Back to passage vs back to state

Authoring Twine
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Im a noob both in Twine and in Chapbook.
I have just realized that the back link insert in chapbook means back to the previous passage, not to the previous state. Am i right?
I have been trying to build a state system yesterday… but as i havent read the full code of chapbook nor have an advanced knowledge of JS it would be a mess.

I was wondering why Chapbook doesn’t have such a system by default. I mean, the daily life of a chapbook passage is really harsh. Have you seen those Hangover movies?
They know were they were,
they know where they are,
but they don’t know how they ended up here from there.

With chapbook passages its the same thing. It leads to weird effects.
Its problematic, because, suppose you did an “strengtht: strength+ 1” at vars section of Passage Two (so that strength=1), and you return from Passage Three to Passage Two again… strength would be incremented again (strength=2)…

I mean, in real life you have time and space. Events happen somewhere at a certain time. Now imagine if events were not attached to certain time and space but only to space, and you move from where you are to where you were… the same exact things that happened there when you were there, would be happening again now, but in a weird way: suppose a a coin fell from the Strange Corp building and you grabbed it and put it inside your pocket and 1 hour later you go back there, but its 7 o clock again, and the exact same coin you have in your pocket is falling again and you grab it again and put it in your pocket but now you have 2 of them… its a little surrealistic, lets say.

In back to the future, for example, Marty can travel through time, back and forth. He can travel through space, and he can travel through time. He goes back to 1955 and there are two Martys. He can see what happens to his other self from the outside, because he is another Marty, the Marty from the future. It doesn’t happen that he, as Marty from the future, while starrring at Past-Marty being punched, is also receiving that exact same puch again, so that he is at the same time future-marty and past-marty, outside and inside. That is dream stuff, a place with no principle of no-contradiction.
Its like, i remember playing quake, or duke nukem, or doom (i dont remember precisely) but there might be a leak from the map to the non-existant outside of the map, and suddenly you had an eternal fall, or a long fall and then you were in the map again but without physics, so you could go through solid things, and the like.
Doc Brown would say: ‘Great Scott! What a paradox!

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Yeah. Chapbook doesn’t have as much state tracking flexibility out-of-the-box as some of the other formats, so you probably want to put state changes in their own separate passage that doesn’t have a back link (e.g. “you spend a week training and your strength increases”). If you design around thinking of those passages as events that happen rather than locations that you can re-visit multiple times without any effect… that should help.

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But what happens if player’s finger slips, or he wants to read the former passage again for some reason, or just to make a different choice. Should he restart the game and do everything again just to do that? I think to be able to go back is a must.
Plus, i was thinking about using a dedicated passage as an inventory. But if on return player have to face the “Strange building effect”…

Its like stats seem to be more a cosmetic than a functional thing.
As a CYOA chapbook is solid and coherent. But when you add states this way, its a little messy.

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You could use a dedicated passage as an inventory, you’d just want to link to other passages to make the actual changes: “you just sold an apple for 3 pennies. [[go back]].” Like a dialog box where the only option is to hit OK (or maybe “cancel” too).

But yeah, Chapbook is intentionally pretty limited. You may be better off using Harlowe or SugarCube…

6

But chapbook’s UI looks sooooo nice. I love a Lot of things of this format. But, what Is making me insist these days Is its awesome responsive nice looking UI.

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Against my own thinking, from Choice of Games FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions - Choice of Games LLC

Q) Why isn’t there a “back” button on your games?
A) We’ve considered incorporating an Undo (or Back) button instead, but we found that users would spoil their game, by clicking on every option one at a time and clicking Back, until they found a result they liked the best. It removed all of the dramatic tension; one user described this as a “chore!”
t’s tempting to say “well, if it’s a chore, and it ruins the game, then why are you pushing the Back button so much? Just play the game without testing every option first!” But I think people just can’t help themselves; it’s just too hard to resist pressing the Back button when we’ve made the “wrong” choice. And even if we never use the Back button, it undermines tension just knowing that “if I ever get in trouble, I can always Undo…”

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So my strategy has been to only use back links from a dead-end passage with no state changes in that passage or the one you return to - like you basically want to give a further description of a lamp. In fact, I might not use the back link for that and specifically hard-link back to the previous passage.

The use for a back link is when you don’t know where the player is coming from. Say for a stats or inventory screen. For that, my strategy has been to only offer link access to “menu” screens from specifically chosen hub passages with no state changes. Like if a lot of stuff happens in one room, the main “you are in a room” passage will allow temporary diversions to inventory or stats as a link in that passage, but I don’t leave those links active in the header anywhere else during a cutscene or plot scenes that change variables and state.

Another strategy is to have a variable (I used to use $destination) that is set in every major physically located room, so if you have a temporary divert, you first set that and then use a return link to [[$destination]] instead of a back link. That works if you have multiple-layered menus where a “go back one passage” link might not work correctly.

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9

I just wrote some code that may help you: Chapbook Modal Text Window strategy? - #9 by javiermobile

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