Adventures: Adventures are the broad product you'll be creating and enjoying on this site. They're like books.

Screens: Screens are like the pages of your Adventures. A reader will see one Screen at a time, which generally will have multiple links to other screens within the same Adventure -- the Choices. Screens are represented by blue boxes on the Screen Editor.

Choices: Choices are the sinew that connect the Screens within your adventure. If a particular Screen doesn't exist as a Choice from other Screens going all the way back to the Beginning Screen, a user will never see it. Choices are represented by blue lines going from one Screen to another on the Screen Editor. Choices have a label, which is what a user reads and clicks on, and a target, which is the Screen it leads to. One Screen C might be accessible from both Screen A and Screen B, in which case the choices on Screen A and Screen B could have different labels but the same target.

Children/Parents: In the context of CYOCYOA, "Children" refer to screens which are possible choices of a screen. So a screen with two choices to choose from has two child screens, and it is the "parent" of both of those screens. Unlike in real life, it is possible for a screen to be both parent and child of another (though not of itself).

Pictures: Pictures are pretty straightforward; they're visual representations of anything that can be stored in JPEG, GIF, or PNG format. In order to use a picture in your Adventure, however, you must upload it to your account. We do not allow "hotlinking," i.e. using the URL of a picture hosted on another site. CYOCYOA also provides some generic pictures up front.

Availability: An Adventure begins its life as "Unavailable." This means that only the author can see it. Once the author has finished with it, the Adventure can be set to several different levels of availability on the Adventure Options screen. In general, a person would use the "Publicly Available" option, which allows the Adventure to be seen and read through by anybody, including guest users.

Alternatively, an author can choose to make the Adventure only "Privately Available," which allows only users (whether logged-in or not) who have the passcode that the author has defined. This could be used for private in-joke Adventures, or something a little too raunchy for the public, for example.

The last availability option is "Restricted." This is for Adventures which have content that's too mature for general audiences, but which should still be as available as possible. These require users to be logged-in and to have set "View Restricted Adventures" in their Account options.

Once an Adventure is set to some level of availability, it cannot be edited again until the availability is revoked. This is to ensure nobody is in the middle of reading through it while you remove or re-organize your screens.

Screen Editor: The Screen Editor is the basic workbench of Adventure editing. It's an SVG-powered interactive storyliner and organizational tool to help you plan out your Adventure and quickly make the changes you want to make. It's one of the sections available on the Editing Adventure screen.