Awesome Visualisations of Choose Your Own Adventure books | Hacker News Reader

Awesome Visualisations of Choose Your Own Adventure books

samizdat.cc

154 pointswakeless22 comments

I love how casually detailed this article is. Touches like the subtly blinking blink tag -- and the subject matter itself -- lead me to believe there are gems here waiting to be discovered on subsequent reads.

"13 months and 11k lines of code later, i’ve finished up the choose your own adventure project"

From: http://etc.samizdat.cc/2009/11/the-rules-of-the-game

Yes, this is an impressive effort.

Fantastic article. I just wanted to point out -- if you click on the links on the top left navigation, you can see the graphs/animations/etc for every book. This wasn't obvious until I read the entire article!

This is just so well done. The overview, the gallery, the animation, and play. It's remarkable. This must've been a labor of love.

He's also created a digital version of a book that is browsable and shows your jump history here: http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#/zork

I didn't see that, nor did I see the blog. This guy is like the gift that keeps giving.

:) - a number of people who saw the page didn't take note of it, thinking 'cyoa' was the name of the site, or something.

Down at the bottom is a link to a footnote with more information about the software and coding used:

http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#fn3

Edit:

Wow! I just found the digitized Choose Your Own Adventure book with jump history:

http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#/zork

Christian Swinehart is at the top of his field, working for a legendary design company. http://samizdat.cc/me

Funny how because he's not a familiar tech name, everyone here assumes he's an upstart.

Thanks, you just answered my question posted above. Work at this level rarely comes out of nowhere.

What a fantastic article. I wonder how more rules-oriented gamebook series [1] would fare in this type of analysis. They do tend to lead to an "ideal" ending, as the author noted, so perhaps they wouldn't be as interesting. The progression graphs would be interesting to see, though.

[1] Such as Joe Dever's wonderful Lone Wolf series. The republished versions available at projectaon.org --- and apparently back in print now --- are just as much fun as I remember.

The graphics are (mostly) Python+nodebox. This guy has a monstrous talent.

I loved those books and I had a system for reading them. Each time I had to make a decision that involved me jumping to one page or another, I would fold the corner of the page. Each time I hit an endpoint, I would travel back to a folded page and then make a new decision to see where it would take me.

Funny how memory works. I don't think I've recalled my system for reading these books for years, perhaps more than a decade.

I did the same exact thing, or left fingers stuck in all the choice pages. Maybe that's why recursion came easy to me years later in my early programming classes.

Not related to the content: Check out the cool "side notes" mechanism that site has! Click the cross symbol after the phrase 'from the beginning.'

Wow. I mean, who is this guy? This is just breathtaking.

This really reminds me of the old Joshua Davis experiments.

someone needs to bring the choose your own adventure genre back.

Now if only this type of visualization was used for something _useful_...

While I see why you got down-voted, I can't help but agree. This is design-as-art, and it's an insult to true design. Why are top-tier designers visualizing choose–your-own-adventure books? Yes, it's pretty, but in the meantime, I'm looking at code all day using monospace fonts of ~100 characters. The input device through which I express my intentions would been not unfamiliar over a century ago. So while it's nice to see pretty pictures, and I appreciate the enormous efforts put into them, I'd much rather this guy use his PhD in Computational Neuroscience to help my brain visualize code.

This is design-as-art, and it's an insult to true design.

Huh?

Why are top-tier designers visualizing choose–your-own-adventure books?

Actually, only one guy is doing something he loves, as a hobby, and he gets to learn a lot of useful stuff at the same time.

I'd much rather this guy use his PhD in Computational Neuroscience to help my brain visualize code

So, how far do you think he'll get doing something he may have no passion for, for somebody like you?

Oh, no, he's more than free to do whatever he wants, for free or for pay. I'm just saying it would benefit me if he developed a passion for revolutionizing IDE's - or more generally, making something that's equally artistically wow-ing and useful :)

Most artistic (and programming) pursuits include the idea that it's good to take a sabbatical, a little rest, a change in direction.

I don't think it's controversial to say that doing something different is generally regarded as a good way to learn new things, things that apply back to your 'real' life or job.

So, I have a more hopeful view: I loved his work on this admittedly trivial topic. It was beautiful, and inspiring. I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with the results of all his labors. After reading the page, I have no doubt he will apply his skills to things that you or I might one day benefit from.

So, be positive! And grateful he published this thing, this is roughly the equivalent of a master's thesis in info-design someone put out on the net for free. I loved it.

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