Textallion, a gamebook system

Introduction

With textallion, you can also create traditional "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, with the help of a "txt2CYOA" module. Those stories are like normal books, except they offer choices to the reader at some points in the narration.

Chapters

Your sections (chapters) will be created using the default txt2tags heading (level 2):

== z ==

Important: You must add spaces around the number to create the anchor.

Choices

To create a choice, use either :

- Description of the choice (starting with a dash "-"): number
- Description of the choice: [#number]. More words afterwards.
- Description of the choice with a [#keyword], and some more things afterward.

with the number refering to the number of one of your chapter. Textallion will be able to detect that it's a choice, and link to the related chapter.

You must use the syntax [#number] if the number is followed by something and not alone at the end of the line. This syntax might not be supported in advanced export features (other CYOA systems). It works well with twine though.

Also if you need to describe your choice with more than one single [#keyword], or reuse the word but link to another place with another keyword for an alternative chapter, you can use this syntax:

[your description|#keyword_without-space]

The dash # is like an anchor which will redirect to the name of a chapter.

Pictures

You can add pictures with [yourpicture.jpg] (or .png)

To use wrapped pictures, type:

[yourpicture.jpg](~~~~)

(default textallion behavior)

Graph

It's possible to get a graph with all the chapters connected together.

You need to have graphviz installed to do that, and make sure each choice starts on one individual line, with a - and ends with the number of the choice.

You can invoque make cyoa-graph to produce the svg and png version.

Export to other game formats

• make cyoa-html : create HTML file to publish the game on internet
• make cyoa-pdf : create the PDF file for printing the gamebook
• make cyoa-epub : create the ePUB file to be displayed in a ebook reader or on a phone (android, iphone, ipad)
• make cyoa-ramus: Use Ramus as an alternative HTML rendering. The output game will get _ramus.html at the end.
• make cyoa-graph : create organigram
• make cyoa-play : start the default browser and play the HTML file
• make cyoa-cs (or make cyoa-choicescript): convert your game to the ChoiceScript format, into the new folder your_game_choicescript. Beware, this command will delete and recreate a previous folder with this name, so if you intend to modify the renpy code, move this folder elsewhere.
• make cyoa-hyena : convert your game to the Hyena, format, under the name your_game_export.gamebook
• make cyoa-renpy : convert your game to the popular Renpy format, into a new folder your_game_renpy. Beware, this command will delete and recreate a previous folder with this name, so if you intend to modify the renpy code, move this folder elsewhere.
  • make cyoa-inform7 : convert your game into Inform 7 source code, with an .i7 extension.

• make cyoa-undum : convert your game into Undum format, into a new folder your_game_undum. Beware, this command will delete and recreate a previous folder with this name, so if you intend to modify the renpy code, move this folder elsewhere.
  
  note: in the case cyoa-graph is not working on windows, you can render the generated cyoa-game_graph.txt with online tools such as http://ashitani.jp/gv/
  By choosing to create games with textallion, in addition to the PDF, HTML and ePUB exports, you can also create games in those formats:

• Renpy is a popular format for creating visual novels. The export from textallion will recreate your paragraphs and your choices in the format used by renpy, generating a working folder containing everything you need to read later from renpy. You should then move that folder into renpy's workspace default to work further on this project (including addition of multimedia documents, images, sounds …). Please note that the command make cyoa-renpy will completely destroy the original folder and replace it with a new one. So if you intend to add new elements in the code, you can either change the makefile accordingly, or move the folder elsewhere as indicated above.
  To mean the end of a game, any occurrence of "THE END" will move the player to the end of the file, stopping the game. The inclusion of images will be converted to the renpy format, and on each page, the background image will overlap the images already posted. To hide the images properly, although this is not an obligation, it is advisable to add $ hidemypic ("my_image.jpg") at the end of the paragraph after the use of a given image.

• Ramus CYOA system, with a look similar to Undum, yet simpler to use.

• Hyena is the format used by the Project Aon (Lone Wolf free version). There is also an implementation to replay those games, with gamebook-engine

• Inform 7 is an interactive fiction system. It can create CYOA using the extension Adventure Book by Edward Griffiths. You must have installed it prior to use it.
  The output file will be yourgame.i7. Then convert it to zcode (.z5) using Inform7.
  You may have to tweak a bit the source before being able to compile it in Inform, for example remove the "Page0" lines. Texts such as "So it will lead you to the 14" will be converted to "So it will lead you to the ****" (four stars), you'll probably want to edit this as well (you can just replace it to …).

• Twee(code) / Twine is a format gamebook usable on the Internet, based on TiddlyWiki. `` make cyoa-twee`` will export to this format. (The version on the official site is buggy so we use a patched version). You can also import from twee into textallion in the case you want to design your game using Twine.