A while ago I made a "create your own adventure" type fic for a lovely fan project that you can find here – everybody who took part in this is insanely talented! Originally I was going to write a completely different thing for my part, but for some reason I decided to try something new and thus I almost missed the deadline and stressed myself out for no reason. But the idea made me think about fanfiction as an interactive art format. I have minimal (and convoluted) experience with game making and my failures of constructing a dialogue tree without wanting to bash my skull against the computer screen inspired me to make a fanfic that was – on the most basic level – interactable. I did it for the memes but to my surprise, a lot of people found the format enjoyable and nice.
I count that fic as a successful experiment, but ao3 was not invented with these kinds of shenanigans in mind. This format, as far as I tested, has its limitations. The way it worked was building diverging paths and connecting them via links, which is as good as it gets. But since then I was forced to butt heads with html once again and with that suffering still wandering the halls of my house, I got some new ideas.
So, the next unhinged fanfic project on the horizon is:
drumroll...
I will probably regret this in the future, but the idea is stuck in my mind and I really like the idea of it. I’m not exactly sure what the core story line is going to be, but what I can promise is that there will be blood, and love, and probably a weird mixture of it both. Having Harrow as a main character would fit with the second person narrative extremely well too.
I could just string together different chapters with links, but I want to do something more than that: it would be a way more fun and unpredictable experience if I could somehow incorporate random chance and a point system into this mess. HTML does not offer a solution to all of my problems, but there are some things I might be able to do, although I need to do some investigating before I can say anything definitively. The current setup that my idea requires comes down to these components:
incorporation of random chance
This is a very bad idea but I want to see where it goes. Ianthe would never be predictable and I'm respecting that. This would mainly influence events where seemingly there's no choice but behind the scenes the code decides where the [next choice] button takes you. AO3 Gives me no such choice, so I'll have to figure something out. This is probably not possible to implement in a normal fanfic :(
a point system
This is also a very bad idea. Something like this requires a counter, which ao3 does not let you create. But I am not giving up on it yet.