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If/When you have an Entry for BZ's Summer Slam Contest, post a Link to your Story here. :)

Ok, here goes nothing!

Spy Mission

Special notes to judges:
• Thank you for reading this story. It is a complex story, so I do not expect you to read the entire story. If you really want to, please do, but it will take some time.
• There are 28 endings. Again, I don't expect you to get to all of them. But hey, good luck, they're out there somewhere.
• Most importantly: The story has branches that spread out a lot. You simply cannot get to the entire story in one reading. I would appreciate it if you would try at least a couple times -- if you see Prague, Havana, and Brazil then you will have at least reached all the major points in the story. You cannot see them all in the same reading.

Well Ogre won. Lol.

Okay, I don't want to discourage anyone, so it's still possible someone else could win, if Ogre's story is really boring.

Hey, I'm at least in the lead right now! Yay, me!

Just to mention, if anyone reading Ogre's story has BD and Ford's Stylish template for CYS turned on, they might want to turn it off because it looks like it's screwing up some of the front cover design. Idk about the rest- I look forward to reading it!

Well that's annoying. Sorry about that!

I would have thought that my formatting would override that but... oh, it would be the other stuff. Hmmm...

Thanks for noting it, that's good to know.

Yeah- I'm having the same issues with mine. I know the front page is messed up because there's a separate box that Ford and BD put in for the text. I asked them about it and apparently you can get rid of it by using this:

dark1border + div::after {

content: none;

}

I think you should be able to see the title picture after that. I doubt you have any other formatting problems though as long as you haven't used more background pictures.

Nice story Ogre.

Well, since it's being mentioned, I made a typo in that snippet I gave you. dark1border is a class, so it needs a period/full stop prefix.

.dark1border + div::after {
   content: none;
}

Pretty cool. Funny to see that there was a path to continually ignore all the spy stuff and just never get into any sort of adventure at all.

Thanks. Heh, you have to work pretty hard at that one, but yeah, if you really want to!

I had a much larger scope for this story, but due to time restraints, I had to cut a lot of it. Still, it's better than nothing.

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/the-exploits-of-fail~2dman

Hooray, another entry!

Figured I'd at least get my foot in the door.

So far we're both at least second place! And less than 12 hours to go now. Congrats on getting a story in on time.

Over thirty contestants in total, yet only two submissions. I'll be submitting something later today, so there's that, but aside from me...it looks like they're is going to be a lot of shaming for EndMaster to do after today. 

 

I sure hope so.

I do not think you will be disappointed haha! XD

Still 7 hours to go, but I'm still amazed. The over/under on entries for this one was 14. I really thought we'd see at least 12 or 13. I mean, I guess we still could, and I really do expect to see a bunch pop up in the next few hours, but things are not looking good so far.

Here comes the slew of unfinished stories.

Well, I submitted mine. Here y’all go. Hopefully, the judges won’t think that this’s a bunch of bosh.

Hooray! Congrats on getting yours in as well!

A Pleasant Shopping Trip

All right! Nice job getting it in under the deadline! We're up to four!

Yes, congratulations on stealing my sweet, cheap second place victory from me.

No but for real, good story man.

There's a part where you click the link to continue food shopping and it just leads to a "Which area of the supermarket will you visit next?" and the rest of it is blank with no links.

There isn't even a notification say "this page has a dead/broken link" it's just blank.

Hmm, I didn't see that. I'll have to fix that afterwards, looks like a small scripting issue. It doesn't affect the rest of the story though.

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/song-of-nothing

Edit lock

Yay, another entry!

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/a-chosen-hero

I'm not very text savvy at all. If someone would hyper link that for me, it would be much appreciated. 

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/a-chosen-hero

Thanks Orange.

I didn't get nearly as much as I wanted to done, but I suppose this will do for now. Here's hoping that my story isn't complete trash. And to any one who reads it, it's my first story, so please don't criticize m- Nah, I don't care if you criticize me at all. In fact I prefer it, so please go right ahead.

Relatable.

Glad you made it in under the deadline!

Goliaths' Fall

I think I mentioned in some other thread that I barely got any writing done over the course of the summer, and that I decided to start with new story a few weeks ago. In true contest fashion, this meant that I started writing this actual entry on Tuesday... 

Long story short, my entry's definitely not a good one, but I already got shamed for not submitting a story in the January contest, so I thought I'd might as well submit something. Even though I wrote most of it thisight, most of the stuff I planned to write is still missing, and I thought I had 24 hours more, so it's barely proofread. Oh, it's also almost 6AM over here, so I'm not really sure much of the stuff I've writing last makes much sense.

Anyhow, enjoy!

Glad you made it in!

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/the-veil

Forgot how to hyperlink, sorry.

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/the-veil

Thank you friend!

Damn it wish I had one more hour to polish. Oh well.

I wish personally that I was not naive and thought we had one more day to finish this.

The story has some background color formatting. Not sure how styles affect that.

Another one in under the deadline, great!

Anyway, I wish I had time to add a few more Achievements. Thought I had an extra day. I hope people at least play long enough to get the Prison Bitch Achievement. That or the Exit Only Achievement. I would dare say it's a first on this website. XD

http://chooseyourstory.com/story/gemstone-swords

There we go, finished and I will be honest, I did slack but was doing really good work in the beginning. But as the days went by, my life began to get busier and I had less time to focus and found myself having writer's block too many times. Even with those problems, here is the product. I do believe it is one of my better works but that is up to my fellow writers to decide.

Judge harshly and critique nicely. Any feedback is nice as a writer who still requires much more practice.

Congrats on getting it in for the contest!

Not quite fashionably late, but a few minutes before the deadline will do.

It's 5 a.m here and I'm dying.

Notes:

I planned this to be way bigger, with much more artwork than it has in it. I tried to teach myself a comic book style way of drawing and drew a few decent pictures, but nothing I thought was good enough in the end to go in.

Please turn off Stylish to view my story if you have it on because it screws with the formatting a little.

Please tell me if you find any bugs or mistakes, of which I'm sure there are a few because I didn't have much time to proof read. The lack of polish makes me sad but oh well I'm really glad I finished it and can get back to my main story. The scripting on this killed me and was meant to be much more expansive. Actually, I'd planned to do three results for each fight scene depending on hidden variables, but that wasn't feasible in the end so you win pretty much every fight. There are hidden variables though that track certain things and there's two outcomes to most fights.

TL;DR: MC is accidentally OP

Enjoy!

Oh yeah, I should probably say there's some pretty graphic violence and strong language and people generally not being very nice to each other. Rated Maturity 7 for a reason.

Glad to see you got this one in before the deadline, congrats!

By All Means Necessary

Yeah man I'm not about to get shamed ;) Like most of everyone else's (I think) it's unfinished, but I guess it can still kinda work as a storygame just not exactly the most fulfilling one.

edit - Wow, turnout is kinda depressing as usual :(

.

Great job getting it completed and submitted on time.

Bah, seven new entries since the last time I checked.

Oh well, still a lot of SHAMING to do. (And points to refund)

I'm guessing either most of the people forgot the deadline, misinterpreted the deadline or just didn't care. Which is horrible since this contest had a lot of promise from so many participants.

I think that's a total of 11 entries. Decently solid I guess. Well among us that have finished...

What did your guy's word count end up at? And how many pages was your total? And how did your stories' go? Did you add more than you previously thought you might? Or maybe you were like me, and wrote less? In general how did your stories go? Of course you don't have to answer my barage of questions, but you know.

My story was originally planned for 6 full drawn out epilogues, but I got super caught up in the writing (and I didn't have access to a computer the first month, and then some) and I was really only able to finish half of one. That came came up to 33,000 words, and 45 pages. If I managed to complete every epilogue to the extent that I wanted, well I'd probably top off 400,000 words. 

 

 

My storygame had ~18k words, ~44 pages, and ~120 links (due to my odd format of this CYOA). Though I had less than what I wanted for word count (40k) and the storygame still probably has grammar/spelling mistakes, I am extremely happy with my result. I view it almost like an indie movie where only the director and four other people on the planet love it while everyone else shrugs their shoulders. :) It's actually my favorite storygame I've published despite more success with others.

I wrote it with the intention of improving my writing and creating something I like. I was very successful in both terms. Too bad I didn't accomplish winning this contest! :)

Just saying, you can see a story's word count by hovering over the "story length" when you view it.

I can't look at my specific story stats without unpublishing it, but I had something in the region of 240-250 pages. My final product is also not how my story was supposed to go; I wasted about a week writing about mass child murder and mental trauma before cutting everything out and reducing it to what it is now. Hell, I didn't even plan any of this, I just kept writing because I was afraid of losing motivation. I also wanted to put in 7 extra endings, which would probably really help the story, but by that time it was 6 hours before the deadline and it just wasn't worth it.

Oh, and you know how lots of people somehow thought the deadline was day later than they thought it was (due it being at midnight)? I was the opposite. I misread my own time zone, and thought I had to finish 10 hours earlier than I really did. That might have played in my favour though since I had more time to proof-read the whole thing. (Not enough time, though.)

All in all I do not consider this one of my best works, but I did have fun writing it. I am also glad to finally write something for Modern Adventure, since I find it hard to write for that genre for some reason.

I'm on my phone rn, but I will keep that in mind.

I can't really remember and can't bother to check since I'm on a mobile device right now but my word count was around 30,000 and page count was maybe 39. My biggest flaw in this story was that I had a good concept but poor planning led to a lot of writer's block and I basically spent a lot of days trying to figure out, "What the heck am I doing?" But this was definitely rushed like my other stories (if you are wondering where they are, they're in my archives) and if I had actually given myself time to think and planned accordingly; I could have stretched the story to 5 epilogues.

Wrapping up all that, I didn't think the story was my worst nor my best. Honestly it was probably the most normal story I have ever written and I enjoyed that. Being able to relax and not focus on super complicated plot points or abilities. Although now that I say that, I did have another idea for this contest that might come to light some day...

It also sits in my archives, waiting for me to finish it. I'm a guy with a lot of ideas but too lazy to put them down. I can recognize that and one of these days; I will bring a semi-masterpiece to life. Or death.

Mine is just shy of 97,000 over about 160 pages from memory. I guessed it would end up at about 40,000 from the start, but it got really convoluted really quickly because it's more butterfly effect than traditional branching. I don't even know how many endings there are- I'd guess about 15 including deaths. The scripting made me want to top myself and I'm not satisfied with it because I had time to proofread like one path so there are bound to be continuity and grammatical errors.

Mine's just over ten thousand words, over half of which I wrote in the final day, with about twenty-fiveish pages if I remember correctly. I wrote way less than intended, with only one of the two main intented branches even somewhat fleshed out, though even there a lot is still missing. I really should do something about my procrastination habits. When it comes to writing long-ish CYOAs, I have the attention span of a Chihuahua on methamphetamines. 

In one place, in case anyone wants it that way, in order of submission:

1. Spy Mission
2. The Exploits of Fail-Man
3. 4-Simplex
4. A Pleasant Shopping Trip
5. Song of Nothing
6. A Chosen Hero
7. Goliaths' Fall
8. The Veil
9. Gemstone Swords
10. Frameshift
11. By All Means Necessary

Some of them aren't finished being read according to the stat indicator. I'm guessing our stories suck that bad, huh? Hahahaha.

If I remember correctly, the stats are only updated every so often.

Yes, they're only updated overnight. And I question the accuracy of some of them, anyway.

So by my count, there were 35 entries and just 11 finishers, so a solid 31% actually submitted something.

I calculate 3,350 points were spent by entrants into the contest and only 1,470 points were awarded to completers. So once again, the house wins! Wait, what?

CYS casino: you commit or you lose.

Most fo you that submitted something did okay. A couple of you still failed. One of you would have gotten a lot higher if it had been a little longer. Some of you barely did the actual superhero/hero theme correctly, but were entertaining anyway. (I guess Berka can make a final decision on that part)

Did I fall into one of those? 

Let me rephrase.

Which one of those did I fall under?

You did okay.

Honestly, I probably should go re-read most of the stories again just in case I missed something that might change my current ranking of them.

I'll be reading through these over the next few days. Congrats on all who actually submitted an entry!

Do you have a first estimate on when the results are going to be out?

Hopefully by Wednesday, but as there are multiple Judges, that can vary depending on when all the results get in.

Will the judges be giving opinions about everyone's work? Other than the ranking in the contest, of course. I'd like to hear how the judges felt about my story, and some critisisms, etc.

You did better than I expected you to. Probably helped that you loaded your dialog with a lot of swearing.

That actually means a lot to me, thanks End.

With most contests, you can usually PM a judge after the contest if you are curious in their thoughts and some members on the website will most likely post reviews on the front page of your story. On the contest results thread, some judges will post which stories they voted for so you may look forward to that as well. I wish luck to all of those who have entered by the way.

It'll be awhile till I get a chance to read them, but just from the opening pages and clicking around a bit all the entries are far and away better than anything the site has gotten in months.

It's pretty telling the last story that managed to survive previous to this was published more than three weeks ago and couldn't quite manage a 3/8. The contests have undoubtedly been REALLY good for the site even if I don't think I'll be entering any more this year.