I was thinking how to quickly evaluate the
quality of interactiveness of these CYOA, cause I cant tell even when looking at the script - its usually very staggered and intervowen with text.
If they are heavily plot focused, then they all feel very linear with insignificat fluff.
Playing them, its hard to tell how much branching and interactiveness is actually there.
For comparison your avr CYOA book is short but highly exclusive in choices.
Choicescript games are not. They plop you into a
sequence of situations where you have to pick an option that fits your stats. And proceed to the next planned situation.
Turns out there is a visualisation tool. Its not great (the nodes are too widely spread) but it works.
Your typical choice. You pick an option and push character numbers a bit around.
And get flavor text (of which most of the game consists...)
And even if stuff looks large, there are actually only 2 choices.
This is your friends phone call on the way to the hospital.
Only 1 choice matters in a sense that it means agreeing to work wtih thim. The 2nd
choice is flavor only and pushing numbers a bit.
And where the mouse points, the 4 nodes around it are just 4 different times
like 8 oclock, 9, 11:30..
And this is how you enter the hospital - single choice.
The big choice on the right is just a feeding opportunity...
Note that there are no choices to make after you pick your poison.
Where the mouse points, you just loop around and can pick a different poison
until you succeed.
And this gigantic lol is the fight with the Bignig.
The tree in the middle below the big choice does not actually belong to the fight at all.
The lines down, outside the screen, is when you get fucked up and its a small flavor text.
There are no choices here, it all branches of your character values and presents flavor text.
There is a choice of how to deal with him after you win but its a number-pushing-deadend.
And there are less than 5 staggered choices in the whole game!
One could argue that character-number-pushing and subsequent reactivity on checks vs those numbers is branching but I dont think so. You dont branch. You get flavor that pushes numbers around even more.
Eg there are CYOA where you increase relationship number with a npc and at some point in some scene it gets tested. But you dont get more scenes out of it, you just fail or make teh check and this moves around more numbers with some diff flavor text.
There is no exclusiveity or gated content.
And in these particular Choicescript gayms for homofags the author deliberately makes all choices easily doable for every "build".
So not only are you linearly plodding through a plot without interactiviy on the happenings, you also can always succeed.
There is no consequence to failure either, since there is very rarely subsequent choice in a scene. You just go to the next situation.
This makes these game not replayable at all...
