As those of us who have attempted would know, keeping track of threads is important in making interactive fiction. And being a community, I thought maybe some of us would have tips for organising our work, and perhaps it could be shared with the rest of us.
For myself, I am currently using a tree structure. It works good enough for now, but I forsee a situation where perhaps there just isn’t enough room on a single page for all the branches.
I write up major plot points and paths on index cards and lie them out. Easy to keep adding new cards and shifting them. When i have an entire scene, I stack the cards and rubber band them to save space.
Also I have a list of variables, their minimum, maximum, and average value so I can track character progression.
I use a notebook, and section it by chapters. Then I write in sections, by *label, and tag each *label. It comes in handy when working with complex storylines. Easy to use and reference, but very time consuming to put together.
I use www.bubbl.us to create mind maps of each scene. I write the script in the mindmap then copy it across. It’s good as you can see how it all links together and (as far as I know) there is no size limit! Being on a computer it’s very easy to edit as well.
The notebook was working great until the dog jumped up on my desk spilling my mtn dew all over it. Ow the hours I labored to produce this book. No I did not kill the dog. Once I recovered I had no desire to try rewriting that again, so I looked at bubble.us. Nice program, but not what I was looking for. I thought of doing the index card thing, then again I still have the dog. So I went in search of an index card program, and found one I really like. So I thought I would share it here. http://www.azzcardfile.com/
Wow… That really is a shame. You have my sympathy.
Also, that is a nice find. Judging by how long my mind map is turning out, I may or may not want to look at alternatives in future.
I realize the thread is a bit old but just wanted to say thanks for the great resources!
The moral of this story: Soda is bad for you.
A great non-flash mind map alternative is:
Keep in mind this uses HTML5, so you’ll need use a (relatively,) modern browser for it to work.
Hey, that mindmap is actually a lot of fun to play with.