Decisions relating to my CYOA (2/12/2014)

* As next week will be our five minute presentations, I decided to further work on mine today, making sure to list my ideas, why I chose the one I did, a mood board for reference and a story board and game play to show how the game would play .

Even though other colleagues of mine were writing down the whole story board with multiple quick/simple choices, I decided to focus on just the first act with bigger more detailed decisions so as to make sure it was clearer than an overly cramped one. Therefore, I plan to write the second and third acts separately as each one will take the player to completely different areas depending on their previous choices.

Coming up with the first act, I decided to ease the player into the game and the amount of choices they can make at one time so as to not throw too much at them e.g. from my experience with nearly every open world game I find that the player is thrown into the world too soon. Therefore, the first three pages are linear until a decision has to be made. These decisions then link back to one another and lead to another linear path for narrative purposes before giving the player a two choice decision followed by a three choice decision that will determine the rest of the player's journey.

* Since I still don't think that 4000 words is enough to even complete my first act, I asked my lecturer if I could write as much as I felt I needed to for my first act and then show him what I had done. That way he could look over the rough demo version of my game and decide if it is too much or not. Overall, I'm aiming for roughly 8000.

* Although I love the story I have chosen e.g. the underwater setting, I felt today that my CYOA book would seem too simple as all you do is turn pages and make choices. Granted I wanted this as it works really well in the 'Star Wars' adventure books that I am currently reading since they are also cinematic in their description. However, although the story didn't grab me the actual starting choice of class that determined your abilities and equipment from my Call of Cthullu esk CYOA book did. Thus, I decided to include classes in my current CYOA book so as to make it more varied.
These classes include...

• A security officer who is tough, streetwise and has a gun.
• A mechanic who can repair things and is tech smart. 
• And finally a scientist who can treat injuries and is environmentally smart e.g. knows about underwater life and its inhabitants.