Hi! I was bored in my college lecture and figured that trying my hand at ChoiceScript for the first time would be a good way to pass time, figure out how difficult it is to make an IF so I can better appreciate the work authors put in and the reason for the long waits between IFs in a series. Flash-forward a week later and I’ve gotten way more invested than I had ever expected.
My question is, how do you know when, or how do you limit the amount of choices you yourself create?
Sometimes I feel like I’ve gotten over large hurdles with how much I’ve written, and then I scroll through my code to review and realize it only feels long because I have choices upon choices upon choices, and a read-through would actually only last about five minutes .
Welcome to the community and to writing an IF story.
I use outlines, so I make sure I cover the “must-haves” and then move on to the next part of the outline.
This doesn’t mean I do not change some of the choice sets or add/subtract the number of choices, but it does give me structure to help identify when I get lost in the details or am rushing through a section.
The types of choices also dictate how many choice-sets I use and how many choices to include in them. For example, a personality flavor choice-set I try to limit to three choices, because it is “flavor” and not essential.
In the future, you might want to check out the monthly Writer Support thread, because a lot of people participate in it and you can get different people’s perspective, which might help too.
Remember: You are not alone in your questions and concerns AND there are different ways of doing things, so if something doesn’t work for you, something else might.
Edit:
This is called: “Writing wide” because, like a wide river, you may be giving a lot of choices that only covers a little bit of ground. “Writing deep” is where you cover a lot of ground but don’t offer as much choice ot give as many options.
There are several reasons for this, including the one that Eiwynn mentioned above. Two other major reasons are 1) because writing takes a lot longer than reading, and 2) something unique to interactive texts, the concept of coverage. Because of the choices with multiple options, an average reader might only experience about 25-30% of the game’s text. For example, a 200K IF might be longer than a doorstopper fantasy epic, but if the coverage is 25%, the reader experiences 50K words, more along the lines of a meaty romance novella, or a young adult book of the older generation.
Both of these can be quite frustrating. It takes a while to get used to the fact that an update that you worked on for months only takes readers 10-15 minutes to read, before they’re soon clamoring for more.
I just started recently but like @Eiwynn said I have already realized that I really need a visual outline (I use app.vibe on infinity scroll and its SO HELPFUL) to see if I’m actually going to be having choices that progress the story. I focus on choices that will actually lead to interesting branching (i.e. setting relationship priorities, leading to different situations, etc.) but I do plan to have things meet on a few major essential plot points and only fully branch into 3-4 paths once I’m a good way into the story.
Of course this might change as I actually continue writing the project, but that’s what I’ve been working with so far. I do ghostwrite fiction for my job, and this feels different in that you are covering multiple plot directions, but similar in that outlining and determining the absolute essentials that give momentum is SUPER necessary. Anyway, sorry for the ramble but yea!
.