ChooseYourStory.com

[severenz]

Guys - I'm fearing that my time away from the site has led a lot of you to go over to ChooseYourStory.com. Aside from the "msword copy/paste" issue which is almost fixed, what is making people go over there?

If there is a feature that this site is missing, please let me know. If there any problems you experience, please let me know.

Or is it the other way around, chooseyourstory users come over here?

This is in response to Endmaster releasing Eternal over there (and a reference to the copy/paste issue) - I saw a post on that.

My goal has always been to have the best interactive fiction writing engine on the web. This would hopefully lead to the best stories, and most readers, writers than other sites out there.

[End Master]

I doubt if anyone is going over to either site on a permanent basis. I tend to bounce back and forth, and a few others wander over sometimes, but that's about it.

If anything, I tend to promote IS sometimes when I'm posting over there. The two sites tend to do stuff differently anyway, one focuses on games and this one focuses more on the story, so people are going to flock to what they prefer. I wouldn't worry about trying to copy CYS.

Recently I mentioned this site over at another interactive fiction site called "Choice of Games" and I try to make sure the link to the site I put on the wikipedia doesn't get deleted by overzealous mods, so hopefully people are still finding this site that way as well.

EDIT: Also this place has the advantage of not having any censorship, so there are stories that can be written here that can't be written over at CYS. (And fortunately this place has managed to avoid becoming a pit of bad porn stories like CHYOO2)

[severenz]

Are there gaming features that could easily be added to attract more users?

How about an animated random dice roll? I really have no idea how the gaming sites work!


1. I'm considering adding an "ajax browser" version of the story - only the "room" information would refresh after clicking a choice.

2. The browsing engine is currently under surgery as well.

3. I will soon be starting a discussion on "crowd cleansing" (aka report this as offensive or just plain shite) and automatic cleansing/purging of abandoned stories soon.

P.S. Has anyone heard from xnull? I figured he probably took over a portion of the world by now. He had confided in me that he was working on some sort of vector visualization engine of a story that he was going to let me apply to my story structure.

[End Master]

Well I'm sure adding some gaming elements probably would attract more people, but I think for some, part of the appeal is the pure writing aspect. Drag, I believe has said in the past he'd be against any move that would change the site towards more gaming aspects, he can probably better explain his position on the matter.

Personally, it wouldn't bother me if you did add such things, but I don't have any good suggestions on how to implement them since I wouldn't be using them anyway. Even at CYS I don't use them, I just focus on writing the story. I find that if you write a good enough story, it will still capture people's attention just as well as one that has a few game elements.

As for Xnull, I know he's Apoth's friend, so he might know where he is.

[severenz]

Dragavan, you are also one of the elders here and are being called out!

[Dragavan]

I do believe that Choose Your Own Adventure style stories and Game Book style stories are different and people tend to have a serious preference of one over the other. I like CYOA as I prefer the focus being on the story and adding game elements (random numbers affecting any choices, collecting items, gaining levels, etc.) tends to move away from that (from my experiences with them). I think keeping the two separate on separate sites is a smarter way to handle things. This being a story driven CYOA site and that other one being GB style site. Let them go that direction and keep IS focussed where it should be.

As for features I would like to see added, I don't think we really need any strongly. The way we can link (and loop link) rooms (using names we choose, numbers generated by the site, etc.) is the main feature I like seeing on a CYOA style site. Formatting options (which we also already have) was another area I like to see, but isn't as necessary.

A fun one that might be neat to work in somehow (and I've seen done on some others, like CHOO2) is the ability to ask for a name at the start of the story and then use a String marker of some kind (like #NAME#) within the story to insert that name into the writing. When doing second person stories (where the reader is referred to by the characters) is can be kind of a neat feature... but again, isn't really all that necessary.

[severenz]

So Dragavan, you are suggesting the ability to present a form and then use the values in the story? The admin would have to specify a default value for each field in the event that a user entered a story midway.

Is it safe to assume that the "Full Editing" feature is working properly for everyone?

And the auto-complete of nicknames I thought would be a huge improvement and much more efficient than the old way. Thoughts?

P.S. What is the domain of CHOO2 ?

[Dragavan]

So Dragavan, you are suggesting the ability to present a form and then use the values in the story? The admin would have to specify a default value for each field in the event that a user entered a story midway.

Either they would have to define defaults or the system would have to define them for the user (which only works well if you only use this for a name, like Pat Smith or something equally androgynous). But opening it up to being more than just names would be neat, but could also make things harder to work with.

P.S. What is the domain of CHOO2 ?

http://www.chyoo.com:81/

CHOO2 will soon be CHOO3 it sounds like.

[End Master]

As far as I know the address is www.chyoo.com.

It mostly deals with sex oriented CYOAs and the site has been abandoned by its original admins for years. From what I can tell another writing site called Literotica is upkeeping the place and keeps a forum for it on its own site, but nobody has actually done anything as far as trying to improve the features there.

EDIT: That announcement for CHOO3 has been there for a very long time. I don't think it's happening. When I visited the forums, a lot of people have mentioned their concerns on trying to get someone to take over so the site can actually get worked on.

[severenz]

Wow, I had no idea that site even existed. I'm sure if I could have at the database I could write a conversion script to import the data into my table structure. The stories could be flagged and offered in a "special section" of the site. Or my same engine could fuel the site on the original domain.

[Usoki]

I know I'm chiming in late, but... about the only feature I would want that exists on CYS is a way to make variables. As it stands, I have to use large amounts of identical rooms to track reader choices. It's a perfectly servicable work-around, but it adds up rather quickly. Tracking two variables means four sets of identical rooms, and so on. I wouldn't mind writing a story with the ability to keep an inventory, or monitor relationship values. Although, depending on where and how it was implemented, that could get really complicated, really fast. I'd rather err on the side of keeping IS simple and stream-lined.

That's the main reason I've never written anything on the other site- when it comes down to it, the interface is just does not look user-friendly. It's up to the user to provide most of the coding, and I just don't want to deal with that. Of course, there are other issues. Questionable copyright issues, annoying members, overbearing censorship, and a really annoying layer-list forum setup.

[Locke]

Agreed 100%, Usoki. I'd like to see some discussion on how it would be implemented, but I think that feature would take a lot of the tedium and effort out of the design/writing process without over-complicating the editing page.

If I get the magic slippers from Jack with the first choice, but they don't come into play until much later in the story, I have two options as a writer. I can ask, via choices, "Did you get the magic slippers on the first page?" Yes No

or I can copy/paste the entire story, creating two identical versions of every branch where the slippers have a chance of affecting the plot, until they actually get used, at which point the variable may still force separate branches, even though significant plot overlap is still possible.

[mizal]

I'm even later to this but I agree with Usoki too. Even though I write stories, not games, variables are really handy for keeping things organized.

Though my main complaint about this site has always been the way it will randomly decide to log me out and then not let me log back in for a few hours...or days, or weeks for giggles. I got to the point where I was sacrificing a chicken and consulting its innards for signs of the site's approval before each attempt to actually work on a story but even that didn't seem to help much.

[apotheosis]

I know I'm chiming in late, but... about the only feature I would want that exists on CYS is a way to make variables.

This. I know I've been horrendously inactive these past several years, but a lack of variable feature is what kept me from finishing Escape Artist, and there were many other stories I conceptualized that I could have made had this feature been available.

So long as I don't actually figure out something to do with my life, if you implement a variable feature I will release at least one story that makes use of it, hopefully multiple stories...