Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Podcast! Opinions please!

Hey everyone! Just found this forum because I’m after opinions on a podcast I’ve developed. Remember those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books from the 90s? Well I loved them, I loved being a part of what happens. So I thought, podcasting is halfway between games and reading, why not try to gameify it?

So I made this story. I did voice acting, sound effects and music. This was actually a final project for my sound degree. But anyway - I’ve lost objectivity. I don’t know if this is any good or not. I really don’t. Could you please give me your ideas and opinions? If it’s received well I think I may finish the story (it’s at 60% done right now) and then create a kickstarter campaign for around $1,500 per 60 minute weekly story. That sounds like a lot for one podcast, but this takes a LOT of time to do everything myself - so much so that I probably wouldn’t be able to work full time.

SO, please have a listen if you can and give me any and all thoughts. Thank you!

soundcloud.com/user-922736522/prologue-final

Small, third person wiki:
honor-among-thieves.wikia.com/wi … ieves_Wiki

I listened to the first minute or so just wondering how this worked, and it sounds very well produced!

Is the idea that there are links below for the choices you make to take you to the next correct sound clip?

FYI, “Choose Your Own Adventure” is a registered trademark of ChooseCo, and they do enforce their mark. I would not recommend calling this product “Choose Your Own Adventure.”

Stupid trade marks. A company here on Quebec just made a company called Uber, and Google stole our number! haha. Wizards thinks they own basic statistical math, what next!

Name ideas…

Adventure Books
Adventure Book
Quest Paths
Quest Book
Choose Your Own Quest
Adventure Paths
Destiny Books
Weavers - like tale weavers.

Lol, we just released a new weaver today!

You can get pretty close to it, though. The recent Gravity Falls one was “A Select-Your-Own Choose-venture”, and Ryan North’s Shakespeare books are “Chooseable-Path Adventures”. So as long as you don’t use the exact words, even obvious allusions are a-OK!

HanonO, thank you! I’m a composer and sound designer, dabbling in voice acting. I wanted to do something where I didn’t have to rely on anyone else to get the project done, something I could just smash out all by myself. Thank you for the notes on the production value.

That is how it works - despite soundclouds incredibly annoying autoplay, I’m trying to have that be the main platform. Another option is to release it as a free podcast, where you listen to the intro and then choose your favourite character, and the story you hear will follow choices they would make.

Is it confusing, the soundcloud way? It’s slightly more interactive that way but also more of a pain in the butt, and less consumable-on-the-go like a podcast.

dfabulich and Jeremy - THANK YOU! I didn’t know that! I’ll be changing it to something similar, I like the Adventure Paths and Weavers too. It’s like a double meaning - weaving a tale and weaving through obstacles by making choices.

Thanks for the feedback guys!!

One other way you could do it (with full understanding I know just enough about sound and website to be dangerous…) is you could make a website with the link structure of your story and clickable choices, then use javascript controls to play audio on each one. The pages could be just the choices, or imagery, or a readable transcript of the audio.

This may even be creatable with Twine, although I’m not sure how easy it is to run script off of a page.

My Storynexus game FINAL GIRL did this where the sound effects were streamed from the web with controls that someone showed me how to use added to the readable text on each page. So when you got into the canoe, that text also called the sound of water.

Trapezoid implemented a simple CYOA song using YouTube, that might be a way to go: youtube.com/watch?v=tUIu6_eTkjY

You might also want to look at John Robertson’s The Dark Room which is a choice based game done entirely on YouTube:

http://www.thejohnrobertson.com/thedarkroom/

I too would think youtube would be better to implement and possibly provide a bigger audience than soundcloud as well.

Wow, that’s nice. I love it.

As an addition to this, since replying previously I purchased AXMA StoryMaker, and one of the options for game type when you create a new game is “Interactive Audiobook”. ASM makes multimedia pretty easy, but I’m not quite sure what exactly this does to help. It might be stripping away the animated windows and other visuals so screen readers have a better time? Not sure. I’ll have to ask the developers.

But I thought this was cool. Within ASM every passage can change the repeating background music, which could also be narration, and sounds are separate entities that play once.