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!
Greetings, all!
It's been a busy month here at Grasssmithery Worldwide. Alas, a lot of that busy-ness was in pursuit of unexciting goals, like optimizing HTML 5 draw times. I know I can't release a visual editor that skips around and lags for people on low-budget computers, even if it is fun to have fancy stuff all over the place. So I've been experimenting a lot, seeing what makes a difference and what doesn't, trying different computers and browsers... and it all is valuable, but not especially interesting.
In any case, one of the new things that has been worked on is the addition of a new pop-up menu when you click on a screen. Right now the "pie menu" is incomplete, but you can see an idea of how it'll work here.
This will replace the drop-down menu currently on CYOCYOA. As an added bonus, it should make it easier to navigate the Visual Editor with only a keyboard, if you're so inclined.
In other news, now that November is here, it's NaNoWriMo! It's a great month to write the great American (or Chilean, or Australian...) novel -- in choose-your-own form, of course.
The hosting company has informed me that they will be upgrading the servers the site is hosted on this Sunday, 10/12. It's supposed to be at 8:00PM PDT for 30-40 minutes, but having performed these updates myself before, I know it can sometimes take a lot longer than anticipated.
It shouldn't cause any issues with the site afterward, but it might, and if it does, please let me know!
Hello, all you authors out there!
It seems the school year's started up again and we're getting some new stories pouring in. Awesome!
One reminder: We can tell when you're commenting on your own adventures about how great they are! And we will delete anything we feel is spamming or gratuitous self-aggrandizement. Please save your compliments for the other authors on the site!
As far as progress on the new site goes... well, there's not much to report. Work has been progressing, but mostly in invisible ways that wouldn't be visible in any sort of screenshot. It's important that the new site be easy to use and fancy, but accessible through lower-end computers and even tablets and phones, so that's taking some time to work through.
I'm looking forward to a more exciting post next month!
August has come and gone, and with that, a new version of the visual editor arrives.
The version I showed last month was working just fine, except for one thing: even with just a dozen screens, it was far too sluggish, and there wasn't much I could do about it. So, unfortunately, I had to start over with a new JavaScript library. Not everything was wasted, of course, but I had to do a lot of rewriting. After that, I continued on to adding more functionality, to move closer to being able to replicate everything the current visual editor can do, and then some!
You can see the progress here, with a view of (a messed-up version of) the tutorial adventure's structure.
The next step is to start adding menus and the accompanying functionality. It's a long road, this visual editor, but I'd like to think it'll be worth it!
Another month, another update.
This month has had me focusing on the most complex and difficult part of the site: the visual screen editor. The current version is written using SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), which are great for drawing cool shapes and lines, but less effective at being responsive user interfaces, which unfortunately is the main thing I need it to be. I feel like the current implementation isn't bad at all, but every time I wanted to change something it was a huge headache.
To that end, I'm rewriting the whole thing (as I'm doing with most of the site). As I hinted last month, I started just by getting some boxes and lines on the screen.
Since then, the boxes have become draggable, the lines have become dynamic, I gained the ability to set a background, and I've implemented the color-coding feature that shows which screens connect to the one you're hovering over. Now that I have the foundations in place, I can start connecting it to the database to grab the current adventure structures and show them as we're more or less used to seeing them in the visual editor.
See it here!
In the meantime, I also took a couple days and set up the site to use hashtag navigation; that means that even though the site is a fluid experience that almost never requires reloading the page, as you traverse the different parts of it the URL will still change, so you can bookmark certain areas or use the back button. It's a bit technical, but maybe some of you will understand what i'm talking about; in any case, I hope all of you will appreciate it once you're using it!