Hello, and welcome to Create Your Own Choose-Your-Own-Adventures!
Here, you may browse literally tens of exciting adventures, or register and create your very own!
Hey, everyone. I just wanted to let you know that things are still moving along, I'm still alive, and Choosology is still approaching. I'm essentially re-writing the entire site though, so it'll be a while yet.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying all the stories that are being published! Although a lot of you are linking back to the beginning screen at the end of your adventures, which means that nobody can ever rate or comment on them. There's always a link to the beginning screen on the left side of the screen already, so unless you deliberately want to avoid comments or ratings, let your ending screens be true endings!
You will all now notice a little count of your "Star Points" (potentially a temporary name) next to your names in comments and on your profiles.
You get Star Points for reading and rating other adventures, as well as for other people rating your adventures! The more people that rate you, and the higher they rate you, the better!
You get one point for each rating you give.
You get one tenth of a point for each star someone gives you; so two five-star ratings are worth as much as ten one-star ratings.
At the moment, these Star Points aren't worth anything but bragging rights. But there's more stuff in the works!
The site was briefly down tonight as I updated it and sleepily messed some stuff up. It should all be back to normal now (except the background is a little different), and there's some cool new stuff in the screen editor.
You can now see a word count for each one of your nodes, and those which are unpopulated are a different color. This'll help you track your progress (and brag about how much you've written). The word counts may be off by a few, depending on how much formatting you've done, but they should be close enough.
Let me know if my shambling clumsiness caused any bugs that I didn't catch!
Well, it's official: the future of CYOCYOA is "Choosology," a new name for a new era!
www.choosology.com is already under my control and currently just redirects here. But once the site overhaul is complete, it'll be the other way around!
I'm pretty excited about this, and I've got a professional graphic designer helping me out, so I'm hoping it'll end up looking a lot slicker than this current, thrown-together mess. I'll be trying to push it out in stages so that we get the shininess as quickly as possible!
All of you will become "Choosologists," if you've published an adventure, and I'm also planning an achievements-like system where I can confer "degrees" on you for your various exploits. Lots of other exciting changes in the works, too, but I'll try not to promise too much!
Thanks for being with me during the first stages of this little site; now let's move into the brave new world of the future with the science of choice: Choosology!
Hi, all!
A new look for the site is currently being worked on, so nothing much new has been released for a while. But, hopefully sometime soon, the front page will get a facelift and there'll be a bunch of exciting new changes around here, so the whole site will look and work better.
In the meantime, I thought I might ask you, the users, for your opinion.
When I started this site in 2009, I had to think of a name that I could get a domain name for, and I had to do it fast. What I ended up with is a little bit clever, I suppose, but I've never been entirely happy with it. And perhaps more pertinently, I may be mildly treading upon ChooseCo LLC's trademark ("Choose Your Own Adventure"). For now, it's not a big deal since I'm not making any money and there are relatively few users. But going forward, I'd like to come out of the shadow of that book series and have a name that really reflects what the site is all about, namely:
1) You can read a bunch of stories!
2) You can author your own stories!
3) The stories are interactive, not just short fiction!
4) The stories are not games, though some may be similar to popular games, and in the future I hope to have more options to let you get closer to the text adventure experience (if you want).
5) The "adventures" don't have to be stories! They could be an instruction manual, a quiz, an elaborate joke, a surrealist nightmare, or some other experimental form I haven't yet thought up!
6) Lastly, there's a community aspect to the site.
So with all that in mind, I've been thinking about new names. These are just a few that I've come up with (and which have available domain names), but feel free to suggest any thoughts you have in the comments.
Pick-A-Path - Focuses on the interactivity aspect, and is alliterative, which I like...
TaleSpinner(s) - Focuses on the authoring aspect, sounds kinda cool, though maybe reminiscent of a cartoon...
Choose Your Own Path - A transparent attempt to be similar to Choose Your Own Adventure, but both descriptive and short enough...
Think Outside The Story - A bit long, but implies a bit of mystery and excitement and novelty...
I'm sure there are a billion others. What do you think?