Hello! My name is Slim Pickens and I just finished writing my first CYOA, “Abraxas, The End of All Things”.
Hm. As I sit here trying to think of what to write next I have discovered how strikingly bad I am at writing little blurbs about the story, so I’m just going to go ahead and jump right in. Hopefully you’ll stay.
Description
Medieval Fantasy with strong horror elements.
You are sent to a small, nondescript village nestled between great and terrible mountains to discover why they have ceased their exports. What lies within?
Embark on a journey of loss and armchair philosophy.
Features
A lovecraftian inspired tale with no happy endings!
A disturbingly unreliable narrator and protagonist!
Intense violence, the likes of which made my father throw out my D&D gear!
Go insane on at least three separate occasions!
The story is fully written, and I plan to submit it to Hosted Games once we get rid of all the grammatical issues.
Please let me know what you think of it, good or bad!
KNOWN BUG WITH ONE OF THE ENDINGS!
This will be fixed in a little bit, but for now if you manage to make it to the Child at the end don’t choose ‘make a case for life’. The code isn’t properly implemented yet.
PAQ(Potentially Asked Questions)
This is the worst thing I have ever read! Can you send me a link to your other work so I know what I need to avoid?
Sure! I currently have a WIP that can be found here Northern Elysium Hotel(WIP) Where did you get the idea for this?
I dreamed it. Why ‘Slim Pickens’?
Because he does the right thing and rides the bomb to hell. Also, because it sound like “slim pickings”. I don’t understand (specific detail of the plot)!
There is a certain degree of ambiguity pervading throughout the story that is inherent to the genre, but I don’t want any confusion as to the broad strokes or history. If you have any questions, simply ask them. Ideally, with spoiler tags.
Hey, I have to say good opening If you could, you should reword the choices (for example: “Reach Out” to be reworded into “I reach out to him” or something, because I feel like the choices are a bit too rigid compared to the main texts)
Okay, good news: I found out what was causing the errors and took care of it. I’m going to tentatively say that you shouldn’t get any more errors for the duration of your playthrough (Knock on wood).
I really, REALLY appreciate you finding these! Its just dissappointing that you’re running into so many!
It seems my character caused the end of the world - not quite what I expected An interesting story, although I’m still not quite sure what’s going on, but I admit I started to skim through for checking bugs - I need to give it a proper reading later.
Yes, it seems to be working now, at least in that set of choices.
Well yeah, but the large prevalence of bugs is discouraging. Not to tempt fate, but I think I’ve gotten rid of all of them now, though.
Now, I just got to get some story feedback.
Umm… not so many choices, mostly just like “next page” choices in there, and I could easily dead if I choose the wrong one so it’d be really challenging to finish this game when it’d get released since there won’t be save and load options hehe…
And lastly, it’s kinda my fault for not reading your description first and just clicked the game link. But I didn’t expect it’d be so much much gore things in there, I thought the “horror” in the title mean there’d be ghost or anything like that. And I’ve been wondering why this story’s not tagged as adult? Or was it already tagged but I missed it (again)?
Hey, thanks for taking the time to read it and offer feedback! I really appreciate it!
As to the lack of choices, I’d agree with you in that there are two stretches where its mostly just one choice: the beginning exposition after you awaken from the first dream, and The part where you stab your eyes out, but that second part only happens if your willpower is low enough. But other than that, there’s a bit of freedom and most every other page offers 2,3,4, or 5 choices as to what you want to do. The endings are also varied. Its probably a byproduct of this story being quite a bit shorter than the usual HG fare, and maybe it feels that way.
From what I recall there’s only a few “instant death” instances, they are all pretty telegraphed and easily avoided (ie, don’t try to hold the horde off on your own, or go blindly charging into battle when you don’t really know what you’re up against), and there is an option to immediately go back to a passage before. In fact, I was going to recommend some people to seek out the death scenes, as I spent a good bit of time writing them!
Its pretty graphic, yeah, but I put a bold warning just above the link. Maybe I should put one at the beginning as well. The ‘horror’ in this tale comes more from the sheer bleak nature of the occuring events, as well as the overarching narrative. its a bit more surreal in that regard, I suppose. I can say with absolute certainty that there aren’t any ghosts inside! (Well, perhaps not in the traditional sense, anyway.)
Hm…No, there isn’t an adult tag, but if you think it needs one I could put one on. Upon reflection, it is quite depraved.
Again, I really appreciate your time!
Don’t really like the railroading once you enter the mines and when you meet with what is seemingly responsible for this mess I get this error: song from the depths line 109: expected choice body
Hey, thanks for the feedback! Sorry for taking a while to respond.
I don’t know what you mean when you say “railroading once you enter the mines”, could you elaborate on that? Which part are you referring to? It diverges pretty heavily depending on choices you’ve made prior to that point.
Okay, thanks for pointing that out. It seems the code for that ending wasn’t inputted properly. It’ll be fixed in a few hours or so.
(PS. Dig the username!)
If you could, you should reword the choices (for example: “Reach Out” to be reworded into “I reach out to him” or something, because I feel like the choices are a bit too rigid compared to the main texts)
An interesting story, although I’m still not quite sure what’s going on, but I admit I started to skim through for checking bugs - I need to give it a proper reading later.