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Woosh.

Hello, there. My name is Nicolerhi, and I'm back on this website after a prolonged absence. I have some ideas for stories, and I would like to -- once again -- try my hand at choose-your-own-adventure games.

Anyone got any advice for writing in this style? I love reading choose-your-own-adventures, but I'm not great at writing them.

(My evidence are the two published stories I have on my profile -- Remember and Years Gone By -- they are like super bad and the only reason I'm keeping them around is encouragement for myself to be better.)

Anyways, that's really all I wish to say.

Hope everyone's having a nice summer,

Nicolerhi

First I'll ask this:

Do you believe your important enough to have not one, but two return threads?

*Cocks (haha, "cocks") gun* Your answer is imperative on whether or not I shoot you with the autism amplifier gun.

Oh crap...shoot I didn't even realize I had another one.

Oof.

Well, that's a bit awkward.

*you're

Darn, you replied too fast and now I look silly. Now to answer your question despite my lack of experience on the whole writing front of things... My opinion is that you'll want grammar and punctuation, but among all else you want to have an engaging story in which your reader feels that their every choice is meaningful and connected to one another without seeming random?

I think I'll have to read your previous storygames to get a better idea of you as a writer. Apparently I rated one of them already.

**yore

Oh, there's another one?

But then I remembered a smaller, second reason why I left. I vaguely remember some members (I think some were newbies) being mean to one another. This didn't set well with me, but I loved this site, so I continued to go on. Then I had someone say something mean to me, it sent me over the edge. In my head, a place I thought was safe, was now becoming a nightmare.

Uh....oh dear

Well, it's been four years so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt as far as having grown up a little this time...lol.

Everyone is so so very mean still.

This is supposed to be a safe environment in which we brush each other's hair and sing songs, prance, frolic, and other gay activities.

Sometimes I go to sleep, hurt fee-fees, my bottom sore, my puss-puss aflame.

That aside, hopefully four years is enough for thicker skin for anyone. Because this place would be barren if that wasn't the case, which would blow.

I don't really remember specifically why I left, but I'll just do myself a favor and stick to writing on this website. Save the social stuff for social media like Instagram and Twitter.

It has been a few years since I was last on the site, I have grown up a lot. (Boy, was I cringy back then lol...hopefully a little less cringy now). 

Lol, don't worry. Plenty of you were. 2015 was a dark and cringy time for the site.

Anyhow, welcome back. Best place to look for feedback on your existing stories or ask general questions about writing or structuring a game would be the Writing Workshop, but do you have any specific plans in mind for a new one yet?

You've missed a lot of great storygames since the last time you were here, some of the best in the site actually, and the overall quality level has been creeping up steadily so it'd be worthwhile to browse around a little before diving into your own projects.

I actually am interested in reading The Price of Freedom. I remember that game fondly, and it seems to have gotten an upgrade.

As for my own personal projects, I have a short story that I want to convert to a choose-your-own-adventure game. My goal is to start small and expand to bigger projects. It's a story I wrote a year or two ago that I want to revisit -- plus I think it would be cool with different outcomes.

That's a smart way to do it. Most noob author burnouts happen when they try and take on some kind of epic right out the gate and wildly miscalculate how much work it will be. Refamiliarizing yourself with the editor with a smaller project will make everything easier.

The new Price of Freedom is great, that's joined 'everything by Endmaster' as part of the standard recommendations around here. (And about the new version, there's a funny story there...

H

On sorry! My kindle glitches quite often, and it just did. I don't know why it just created a response. Sorry.

You seem to have haunted equipment.

Oh yeah, I DEMAND THAT YOU WORK ON YOUR STORY, as requested in your profile.

Yep. Typing is really hard. I press backspace, it adds three weird random letters. I press forward slash, it adds a period in between all the words I've typed. Sometimes it deletes everything I've typed, and it has some really weird glitches. At least it's usable.

Ah. Well...I will try. Working on my story is currently difficult, as explained above. I have a desktop, but I don't like using it because someone is always staring over my shoulder, and I can't work with people staring over my shoulder.

But I will try.

I remember I used to have this problem on my Kindle.

Like most of the glitches and annoyances on the site, I believe it can be fixed by turning off the Rich Text Editor in your profile.

This is weird. I try to turn it off, I click "Save Updates" (or whatever it says) and it turns back on again when I come here or do anything.

Try logging out and then in again after you turn it off.

Nevrm I think the problem fixed itself. I have to use html for bold and italics now, right?

Like this?

<strong>Hi?</strong>

<i>Rawr</i>

<u>Test</u>

Advice? Hmmm... People aren't very fond of linear stories here. The writing can be utter shit, with no quality sensory description or without dialogue that takes any effort to write, but as long as the story has wildly different endings depending on the reader's choices, you're bound to get at least a 4 or 5 rating.

Oh, and don't have a bunch of grammatical errors in your work. Nothing earns a 1 rating faster than pissed off readers who don't get beyond the first page due to horrid grammar.

I don't think I've seen many examples of utter shit ending up with a 4 or 5. Aside from Ogre's boobs of course...

Well, I suppose we define "utter shit writing" differently. To me, the phrase means writing that doesn't engage my delicate, millennial-pampered tastes.

Feel free to offer some examples.

I don't feel like offering specific ones, but I'll just say that generally I prefer stories that have emotional weight. I feel like the whimsical humorous stories are a bit overvalued, and so I'll be more forgiving to someone who tried to write a serious storygame than to someone who wrote about, say, randomly sodomizing chickens.

That said, if a parody story clearly has some depth and shows effort, I'll rate it on the same level as a Lord of the Rings ripoff.

Note to include random sodomy of chickens in my next work

Generally the "random lol" stories don't get highly rated.

Welcome to the site! (... again, I suppose.) ^_^

Honestly, the best advice I can think to give is:

1. Read some of the good games.

2. Ask yourself what makes them good.

3. ... Do that.