Choose Your Own Adventure

Although the evolution of technology put the computer in the center of attention, it doesn’t mean other activities are slowly dying. For instance, books have adapted and are now available under electronic formats as well, and Choose Your Own Adventure comes with a different method of approach on storytelling in a nonlinear fashion.

On the bright side of things, the application saves you the effort of going through an installer, thus making it possible to work on your projects on other computers. You can store the program itself and your work on a thumb drive for easy transfer. What’s more, it doesn’t have any impact on system registry entries, thus not affecting stability of the target PC.

The application aims to provide a bit of interaction to the reader by letting you split the narrative in up to three different choices. Each choice gets assigned to a different page, where the reader is taken upon selection. You’re not forced to add choices and simply fill some pages with descriptions, lore, and action.

The visual design comes as a lot of help. The structure blends well in an environment, while overall arrangement of elements and textures used in the design make accommodation a walk in the park. Multiple pages can be enabled and are shown in a dedicated panel.

Editing options are pretty poor though. For instance, you can’t import text directly from documents, not even plain text files. Text itself doesn’t benefit from any customization options other than several size values, while the entire story contains only text, with nu support for pictures or audio.

You can generate a tree view of the entire plot with branches based on choices. It’s possible to edit on the spot. There is, however, one big downside to the entire operation. The reader needs to open the book inside the application, because there are no export options, and it would have been useful to build an interactive EXE or custom slideshow.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that Choose Your Own Adventure comes with good intentions, but is a little rough around the edges when it comes to edit options and customization. You can’t work with external files, or build something that doesn’t rely on the application for reading.