Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' written in Emacs Org Mode

(tendollaradventure.com)

132 points | by dskhatri 16 hours ago ago

18 comments

  • dvh 5 hours ago

    Do NOT ever use that 4 word description of the genre nor the well know 4 letter acronym. Trademark owner goes VERY AGGRESSIVELY after both. Erase every mention of it everywhere, delete repo and create new one. Replace it with something like

    - Interactive Story - Branching Narrative - Pick Your Path - Create Your Own Quest - Personalized Plotline - Dynamic Storytelling

    Stop whatever you are doing and do it NOW!

    I no longer do game dev but I'm already sweating.

  • laurentlb 15 hours ago

    Interesting project!

    When I looked into CYOA, I opted for Ink. It's using a nice text-based language, a bit like markdown. It worked well for me, and I think it's a good option if you want to use a text editor.

    I wrote about my experiments here: https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/my-adventures-with-narrative...

    • gxd an hour ago

      I'm close to finishing a commercial interactive story with choices using Ink: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

    • dskhatri 14 hours ago

      Ink looks iteresting! Twinery provides a nice visual editor for the passages and branches which I found appealing. Ultimately, I used Mermaid to create visual snapshots of the story which were useful when editing the physical book.

  • a_e_k 11 hours ago

    Neat! IF-wise, there's also

    M-x dunnet

    which has shipped with GNU Emacs since 1994.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunnet_(video_game)

  • Loic 8 hours ago

    Sorry to hijack a bit the thread. I have been using Emacs for the past 20+ years. Before I could live in Emacs, now, I find it harder (software forced on me by external customers, AI tools, ...).

    I try everywhere I can to install an Emacs mode for code/text navigation. But they tend to be inconsistent and for some software, it is simply not possible.

    Do you have good resources to help there (running Linux/Gnome)? Do you keep the faith or switched "out"?

    • internet_points 7 hours ago

      Install the latest emacs release and you will be able to do `M-x eglot` – this by default knows about language servers for many programming languages, so if you e.g. do this while in a C++ file in some project, it will start clang or ccls (whatever's in PATH); the language server will then be active for all files in that project and you can use `M-.` (xref-find-definitions), `M-,` (xref-go-back), `M-?` (xref-find-references). Try also `M-x eglot-code-actions` on a symbol to see all available actions (renaming, add imports, refactoring etc.; what you get here depends on the language server).

      I also use this plugin https://github.com/minad/consult which has the command `consult-ripgrep`, very useful for e.g. looking up all occurrences of the symbol at point (and text navigation across multiple files).

      For "AI", start with https://github.com/karthink/gptel/ (its README lists alternative packages, as you can see there is no lack of llm support in emacs, both chat, "agents" and more specific use-cases)

      • mijoharas 4 hours ago

        To add to this, consult works great with embark, and orderless, which make for a wonderful emacs experience.

        Also, on the llm point even though I know elisp, and use emacs heavily, they can be great for creating little personal commands that just make things a little nicer to use (lowering the barrier of "I'll write a command for this" from 15 minutes to 2 minutes is huge and means I can be bothered to do it for more marginal things which makes the editor even more pleasant to use).

    • azaras 7 hours ago

      Regarding AI, I don't have a replacement, but for code/text navigation, eglot is a good option.

      I think that the AI CLI agents are the response for AI, but for now, I am opening VSCode with an Emacs extension and some keybinding changes.

  • lordgrenville 6 hours ago

    I thought this was going to be a game engine written in Emacs Lisp :) but this is still cool. Congrats!

  • quibono 3 hours ago

    I'm torn on the use of AI generated images. I want to like them but they are distracting...

    Anyway, nice work!

  • chrisweekly 15 hours ago

    This is awesome! Thank you for sharing the backstory, and open-sourcing the tools you built. THIS is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to HN more often than I should.

  • everybodyknows 11 hours ago

    Bug report for https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/

    Daphne's eyes are brown, except in the supermarket scene, where they're grey.

    How were the images produced?

    • dskhatri 9 hours ago

      Thanks! The story images were made in Google Whisk. The tool allows you to generate a character and then apply the character to a scene separately defined. While more advanced than other image generation platforms, it isn't perfect and the images required lots of editing in GIMP. The vectors (achievement stickers, play cash) were made in Inkscape.

  • kleiba 5 hours ago

    Were the illustrations generated with Twinery? How do you guarantee consistency of the generated characters across multiple drawings?

  • babuloseo 10 hours ago

    Ai slop for art, people really need to stop buying these products. Atleast publicize or disclosed you used ai for the art.