Choose Your Own Adventure

I see a few IFs out there that are basically choose your own adventure games. The problems with CYOA books was that the books have no memory- who knows if you met the Goblin on page 3, or if you got to page 12 through some other means.

The Lone Wolf gamebooks were CYOA where you built a character and used a chart to track inventory, combat, etc. That was the next level. It seems like IF could be used to improve this process.

Would there be interest in a CYOA format IF if the parser remembered your previous choices, perhaps kept some kind of inventory for you, and allowed previous choices to influence later choices. I know the flowchart on such a thing could get outrageous, but assuming it could be done, how much interest is there out there for something like this.

For example, I considered porting the Lone Wolf books into IF format, to track your powers and inventory for you, and to do combat automatically. Likewise, I considered a seperate CYOA adventure, but one that graded you on the end by your previous choices, rather than forgetting all choices except those required to reach a given ending. (Example, you might loop around in scenarios, but the game changed on what branch you took to get to your current scenario).

Any thoughts?

There are some CYOAs that are more than simply going through a static flowchart. For example the ChoiceScript games are quite elaborate. I assume having a “memory” in CYOA is no more complex than having one in parser IF, but I’m sure it has its own pitfalls.

There’s a Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Scorpion Swamp which allowed you to do three different missions (Good, Neutral & Evil) and also enabled you to revisit sites (something not generally done in other FF books). Could be worth a look as a classical model (if you can track a copy down).

Wow, those are complicated! I love it!