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Suggestions for improvements and additions to the site.
This feature was rejected 10/12/2019: i hate dogs

Add Branching Style Tags

4 years ago

I think it would be a benefit if we added branching style tags for storygames. This way if someone is looking for something specific they will know what to expect, or at least not be thrown off.

Heck, then someone could use ALL the different types at different times and just throw all the tags on.

Anyways, the branching style tags I propose and they definitely are being taken from my big brain and not that helpful link are:

Time Cave

Gauntlet

Bottleneck

Quest

Loop and Grow

Open Map

Sorting Hat

Spoke and Hub

 

Add Branching Style Tags

4 years ago
wtf kind of nerd shit is this

Add Branching Style Tags

4 years ago
Does anyone really only read games with a specific structure though? Plus this seems like it would be really confusing for new authors.

Add Branching Style Tags

4 years ago
I figure listing it in the description works well enough. Those who know what it means will know what it means, those who don't will probably ignore it. Maybe adding a few branching styles as tags works but definitely not all of them. Not even sure if we've got Loop and Grow, Sorting Hat, or Spoke and Hub style stories on here anyway.

Add Branching Style Tags

4 years ago

Figure it might be possible to make something like them if someone was savvy enough.

However, perhaps a couple could be thrown out. But I would like to have the tags so I dont have to sully my descriptions with a set of parenthesis at the bottom.

I know there are people like Cricket who prefer Time Cave style of branching, and Im sure there are others who might like to know what to expect out of a story.

So they know whether they should be disappointed or not when some flavor choices dont actually lead to another branch, or instead change a variable or something.

Add Branching Style Tags

4 years ago

I can't say this is a horrible idea, although sometimes this can be subjective... especially for the writers who are, shall we say, less competent at dealing with branching stories. One of the key reasons why so many stories fail here is because the writer doesn't have a clue what kind of structure they want to achieve. More than a few seem to think they're branching like crazy, but really aren't. By contrast, all of the more successful stories on CYS were written by people who are probably diagramming their stories in some way, and are therefore very conscious of structure.

For a website devoted to branching stories, I think this could be a very interesting feature. As writers, some of us might see that we've written a lot using a certain structure, and feel more challenged to try another structure in the future. All those noobs might pay more attention to the branching structure too as they're reading stories, and perhaps take note how one style works differently than another. And since I believe the difficulty rating is going away, there will be space opening up.

But on the other hand, I also agree that many of the less enlightened noobs will be completely confused by what any of those styles mean. I foresee many linear zombie stories tagged as "Cave of Time". So maybe the solution is to make this an optional rating, with the warning that if don't have a clue what any of this means, it's not for you.