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Hello!  I wanted to take a quick moment and introduce myself.  I spent yesterday evening checking around for a place like this to write.   My first goal is to create a few short stories for family members.  I introduced my niece and nephews to old CYOA and Time Machine books over Thanksgiving.  As you can imagine, they loved them.  My second goal is to write storygames based off of my urban fantasy series.  I’m looking forward to interacting with fellow authors and having fun reading/playing the content available here.  

 

Hi, welcome to the site.

Usual recommendations for newbs:

Spend a little time reading and reviewing the Top Rated games to get an idea of what's possible and the quality levels readers are looking for.

Check out the Help section articles and in particular you'll want to get a handle on the basics of scripting. (Even if you don't plan for your story to rely on it, the Advanced Editor helps so much with organization etc you'll want to know how to use it at some point.)

Remember there's no rush to make your first game. People get excited when they join but a complete, proofread and polished game is what you want for making a good first impression.

It's usually a good idea to start with a small project until you get the hang of writing and structuring CYOAs. They can get away from you pretty quickly if you're not careful about outlining and plotting them out.

And finally, stop by the Writing Workshop with any questions, or if you need advice, feedback etc. (Advanced Editor board for scripting stuff.)

Anyway it looks like you already understand grammar and you've noticed the forums exist so that's great, you're guaranteed to effortlessly do better than 70% of our random noob population already.

Thanks!  I’ve been having fun exploring the site.  It is laid out very well.  My only concern is that I am going to be overwhelmed with the scripting options. I think they are incredible and will add to the storytelling but I have never been good at coding.  I’m mostly happy that I found a site that is still up and has a good community.  I did have a question in regards to sharing my work.  Is there a way I could send a link to a finished story via email?  I’m curious about eventually participating in contests on here and doing work of substance.  My primary goal though is to write a few personalized shorter tales that I could share with my distant family prior to the holidays.

If you put an unpublished story in Sneak Peek then just the title and description shows in your profile, but you can send the link to anyone. (Just an FYI though in case it's something REALLY personal, the URL is based on the title so anyone curious enough cold figure out how to look at it pretty easily if they notice it in your profile .)

Scripting is super simple once you get started with it, it's basically just variable manipulation with IF/THEN stuff. And once you have that down it covers 90% of what most people would ever need to do.

Ok, good to know.  I'm not overly concerned with the kid stories being read due to privacy.  I mainly didn't want to waste time creating something that couldn't be shared how I wanted.  I also didn't want to misuse or clutter up this site.  I did notice the maturity levels and thought that was a nice option for us to have access to in this day and age.  Thanks for all of your help and discussion.  

Ooh, an old person. Greetings, old person, welcome to the site. I hope you enjoy.

Edit: Oh goody, and you're the only person I didn't have to force to review my new story. Delightful, thank you, old person.

Thanks!  I like what I’m reading so far.  

OMG you have no idea how many tears of joy and gratitude are flowing down Steve's cheeks right now. Everyone's been deliberately ignoring that story for days since we dislike him so much.

Glad I could help?  Lol

Welcome to the site!

And don't worry too much about scripting, you can do plenty of writing and storytelling without using that stuff one bit.

Good to know,  I don’t want to hold myself back from useful tools.  I just have a suspicion that I would treat it like I did with the editing process.  I used to get caught up in too much editing instead of focusing on the story content.   I’ve found that I do better and enjoy the process far more if I concentrate on the first draft before going back and doing the grunt work.  

 

Welcome to the site.

A word of caution though.  Depending on the age and personalities of your niece and nephews, you might want to make sure their time here is supervised.  There's a lot of stories with extreme mature subject matter.  As a parent, I would hate to hear of children being distressed with exposure to things beyond their maturity level.

Well, there are maturity ratings. Or do you think a kid would DELIBERATELY DISREGARD an age warning??? On the internet????

I gotta say it upsets me how deceptive children are now, I certainly never did such a thing when I was growing up

(But yeah the usual warnings for browsing unattended anywhere on the Internet apply. And there aren't a whole lot of stories here specifically for kids unfortunately. Endmaster tried to run a contest to address that, but people are lazy.)

Generally I wouldn't say anything, but if the expectation is something like the classic CYOA books, then I felt it was important to say something.  I guess it's because I always worry about my son on the internet.  (Also I agree that kids don't self regulate so well.)

What's awesome is when elementary school teachers just turn half their class loose on us to spam us with terrible school projects which then get rated down and unpublished to tears and drama. Honestly I'm surprised no one has died yet.

I remember this game on my C64 when I was a kid.  It was called Alter Ego and it was a bit like some of the advanced stories here.  Anyhow there were some scenarios that had maturity ratings and I always skipped them.  Maybe I was just a boring child, but I feel that a lot if kids now don't have that ability to rein themselves in.

I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but yes, that's just abnormal and you were a boring child. Quite possibly the MOST boring to ever exist.

Alter Ego was a fun game though. I think it's an app now but there used to be some Dosbox free freeware version still floating around.

Well I had a lot of fun as a grown up going back to see what I missed.  To be honest I was really scared of my Dad catching me playing what I shouldn't and banning me from the computer...

I am, however skeptical that you 'hated' to break it to me. ;)

I remember playing the RPG Wasteland on the C64 back in elementary school and there was a bit where your character could have sex with a 3 legged mutant hooker.

Going off with her lead to the character catching "Wasteland Herpes" and needing to go get it cured by a doctor.

DAD: I told you that was a bad idea.

ME: But I was wearing a radiation suit!

DAD: Duh, you still have to take off the suit to have sex with her. Now you have to go waste money getting yourself cured.

ME: Alright, I'll just kill some more bikers and raise the money then.

Never saw that one...and we had a LOT of games.  I loved that old computer though, and sometimes I just have to go back and play the games.  As awful as a lot of the text games were, there was a certain purity to them, unhampered by fancy graphics and interfaces. *wipes away a tear*  That and humans seem to be programmed to look on the past with a sort of hazy favor.  Not sure why that is.

Sometimes I'm sad I missed out on the golden age of IF, but the mazes etc and the general attitude of 'fuck you, player' aren't something I could put up with now. Modern parser IF is soft and fluffy now that they know you won't determinedly bang your head against a brick wall for months on end to solve them just because you paid for this game and you're going to beat it, damn it.

Not all of the old IF games were THAT bad, but I know what you mean.  DAMN YOU ZORK!  *cough*  To me they're very nostalgic; my family used to play them together, so there's a sense of safety and unity when I think about them.  Of course, I would contest that some of the stuff here is far better written.  A lot of those games I couldn't win until a decade or two later when I played them again on emulators as an adult.

The Infocom games in general were sort of the "paragon" of IFs back in the day.

Favorite one was The Lurking Horror.

Well there's still something to be said for a full sized adventure. I'm not a huge fan of the direction modern IF has gone either tbh. Sometimes it seems like it's all either bite-sized junk food or artsy pretentious puzzleless stuff now. Or the Twine cancer.

The IFComp keeps the community going but it's the biggest factor in pushing it in that direction too when play times are supposed to be under two hours.

I'm not sure how well Anchorhead has aged but it was the first one I beat and it was an experience at the time. :D it's still what I always recommend to anyone who's a fan of Lovecraftian stuff.

I should check out Anchorhead if it deals with the Lovecraft Mythos.  I'm glad to share your opinion on Twine.  It seems a little much.  I found that as an option to use for my ideas.  After a brief gloss over I decided it was far too much than I wanted to deal with since my current creative time is limited.  

Twine is theoretically very powerful, but hard to use and so all Twine games are tiny, linear bits of fluff where you just click your way through until something Sad and Socially Important happens.

Hmmm, I wonder.  Can anything happy and Socially Important happen?

That was totally the impression I got from Twine.  I was surprised that during my search for CYOA that I kept finding stuff like that instead of a simple way to tell a story.  Don't get me wrong, I really am intrigued about the options that can enhance a storygame.  I love the idea of "bells and whistles" but I'm afraid that I'll go too far down the rabbit hole tinkering with them.  Right now I'm lucky that I can fully devote my time to being an author.  I've spent the better half of the last decade researching and drafting.  It is great to finally have the time to dedicate to my dream.  In one year of serious commitment, I can now be proud to say that I've accomplished my goals.  I don't want to lose the momentum!

Oh and Anchorhead is very heavily inspired by Lovecraft, but not directly part of that universe. Still worth a playthrough though, uncovering cults in creepy inbred New England towns is always fun.

I started reading Stephen King and the Sex Among the Cavepeople series I've talked about in other threads when I was like 12. Discovered the People of the Whatever books somewhere in there too and back then you couldn't really read anything much worse on the internet anyway. I'm not sure furries even existed yet.

I was just reminiscing on this in the chat, but the first fanfic I ever read was before it was even called that. It was just some dude's personal site devoted to his series about Barney brainwashing all the kids at home to kill their parents, then establishing a cult, decapitating the boys when they turned 13 and IIRC sending the girls off to his breeding harem for establishing an army of fucked up human-dino hybrids.

Anyway good times, the internet used to be a better place etc.

I can only imagine how frustrating that must be for everyone!  I know a few teachers who would jump on a site like this but not understand that it isn't only for students.  

I mean theoretically there's no problem with kids using the editor to make a story for their class, assuming teachers are aware of the usual reasons for caution with unsupervised browsing. But they never take the time to find out anything about how the site works in advance which is the part I find weird since they could spend ten minutes clicking around or literally just ask about anything they needed to know.

Newly created stories are in sneak peek by default so how they wind up getting made public is anybody's guess, but at that point they're willfully inflicting the kids on us and us on the kids. :P

What happens when something gets unpublished?  Does the story go away completely or just revert back to a "still in works" status on the writer's page?

Still in works status. It'll also keep original publication date next time you publish it.

Thanks.  I figured that was the case but felt the need to clarify.  

Agreed and thanks for the warning.  That is why I was wondering if it were possible to complete and then send out a link to just my story.  I found another site which used to offer that ability and seemed easy to use.  Unfortunately that site looks like it is going to close up shop.  Thankfully I found this site which seems much more enjoyable, even if I have to experience a learning curve.  

You're welcome.  Not that I automatically thought you wouldn't be cautious, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.  I just know that sometimes when a person gets hold of an idea, their mind sometimes skips some of the process, and that can include caution/safety.  I figure it's better to err on the side of caution at any rate.

Most definitely!  I do appreciate the kind concern and reminder.  

Howdy

Hello and welcome!

Hello there! 

Thanks everyone for the nice welcome to this site!  It will be fun to read your work and share my stories.