That’s a good point especially regarding variations.
Maybe we ought to look not only at how efficiently something is coded, but also at how the branching in a story functions.
Does a story go from A to B by routes A 1, A 2 A3, maybe branching those into A1.1 A1.2 A1.3 A2.1 etc, or does it go from A to B by A1.1 1.2 1.3?
Because even an efficiently coded game can have little variety if it does the latter.
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I’d love to hear you explain that a little more–I couldn’t quite parse the distinction you are making. I guess we need to establish a nomenclature for the family tree of branching.
Is your first example one in which there is a branch that doesn’t ever rejoin a main narrative, while the second example has a brief divergence and then rejoins the trunk of the tree?
They both rejoin the maintree.
Let me use two scenes from Hero Unmasked! and Heroes Rise as example.
HU more commonly does the first kind of branching:
At the first real branch (chapter 2) Firebrand, a pyrokinetic villain, is holding up the TV studio you are working at with a bomb-threat. He is, however, giving people 15 minutes to evacuate. That is storypoint A. You are then given four path how to react while people evacuate the building: 1. Find the bomb and try to disarm it. 2. Grab a camera and get some footage for the news 3. Get everyone out as quickly as possible, or 4. Confront Firebrand yourself on the rooftop.
Now, each of these paths splits into subpath again, accounting for various skills/stats you can have gathered up to this point. For example, if you picked the choices before that higher your athletics and your tech skills, you can successfully run back and get a flashlight to look for the bomb in the basement if you had chosen to try and disarm it. If you pick that option with a low athletics stat however, you’ll be too slow and need to get your bacon saved from getting roasted. Either path can lead to success or failure (you won’t die though). Whether or not you succeed, you will come to the parking lot with everyone else. Storypoint B. So you here have a branching method that accounts for various approaches to a situation and various stat-sets therein
HR more commonly does the second type of branching:
Early on you are asked what you want to do on your first outing as hero. Point A. While you are given different options, they all directly move to you taking the same case each time, (point B) even when you say that ‘this is a bit out of my league, I’d like to take it slow’. The game does not, for example go, let you take a smaller case and have you wind up in the bigger one. Instead it says ‘oh but you need to prestige and money, so you take the bigger case’.
HR does this in 9 out of 10 of its ‘choices’ to the point that many are more pseudo-fake-choices than anything.
Now, a game can, of course, have both kinds of branching-methods, but with the latter, IMHO, the author should make certain there is a logical, comprehensible explanation etc as to why there’s only path A1.1 and A1.2 instead of A1 and A2 with subpaths.
Thus, even an efficiently coded game can have little variety if a lot of the text is spent on explaining to the reader/player why they don’t actually do the thing they wanted to do.
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I like this idea.
I also want to point out, to readers in general, that the criticism that a CYOA is on rails and that your character can only do so many things is only somewhat valid, at best.
We’re talking about projects that are usually written by a single person. These are not massive, open-world, endless, MMO-depth RPGs written by a team of highly paid individuals.
If a single person could design and code something like that, don’t you think they would be working for someone like EA or Blizzard, or even have their own company?
Where I’m going with all that is that when we better “establish a nomenclature for the family tree of branching,” I’d like for said branching to be judged fairly and on an appropriate scale.
The A1, A2 thing or the A1.1, A1.2 thing can be a bit confusing. It may be easier to think about story chapters.
If the A in A1 represents chapter 1, then…
The 1 in A1 represents what exactly?
(That “1” can represent different things for different stories.)
So after we branch out and finally come to B (B1; B2; B1.1; B1.55555, etc.)
Now we’re talking about Chapter 2.
C is chapter 3
D is chapter 4
E is chapter 5, etc.
As far as the numbers… let’s look at A1 again, for example… 1 can represent a plot point, or perhaps the first choice tree.
If we go with the latter, consider this example:
I am buying a car at this dealership. I want the color to be…
- Red
- White
- Blue
- Green
If we use “A1” here, we’re talking about this first choice tree in chapter 1. At least, to my understanding.
So does that mean that the second choice tree should be A2?
Where would it make sense to use A1.1 instead?
(This is not a rhetorical question.)
However, before this becomes too confusing, we must remember the reason(s) why we are seeking to establish this nomenclature in the first place.
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Admitedly, I won’t deny that one of the biggest, if not main factors that lure me into trying and buying a game is the word length, so this kind of list comes in hand in regards to the titles I haven’t yet read… 
As much as I love to read as much of it as I can, it’s hard for me to subconciously stray from the ‘cost-benefit’ mindset, specially depending on the situation I’m in… I love and revel in binge reading, and the longer a game is, the more content it has, the more times I have to restart and replay, again and again, mid-game or after a playthrough, the better and worthier the purchase it feels (although I’m well-aware of how much time and effort it takes to put those together 
), and dislike when at last it comes to an end, haha… And due to different currencies, I can’t refrain from feeling a bit bad when buying a 20$+ game that will be finished in few hours or by the end of a day, reading casually (also why it’s hard for me to go with visual novels). I don’t repent reading all the games I bought, but, after being surprised sometimes to see how short a game felt, regardless of a big word-count (especially when the story ends up being more linear, or the game has a wide branching, but a more horizontal one), I realized that can be a flawed mindset… 
It’s all very relative, though, and in the end, there are many other factors to take in consideration to define an actual game’s lenght or replayability.
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As someone who’s been around since Choice of Romance was new and has sunk woefully masssive amounts of money into COG since then, the one thing that infuriates me more than anything is this:
#choice
*Play a sultry kazoo solo
You play a positively spicy kazoo solo!
*Play a mournful kazoo solo
You begin to play a mournful kazoo solo,
but suddenly, it turns sexy.
*Don’t play the kazoo
You have all this free time and a kazoo.
Why not have a sexy kazoo solo?
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Yeah.
As said, sometimes these things are ok (I mean heck, I have them a couple of times in my WIP too, but I always try to make to U-turn to the other option be comprehensible).
Just when there is no reason why the story should detour you over to another option, the author should sit back down and maybe brainstorm with friends and betatesters what to do here
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If it’s fairly minor such as food preference, eye color, which tie you’re wearing for the seminar, that’s one thing. If it’s at a junction in the story that is set up to be important, and all actions lead to the same consequence regardless of your input, that’s another.
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Yeah. Honestly, the only time I saw this work so far was in CCH (and we all know which bit I am talking about Dx ) mostly cause it gives the player the sense that this was unavoidable, no matter what you’d have done.
But when you have it like in, again, HR for example where you are pretty much bared from using common sense, left alone chose your own adventure, something went wrong.
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As @Gower says, it would be interesting/helpful to have some nomenclature. That’s a fascinating look at it from @Carlos.R and @MeltingPenguins
(Has this been discussed before, or is there common parlance among COG staff?)
–
I think we may find that branch width is still best established by dividing total word count by readthrough length, but if we were to try to illustrate branch width using an alphanumeric reference system instead of a visual page tree, I’d be tempted to look for more simplistic method, instead of a technically descriptive one. Because, who’s it for? A prospective reader who likely isn’t a technical savant.
If each digit represents a chapter, and is delineated (here with a / ) for clarity, you can show if a chapter contains major branches:
3 / 1 / 3 / 1 / 3
The example would show that in your 5 chapter story, chapter one has 3 major branches.
You’ve also shown you’ve written 3 chapters in which a reader can enjoy 3 substantively different experiences, and 2 more linear chapters in which their experience will be largely the same as all other readers, excepting some flavour text.
You’d still require consensus on what a ‘major’ branch is.
–
The boring thoughts about the other system being discussed
Using a A:1 A:323 method to show branch width:
- doesn’t take into account length of branches,
- won’t help with any games that use loops.
Referencing specific choices using it:
- would require an in depth knowledge of the story for anyone to know what you were actually talking about when you used it,
- needs common understanding on whether you include *fake_choices (or *choices that lead to the same text) and how or if they’re distinguished.
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I checked the figures for the latest version of UnNatural.
277,764 words (with code)
240,077 words (w/out code)
I also worked it out on average a playthrough is roughly 68,564 words.
I find the figures facinating,
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That’s an impressive, if mysterious, figure.
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I just copied it from the calculator lol
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One thing I’d just touch on because I saw it here.
It’s the dreaded ‘railroading’. It’s the dreaded ‘your choices don’t matter’.
Both of these are entirely subjective criticisms. Everyone who uses them uses them in a very different way. How @lovinglydull illustrates it is one of the few ways where I’d say there, that’s an objective example of being railroaded. I think Heroes Rise is very railroad-y yet I’m sure a lot of people would be happy to disagree – it’s all about what you expect or want.
Sometimes it just means ‘I can’t tell which of my choices matter’. Sometimes it means ‘I can’t die’. Sometimes it means ‘I can’t be a total sociopath at all times’. Sometimes it means ‘I can’t see the branches clearly’. Sometimes people think failing a skill check or making a bad choice is the evil author forcing them onto a railroad.
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The problem with HR is that not only is there little pathing… if you don’t manage to guess what the author’s prefered “true” path is, you’re screwed.
You want to play a hero who does the thing to help people?
Game not only tells you “Nope you are in it only for the quick fame” (the legend decrease when patrolling, as mentioned) but if you don’t get enough legend points, you can’t even save people on the end. How is my ability to use my powers tied to how many people know me?
And worse. Looking how you pretty much need the warning system to get anything done from part two on… wasn’t it that you can only get that if you save the reporter? Meaning you are again forced onto the fame path? (Cause otherwise you won’t get your points there?)
HR might be a very good example of how not to write a CYOA novel. Because it isn’t one. It’s an author’s first outing at a novella with a few alternate scenes in the appendix.
Which frankly, is a shame, because the first story alone does have so many obvious possible paths. The author just… didn’t seem to care to write them. And up to this date, though this is very subjective, he does not seem to care for the craft at all.
Which, I’d say should be something to avoid when writing a cyoa work.
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I kind of agree that paths can sometimes be hard categorise whether something is true branching vs a minor detour. In fact most choices before the endings in a lot of choice games are detours to stop them spinning wildly out in all directions. But them how much is enough to qualify? A page? A chapter? Or do they actually need to permanently influence the outcomes from the rest of the game? What if a previous choice is required to have a branch occur in future chapters? It gets tricky.
Also I’d argue in some cases railroading is not always as railroaded as it first seems. One thing choicescript is very good at, (if you want to write it that way) is delayed impact. Sometimes the outcome will always be similar, pariticularly in the beginning sections, but the way you went about it will come back to haunt you later in the game. (One of my WIP’s like likely to feature that quite strongly for some (but not all) paths, where certain seemingly unimportant choices with regards to outcome from a decision, actually will affect your late story options.)
Sometimes variable action and stat checks are not obvious either. If you have variables being triggered and you don’t look at the code, you may not even realise that’s what’s going on if you just get a different page of text, or different choices popping up unless you’re playing in very different ways and paying alot of attention. So yep, sometimes it will appear your choices aren’t doing anything, while in the background they’re steadily ticking away changing stats and variables for later use. (And sometimes they aren’t, and are just railroaded. Depends on the story 
)
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I’ve been thinking about this, because I’ve got a few, I guess, fake-out choices that are there to misdirect from plot twists. So the choices are offered as if thing A is going to happen, but then thing B does.
What are you going to do with the rest of the evening?
*fake_choice
#Do the laundry.
#Bake cookies.
#Watch TV.
But no sooner have you made up your mind than you are abducted by a passing UFO!
Would you consider that irritating railroading or invalidating choices, or is it ok as long as it’s not overused?
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I think it can add to the storytelling. The problem, as with the kazoo example, is when you make a choice about what your character is going to do and then the game tells you your character does something else anyway. If it’s unavoidable external circumstances, like the UFO, a *fake_choice like that could misdirect, add to the reader’s perception of their character, or exacerbate a feeling of helplessness that’s part of the story.
For example, there’s a choice in @Interestedparty’s Blood Hunter right before something awful happens. This choice has absolutely no effect on the event following, but I think makes the tragedy even worse, because you immediately think oh no, this is my fault, I could’ve picked the other option, which is exactly what your character would be thinking.
I heard (haven’t played it myself yet) the latest Samurai of Hyuga book has a choice with two options that are always grayed out, no matter what you do, conveying this idea that you wish you could do something else, but can’t.
The Agent story in SWTOR has a few dialogue choices that make absolutely no difference (all that Chapter 2 tension!), but it fits perfectly with what the plot is doing, the whole conflict of the arc rising from not having a choice about certain actions. Imo, it made the story more personal than it would’ve been as a static medium (movie/book).
So, I think choices like this have a lot of potential to add to a story, done well. Even if, in-story, the choice has no effect on what happens next, it would have an effect on the mc’s mindset, and you can still reflect that in stat changes.
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If the laundry choices change your stats, and have some unique text - maybe some extra development of NPCs - then I wouldn’t see much wrong with it. The UFO abduction is a plot development, and if the way the PC deals with it can vary between playthroughs, it will have a very different feel.
Of course, if there isn’t much variation then it may feel stale upon later playthroughs, without the element of surprise.
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