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!
Boy, November sure flew by quickly. I hope you are all warm and safe this holiday season, even if you're in the topsy-turvy December summers of the southern hemisphere.
After a long period of difficulties with the visual editor, I've finally gotten it to a stable place and have been able to make more progress than re-doing things over and over. The pie menu from last month's update has been re-worked to look better and be more space-efficient. In addition, the first saving functionality has been implemented, allowing me to update the positions of each screen on the page. I've also figured out a good way to handle small animations without much trouble, which means that the page's responsiveness should be high (in an appropriately subtle way, of course).
You can see the new pie menu here:
The other things aren't really visible, but I'm excited to see what sort of progress I can make this month now that all the groundwork is laid. Hopefully the next update can report that adding and removing screens and connections is complete!
In any case, have a great December and don't forget to make a New Year's resolution to write more!
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!