Quest is a recent discovery for me. You can write "Gamebooks" (aka Choose Your Own Adventure) or you can write Text Adventures (like Zork). The main difference between the two is that a CYOA is more like a book with choices, while the Text Adventures require inputs (IE: The Ogre stands before you. INPUT: Stab ogre with dagger). Quest can be downloaded, for a Desktop/Offline version, or it can be accessed through a web-browser. Quest allows you to make these Games/Gamebooks and sell them, without any fees or constraints

(As said on their website "No restrictions. Quest is licenced under the MIT License. This means you can download and modify the Quest source code, and do whatever you want with it. You can sell the games you make with Quest. You can use the Quest source code inside closed source commercial applications. You don't need to ask for permission - you already have it.")

Quest is also very simple/easy to use (Supposedly so easy a child can use it) However it doesn't look nearly as neat/nice/etc as Inklewriter, and the graphic/user interface is not as 'attractive'.

ETC- ( http://www.codecademy.com/courses/javascript-beginner-en-x9DnD/0/1 ) - This seems to be a tutorial on how to make a CYOA with step-by-step instructions (assuming that this is for Javascript)

If you're having trouble understanding how to write a Choose Your Own Adventure, I suggest checking out this fairly helpful article ( http://blog.karenwoodward.org/2014/06/how-to-write-choose-your-own-adventure.html ) or you can go to TV Tropes which provides a nice sized list of different examples and references, as well as a plethora of book series (as what they did right / wrong) http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChooseYourOwnAdventure (click OPEN/CLOSE ALL FOLDERS to expand the examples)

I hope this helps for people who want to casually make a CYOA/Gamebook/Text Adventure.

[Pants Optional]

Thanks for this list and review! I'm looking into Quest and Squiffy now as they both seem easy to use and the open license is a great plus (especially since you can basically package a game written with them via PhoneGap and then have a game ready to greenlight/sell if you wish).

Choice of Games is another CYOA-building game-maker. It is not free, however, and the licensing is rather steep but they do all the work of packaging and promoting your game if they decide it's worthy for distribution.

https://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescript-intro/

However, the best part of CoG is the forum, as everyone is helpful about all sorts of topics relating to writing, games, and everything in general. You can also play various "work in progress" games that people are creating and some of them are quite good.

https://forum.choiceofgames.com

[Saturn]

Paying seems like a harsh thing for a CYOA book. I understand that not everyone can do certain things (mainly artwork), but I feel that the free tools out there are easy enough to work with to write one. The original CYOA books were very shallow, usually having only some paragraphs and whatnot. I much prefer the novel-like CYOA which include dialogue and greater detail. While you can make a game-game, CYOA is much more like a old school roleplaying game than it is anything modern. Obviously things like 'choice' makes money, but I feel it's fairly rare. Steve Jackson (creator of the RPG 'GURPS') created a CYOA and it did well -- but that's steve jackson.

What kind of story are you working on for CYOA, do you plan on selling it?

[Pants Optional]

I don't think paying for a CYOA is harsh at all. The really good ones (Tin Star) have word counts that would actually be several novels long. Even the shorter ones are mostly fun to read and having choices gives the reader a sense of agency (although perhaps rather shallow).

It's also not that rare to make some amount of money on the work. Choice of Games (linked above) sells many official and hosted titles and those authors are paid for their work - although I surely wouldn't expect anyone to live off such small and inconsistent income.

I am working on several CYOA-type books and I do eventually plan on selling them once I have them to the point I feel they are worth a buck or two.

[Saturn]

It's sort-of like fan made games. They are (usually) free, but not always good. But that doesn't mean that a free game can't be insanely good.

A CYOA book could be insanely good, free or payed, but if it is payed it does not mean that it is good, just like being free doesn't mean it is bad.

And on that note: There is a large amount of professionally publish CYOA that is now legally free. Even Marvel books. So there are hundreds of hours of CYOA (if not more) in professionally published books.

And yeah, if it is equal to 400+ pages it's certainly worth a few bucks.

You should post your work here when you finally publish!