The First Time I Tied You Up (*/*, CYOA)

[Shotrow]

https://ornate-pastelito-c5d853.netlify.app/

This is a little experiment I started working on a long time ago. I was trying to see if I could solve the problem of many peoples' attention span being too short for long-form stories. Not judging, I include myself in this.

Part of it was inspired by an observation I read by the Disco Elysium devs: People are willing to read social media for a really long time just because it's presented in short chunks.

I also observed myself that even a small amount of interaction can really make a story much more interesting.

In the end, I feel like having to have a lot of different variations kind of limited the story a bit, but the idea of including footnotes has potential. Let me know if there are any typos or errors.
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In this story, you find yourself in the clutches of a domineering captor and reminisce about your first encounter with them. You choose your gender, their gender, and the stage of life at which the encounter happened in.

[AlexUSA3]

This was a lot of fun. You find yourself going back and trying out different routes just to see what happens.

[FelixSH]

I had fun with this. Light TUG CYOA games are so rare, it's nice to play one, and it was well written. There was something slightly unnerving about the writing (which may be just due to how the story started), which I liked.

The footnotes were probably my favourite part. They offer an easy way to add some flavour, but giving the reader a way of ignoring it.

I think in the third possible scenario, the summer camp, choosing the gender of the kidnapper doesn't work. No matter if I choose them to be a girl or boy, it was always the Girl with the red windbreaker.

The college and highschool scenarios felt a bit similar, for my taste, at least in the big structure. I mean, the details were different enough, so please don't feel bad about it, it's really just meant as a bit of feedback.

But the summer camp one was a nice change of pace, I enjoyed that one quite a bit. I mean, I enjoyed them all (well, I'll play the last one later).

As a suggestion, you might want to check out Twine. It makes creating these stories really easy. If you want, it worked out the way you did, too.

In any case, I would like to see more CYOA stories from you, if you fell like doing them. They are fun.

[Shotrow]

@AlexUSA3 - Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

@FelixSH - Thanks for the bug report! It should be fixed.

You're right that most of the stories are similar. I intended for them to all be the same overall story, just with details changed to reflect the age differences. But, the elementary school route was the last one I worked on, and I got inspired, so I wrote the summer camp story. Even so, it follows the same basic structure as the others, just not in a school setting for once. I was originally planning on a young adult path as well, but I'd had this project on the back-burner for so long I ended up cutting that path to get the game done.

I've tinkered with Twine before, but overall I'm more comfortable coding from scratch than using a framework like that.

I might do more interactive stories in the future, but I'm not sure if I'll have as many branching paths as this one. All the different variations made it a nightmare to proofread and forced the characters to be fairly generic archetypes.

Glad you enjoyed it!

[BlissfulMisery]

Well, will say it is quite the interesting concept! Has quite the variety of tone through the various paths, and there are plenty of little bits of humor thrown in here and there that I liked.

One of those cases where I have to wonder though if the extra effort involved is worth it - doing it this way makes it a very large project, and does force things to be a little more generic/interchangeable. I think you did a good job with the latter, and as for the original question, I suppose it is not really my place to determine the answer

In general, thought the summer camp concept was an interesting one, the idea of 'ghost-story-turns-real'. Also the various dialogue in the preschool path was quite adorable

The 'good versus bad' endings seemed a bit binary, but again, I suspect it is a limitation of having to keep the scope reasonable due to all the varying paths. And honestly much of the self-commentary by the captor in those parts was quite on point, especially on the bad endings, especially the parts referring to how we tend to live up to others expectations of us (regardless of whether those expectations are positive or negative).

Also, and this applies to every route, I liked the nod to aftercare with how the captor gives the player character food and drink afterwards each time (not the only such nod, but the most obvious).

Overall, was an enjoyable read!

[Shotrow]

@BlissfulMisery Thanks! Sorry I took so long to get back to you.

I think the effort of including footnotes was worth it. It was a fun way to include multiple perspectives in the story. The captor's perspective in the narration, the player's in the foot notes.

But having multiple age and gender options maybe not so much. It is nice to hear from people who wouldn't normally be interested in a story of mine, but as you say it does flatten the story a bit. Now that you mention it, how people are shaped by others' expectations is kind of a major theme in a lot of my stories, so it makes it hard to exclude gendered expectations. I did try to make it work, but it took a lot of effort.

I'm glad you liked the preschool path. To be honest, I enjoy writing from the perspective of little little kids sometimes, but I'm usually too afraid of judgement to center it in my stories. I suppose that was one side benefit of this project is that I got to explore a variety of different ages.

Thanks for the comment, glad you enjoyed it!