For over a year now I wanted to create a text adventure on Hive using a series of posts. Each post has one or more options for the reader to choose from. Sometimes the story would branch off and other times it would come back together again. With a couple of different possible endings included.

The starting point for Forbidden Lockbox.

When I was growing up I use to read a few interactive fiction books. While the genre has gone by a few different names over the years many of them becoming trademarked. With the trademark holders keeping a tight thumb on things so they don’t become household names. So I can’t exactly use the wording for the type of writing that many would instantly recognize what it is.

This was a project I would pick up from time to time and then put down again. This kind of writing is not what I normally would do so it takes a lot longer to work things out. I also could not quite decide how far I wanted to take things.

The other part is trying to work out how to organize such a thing in the first place. In the past, I have used ChoiceScript to write a multiple-choice format story in a special language that I could then run on a website like ITCH or the developer of the program's website. With the way the license is for that program, I decided not to go that route this time around.

Besides I wanted to do it in posts on Hive. Thankfully over the years, I’ve learned a few tricks on PeakD that came quite in handy for this project. Even more so since PeakD keeps adding quite helpful features for content creators and a project like this.

One of the biggest was the ability to create and work on drafts. This allowed me to build things out in a way and go back to change them when needed. When you have something that branches and is broken out over dozens of posts it’s quite hard to just keep it all in a single document without getting lost in it.

Another big helper was being able to get the URL or set one before making the post. As long as I did not mess up and create more than one post or forget to set it I should not have any issues. This would allow me to just copy and paste the URL it auto-created for each post instead of having to write them out by hand.

This also meant that the story could be posted in any order I wanted. I would not have to make a post. Get the URL and then go back and edit where I would need for different options as I went along.

This sort of thing is best to view on PeakD on @Forbiddenlockbox. Since PeakD also has the option to add in post preview description. I could take advantage of that feature as well.

Overall this project comes to about 8k words between all the different options of 34 posts that make up the story. That is quite short for this genre. I also needed to keep it reasonable since this is not a book. A project like this can easily get lost after the first few hours of being posted.

Perhaps in the future, I’ll create another one of these. I have learned a lot from this project that would make it easier to make another one in the future.

As the reader goes through the story they may sometimes find a content clue or even red herrings in an attempt to sway their decision-making in which option to select to move forward in the story. Along the way, there are several deaths and alternative endings to find.

The starting point for Forbidden Lockbox.

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The content was written by @Enjar about Forbidden Lockbox.