Welcome to Choice of Games, @itsElena! It’s a great place.
Other, more experienced people will be able to chime in with more pointed advice. What I did when first dipping toes into interactive fiction was play published games and take note of what features I liked and disliked. I emulated features I liked in Moonrise, and avoided ones I personally found annoying. I read even more reviews of games and surveyed members of my target audience about what they liked. I went through the whole tutorial on the CoG site, copying the code out and seeing how it worked (or got bugged up lol). I made a really short game (like 3 *choices long) and put it on Dashingdon’s site, to make sure I knew how that worked.
When I finally got down to actually making a plot, I did the basic 5 Act structure I’d do for a regular novel, though it was a lot more complicated, haha. Though each chapter had different paths, each path hit the required plot and emotional beat to continue the story. It looked like _/–_ but with a ton of loop-de-loops, connecting back to the corners.
If you like analytics, many smart people have run the numbers on how to optimize your game for max fun. I go back to these posts a lot.
- @jojo’s Reviews of Every Choice of Game. The Interactive Fiction Database has even more.
- His follow up What I Learned
- @hustlertwo’s Hosted Game Data Sheet
- @autumnchen’s Follow up to the data sheet
- Autumn’s second follow up
- HustlerTwo’s So, you made an unpopular game
Best of luck! Keep the thread informed on your progress! 