So I’m working through the sample games and trying out my own stuff. I wanted to make a truly branching narrative, but to my eyes, it looks like the scene list is an immutable linear progression. Is there a way to skip around the scene list based on choices?
For example: If my scene list was:
Mansion
Beach
Haunted House
Space Ship
and I wanted the reader to, based on evidence provided, make a choice between going to those three places, are they doomed to travel through the beach and haunted house before they ever make it to space?
Many games use *goto_scene (or *gosub_scene) to not only let the player choose which “zone” they want to explore, but perhaps even more often to basically export parts of the game mechanics to a separate “chapter” before returning to the one the player is reading. Like, for a vampire game, if the player choses “I decide to go hunting for food,” the game might (unknown to the player) insert something like “*goto_scene hunting” where all the hunting stuff is stored, with a “return” at the end to bring you back to wherever the player was in the story.
But be careful if you want to let the player visit more than one zone in any order, as changes in relationships, objects or information obtained in one zone could change how they experience the others. And those changes can be a beast to keep track of. For scenarios like that, like going to the opera vs. the boxing match vs. the haunted mansion, I’ve more often seen them all in one GIANT chapter containing all 3 possibilities, ending at more or less the same result: the city in flames as you scramble to figure out what happened, or something like that. Not true branching in terms of story, more like multiple roads to the same destination.
That said, some authors can find a way to do non-linear chapters, it just takes a lot of extra work and creative coding.
