This might seem silly, but I was wondering if anyone has ever developed a script of some kind that can compile the text/choices of a full game playthrough and export it as plain text. Kind of like how you can see the text and choices using certain configurations of Randomtest. I have older relatives and friends without smart phones (or any interest in gaming) who would like to read my games like a novel.
Yes, I could simply do a metric butt-ton of work carefully copy/pasting the appropriate sections and remembering which states are triggered/replacing variable names for the whole game, but it would be much easier if there were a way to simply export a playthrough like you see in Randomtest if such a mechanism exists.
I don’t know if you had already seen this old post, maybe it can be useful to you:
However, I wonder if there’s something more feasible on our (readers) end. I’d love to be able to export the perfect playthrough of a game and read it on my kindle reader before sleeping - that way I could relax without the risk of eye strain (unfortunately you have to play on pc or mobile) while enjoying my favorite stories!
Interesting! I think I remember seeing that several years ago and it may even be the thread that started this idea tumbling around in my head!
I’ll try this out this evening and see if it works with newer branches of choicescript.
EDIT: Just gave it a try. It throws errors with current versions of choicescript files and I’m not proficient in Javascript so I’m not sure why. I had similar problems when I was trying to quicktest my working files a few years back while running an outdated version of choicescript.
I’m excited to see if there’s a tool for this that works with newer iterations of ChoiceScript. I think a txt, pdf, or printable version of your playthrough would be a wonderful souvenir or add-on for a game, in addition to being helpful for testing and editing.
You know, ten years ago I considered pushing a version of that as something you could buy. Finish your playthrough and order a copy of it with the cover art, etc.
Cue a stack of books where the first few pages the narrator asks and then answers themselves about what type of hair, gender, eyes, skin tan, orientation and name the protagonist has and what gender they want the ROs to be.
Not a big fan of the thought but if you’re set on it I hope it’ll be something an author opts into allowing instead of anything else.
I’d be all over that. But I’d like the option to customize it in my own text editor before printing.
To remove parts like this
Honestly, I can’t imagine it would be that hard. Randomtest already has the ability to output the choice text and resulting paragraphs into a basic text file. The only thing we’d need is a way to control the choices instead of having them be random. It doesn’t even need to be through the app, really.
Even a basic command line job like the tests would be useful for seeing what beta testers experience, and authors could mix up their own versions on the fly for full-text export. From there, it might not be too laborious to implement the ability to do it through the app for customers, maybe for a one-time dlc fee or something (since Jason mentioned it as a possible revenue stream.)
EDIT: Just to be clear, my original thought wasn’t looking to implement something like this en masse, like LightningGarfunkel was thinking. I’d just like a quick and dirty way to export a playthrough to basic text. Anything else, like potential monetization should be on a voluntary basis if it’s ever implemented on the client side.
Knowing that Dan is now working full time at CoG and is making many technical improvements (which we’re already experiencing!), I guess that could be a possibility in the future. A very welcome one in the community I’d say!
However - provided that I don’t know how much work there would be behind the curtains - after the price increase at the beginning of the year I think it would be a feature that would help making people more satisfied with their purchases!
