Don’t know if this is the right place to ask or of it’s already been answered elsewhere, but do you have any advice for designing branching passages in a IF that eventually lead to the same passage but the choices made earlier lead to different outcomes and different routes from that passage?
It sounds as if you’re describing “branch and bottleneck” structure as defined by Sam Kabo Ashwell.
As opposed to a “time cave” structure where every passage branches out to more passages and the resulting choices and passages never rejoin together, B&BN makes the effort to gather the story back into a single “hub” after spreading out for a while.
Often this fits well with a narrative that structures into chapters or perhaps each day the player can make choices to do different things but will always end up in the same bottleneck of “You wake up the next day” with different choices and adventures to experience.
Essentially you’re writing mini-adventures that are chained together with a singular gathering point in between. If you want the game to acknowledge what the player has done, you would set variables. Perhaps the player has a choice to either enter a room full of hungry bears and fight them, or a room of adorable kittens and pet them. The hub after that split might have text variation based on the variable that changes the description “Wow you’re really tired from fighting those bears” or “Wow, your clothes are covered in hair from cuddling with those kittens” even though they are in the same location/passage.
Branch and bottleneck might also contain loops to gate plot and quest structure. In The Secret of Monkey Island, Guybrush encounters the three Important-Looking Pirates who give him three tasks that can be completed in any order. If this were a choice-narrative, the game could be thought of as looping through different sections and returning back to the pirates who acknowledge when each task is complete; only when all three have been done and the player is deemed a worthy pirate can the player escape this bottleneck and move on with the plot via a new and previously unaccessible branch out of the pirate hub.
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