Introduction¶

Hello, and welcome to the Interactive CYOA Creator Tutorial!

If you would like to jump straight into the tutorial, press the button below.

Otherwise, I'll be doing some advance discussion on the Interactive CYOA Creator and this tutorial in the rest of this preface.

Jump to the Tutorial

Rationale¶

The reason I created this tutorial to start with is due to the amount of questions I would see in the r/InteractiveCYOA subreddit asking "How do I do X?" and "Why isn't Y working?", and so on. I decided to create a single, localized repository of information containing all there is to know about the ICC, so that nobody would ever reasonably need to ask for help 99% of the time, should they have read this tutorial.

Background¶

I had first began planning this tutorial back in late March of 2023 in a Google Doc, where I planned to release video tutorials on YouTube. Eventually though, I had forgotten about the plan and went about my life.

Suddenly though, in Mid-June that year, I remembered about the tutorials. I decided to actually try to create it^(archive) when I was making a CYOA wiki on Miraheze, before Miraheze said they were going to shut down. They didn't end up shutting down, of course, but I quickly realized I couldn't rely on something so volatile as a donation-reliant infrastructure, and decided to write this tutorial in Markdown and host it on GitHub instead.

Clarity¶

I have endeavoured to make this tutorial as straightforward to follow as possible, and to that end most examples have a gif, image, or video accompanying the text in order to more properly explain how the creator works.

If you want to link someone to a specific section/heading, simply hover over the title, and a pilcrow symbol should appear (¶). If you press that, it will update the URL in the URL bar, and if you send that to someone, it will automatically send them to that section should they visit the link.

Alternatively (and if your screen is wide enough) you can use the Table of Contents menu on the right-hand side. Simply pressing on the section that you wish to link to will update the URL.

Searching¶

If you are looking for a specific piece of information and not the tutorial in its entirety, then there are four ways to look for the information:

If you are looking on how to achieve something, check the Reference.
If you are looking on how to fix a bug, check the Troubleshooting page.
If you can't find it on either of those two, or if you're looking for anything else, you can try the search bar in the top right. This will search through the whole project. Alternatively, just press S or F and it will open the search bar automatically.
If you still couldn't find what you were looking for, chances are that it is not in this tutorial. Please comment below or reply to the Reddit thread about what is missing.

Limitations¶

The ICC is an incredible tool which has vastly improved the quality of Interactive CYOAs. However, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that it too has limitations:

The Creator is no longer being actively maintained. It was last updated on 28 February 2021. This means no new features are likely to be added, no bugs will be fixed, and one far off day, the program may no longer be compatible with our current technologies.
The project is not open-source. This ties into the first point, being that if it were open-source, the community could fork the repository, and continue to develop it, adding new features and fixing bugs. As it is not, our only options are to create a new one (unlikely any time soon) or to continue to use this tool.
A lot of functionality that users desire (such as text input!) is not and will never be added due to the above.

Glossary¶

Many terms may produce confusion, so we'll define them here:

Object – Also known as a "Choice", they are what players select.
object – Any distinct entity made with the Interactive CYOA Creator, such as a Row, Choice/Object, Point, etc.
- To differentiate between generic objects and choice objects, choice objects will always be spelt with a capital letter—Objects—or be referred to as Choices.
ICC – The Interactive CYOA Creator.
IntCyoaCreator – Another name for the Interactive CYOA Creator.
Creator – The Interactive CYOA Creator. Always with an uppercase letter.
creator – Any person who creates. Always with a lowercase letter.
ICT – Interactive CYOA Tutorial. Used to refer to this tutorial in the GitHub release page, but can also refer to any ICYOA tutorial.
ICCT – Interactive CYOA Creator Tutorial. Used to refer to this tutorial, but can refer to any tutorial for the ICC specifically (as opposed to other interactive formats).

Conclusion¶

With all that said, I hope you enjoy and learn something new from this tutorial. Good luck and have fun!