CYOA Design, Choices, Patterns and Bottlenecks

June 23, 2024 5:17 AM

Choice inflection points in gamebooks/interactive fiction/CYOA come in many varieties. There a few standard storyline options in "finite-state" interactive fiction, where you don't keep track of changing statistics, or otherwise do anything other than make choices. Branches and bottlenecks are fundamental to choice paths in these things. Note that spin-off interactive fictions are sometimes belabored with extraneous factors that influence the work's structure. Aspects of making interactive fiction have appeared on the site before (green, greener; blue; bluer).
posted by cupcakeninja (3 comments total)

Speaking of wretched? Trying to get a LLM to create passable CYOA-style adventures that come to any kind of satisfactory conclusion at all. I'll take writing like this [from the 'extraneous factors' link] over that, honestly

For someone so pretty, Hannah looked quite tough as she added, “Good, because I do not suffer fools gladly.”

posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:59 AM on June 23 [1 favorite]

Speaking of wretched? Trying to get a LLM to create passable CYOA-style adventures that come to any kind of satisfactory conclusion at all.

You need to have a deterministic state machine/game loop running alongside the LLM. LLMs can't track state/scores/etc. on their own.
posted by ryoshu at 10:27 AM on June 23

I read the title as "cover your own ass design choices" for a minute.
posted by Foosnark at 3:17 PM on June 23 [5 favorites]