Choose Your Own Adventure

I’ve completed pages one through five, and the renders for page six. I think the progress on the current chapter is largely on schedule, although again my work (day job) has meant some very long (and late) hours. I’m in the middle of three weeks were we’re deploying a lot of late night code, so it means my sleep cycle is a little screwed up. Also, I’ll be out of town for at least four days over Xmas, so I won’t be getting anything done during that time either.

Last week I took a few hours to work on a quick mockup for an idea of mine. Using the Imperium universe, I thought about creating a so-called “choose your own adventure” story online. Basically, each webpage would have a render of the scene, a description, and then some choices for the reader to progress through the story. If I really chose to do this, however, I’d want it database driven so I wouldn’t have to do 100+ web pages. Instead, it would be a single page that repopulates based on what the reader chooses. Although I don’t think it would be too hard, I’m not knowledgeable enough right now to do that technically, plus I don’t have the time to work on the story itself (although I have a few ideas).

I’ve also worked on the role-playing game, especially the formatting of the actual rules document. I bought an older version of Microsoft Publisher and I’m using that now instead of just MS Word. Although this version of Publisher isn’t as good as the one we have at work, it does give me a lot better freedom to position text and images. Back when I had a poetry magazine, I used Publisher then too, so I’m pretty familiar with the program. It’s not PageMaker or FrameMaker (other publishing programs), but it lets me do what I need to and it was cheap(!)