What tools do you use?
What tools do you use?
I've been picking away at a pen-and-paper choose your own adventure graphic novel ever since I found some similar things in the local game store. I went through a ton of options looking for tools to make plotting the thing simpler.
So what's your favorite tool, software, technique or advice for crafting a cyoa in your favorite medium?
Ron Gilbert's (
@[email protected]) puzzle dependency charts might be of interest.They're very useful for puzzle narratives to help with structure, particularly around visualizing the breadth of parallel tasks available to the player, and avoiding dead ends.
The open source godot game engine has a plugin for them by the excellent Nathan Hoad (
@[email protected]).I guess cyoa, particularly in pen and paper form, can be necessarily more linear and deliberately do feature dead ends, but could still be interesting.
Also, some interactive fiction software might be useful to aid planning, even if you weren't intending to make a videogame. Stuff like Twine.
I was gonna say Twine as well but you beat me to it. 😅 Surprisingly versatile engine and the learning curve isn't all that terrible. The major hang-up there is that all the different templates use different markup code so you have to choose carefully before you start.
I'm Adventure Game Studio all the way myself. Not because I think it's the superior tool necessarily, but it's got a very easy learning curve and it's versatile enough that you can get away with a lot of really cool things.
Huge Ink fangirl here for narrative design; works great for CYOAs.