Writing Follow Your Own Plot - need advice!

[LongTimeLurker]

I was thinking of doing a FYOP story driven by reader suggestions, but had a few questions.

- Should I solicit suggestions here? Or would the Character Play forum be better suited for this?

- Is there a way to track the "inventory" and "actions" of a particular read-through on the wiki without duplicating pages? And alter what text the reader sees on the page depending on what they've done? I thought perhaps you could put something in the URL, but my attempts to do anything interesting with MediaWiki so far haven't panned out.

[Pvt. Prinny]

Sadly, if you want to track variables, you'll need to use a lot of scripting, which I'm 95% sure wiki pages don't really support. You'd have to make your own site from the ground up to do that sort of thing, if they don't. ;(

As for where to post suggestions...uh, I'm not a very vocal poster, so I can't help there. I imagine the Stories board gets more traffic though, for what it's worth.

[MalcfunctionCrazyfor]

An ambitious proposition to be sure, though hearing you're taking a shot on a FYOP type story is great news indeed.

I'll go with Prinny here and suggest you ask for suggestions on this forum, as I'm unsure how much traffic Character Play gets these days.

[The Liar]

The best thing I can suggest for your variables would be Novelty (http://www.visualnovelty.com/); you could probably make entirely text based visual novel on it, (though I'm not sure that would technically qualify as a visual novel.)

The problem is that it would be a standalone program and not something you could put on the wiki.

[darkbutflashy]

This one http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter is a browser-based tool for FYOP-like stories, with a simple event storage ("Page visited", "Item taken" etc.). Don't know how they react to adult stories, though.

[LongTimeLurker]

Thanks for all the suggestions - it looks like that inklestudios website (which would have been perfect) has a strict "no porn" policy, so that rules that out.

I'll have to check out the visual novel tool - I'd rather not require readers re-download something every time I add a new part, but maybe once the whole thing is "finished"?

In the meantime, I'll just put this on wiki and see how that goes. And I'll make a new thread here to track suggestions.

Edit - new thread!

[darkbutflashy]

If you want to create a more advanced game, like NukuNookee did with his "Gynoid Conversion", you could try the Inform7 (http://inform7.com/) text adventure language/compiler/IDE. There is a javascript interpreter Quixe (http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/), which allows to put the game on a website; no special hosting package or software needed, a simple free site will do the trick. It may be a little overkill for a FYOP, but it's easy to use even for non-programmers. Not as easy as the inklewriter, but still easy.

There's a forum for all kinds of text adventure systems on http://www.intfiction.org/forum/, check it out.

[LongTimeLurker]

If you want to create a more advanced game, like NukuNookee did with his "Gynoid Conversion", you could try the Inform7 (http://inform7.com/) text adventure language/compiler/IDE. There is a javascript interpreter Quixe (http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/), which allows to put the game on a website; no special hosting package or software needed, a simple free site will do the trick. It may be a little overkill for a FYOP, but it's easy to use even for non-programmers. Not as easy as the inklewriter, but still easy.

There's a forum for all kinds of text adventure systems on http://www.intfiction.org/forum/, check it out.

I will look into Inform, that sounds interesting.

Is there a way to put the converted javascript on the wiki?

[robotworld5]

You could try http://chyoo.com/ - it's certainly for this type of story.

[LongTimeLurker]

You could try http://chyoo.com/ - it's certainly for this type of story.

Thanks for pointing this site out! If I get anywhere with the story, I might try hosting there as well.