Behind The Scenes

(Spoilers Below)

I was two hundred passages deep writing a different gamebook when I started on Dinosaur Planet.

I am a discovery writer. My process lets the book and the characters tell me where things are going, and revision is where things become more polished. The other gamebook had become too big and unwieldy. I decided to take a break and write something fun and simple. I combined my love of dinosaurs and science fiction into this pulpy sci-fi romp. The goal was simple; to finish writing a book.

The First Draft

To avoid the same issue, I set a limit of one hundred passages. With only a loose idea of the plot, I randomly numbered entries as I went. As I reached the final third of the book with only ten entries left, I let myself bump up to one hundred and thirty-five entries. This restriction helped me finish the first draft, after which I moved on to revisions.

The first draft had three different landing sites to start the adventure. I added a risky landing option to each of the branches, giving the player a choice of six landing spots overall, with some being much more dangerous than others. The middle section with the T.rex was also greatly improved – initially it boiled down to a choice of where to shoot it, whereas the final passages were a much more dynamic and varied conflict with the dinosaur.

Balancing Difficulty

It was always a goal to have strong replay value with many correct paths through the book. It’s difficult to count the paths exactly (some of them split or converge with each other), but there’s about seven different ways through the first part, then a further seven ways through the T.rex part. The whole structure converges with three distinct entry points into the T.rex encounter, where they roughly correspond with how difficult the earlier part of the book was. The most challenging first parts let you avoid the T.rex entirely, while the easiest paths encounter the T.rex in a more difficult scenario.

The encounter with the Vesper’s AI was extremely deadly in the first draft. I re-worked the AI to be more conversational, while still keeping her vaguely murderous bent, and this led to a new path to find the signal booster instead of the Vesper’s flight recorder. This new branch, with the Mothership Ending, helped give the final third a little more variety.

The Process of Editing

Editing interactive fiction is challenging in different ways; not only does everything have to work in each passage, but the passages leading into a passage and the ones it leads to have to feel good in each possible arrangement of scenes. You have to watch for repeated words and phrases at the end of one passage and the beginning of the next. Keeping track of words you use frequently becomes even more important. There were many editing passes where my playtesters and I identified frequent words and took a thesaurus to them.

The final round of editing came down to the wire. I had initially picked September 1st as my launch day, but when I realized August 27th is International Gamebook Day (celebrating the launch of ‘The Warlock of Firetop Mountain’), I decided to move my launch up by a few days. I was still tweaking passages right up until the moment I had to submit the final manuscript for approval to be published on Amazon.

Lessons Learned

I split the document far too early in the process. Right when I ordered my first preview copy I had a linked word doc for the e-book, an unlinked word doc with graphical headers for the print copy, and the mapped version of the text in Twine. Every time I changed a passage, I had to remember to change it in three places. In subsequent versions I’m waiting until far later in the process to split out into distinct versions.

I started numbering things far too early. Initially, when I thought I was doing one hundred entries, it made sense and worked nicely. Later, when the scope kept expanding, it became tremendously time-consuming to deal with the numbers. I tried not to have too many deaths too close to one another, tried not to have subsequent passages too close together, and that took a lot of juggling and shuffling during the writing process. Whenever a number changed, I had to ensure that every reference to that number also changed so none of the links were broken. My playtesters were key in finding these broken links.

My current works use placeholder numbers, in a rough sequence, and I’ll just use ‘find and replace’ to re-number them when I have all the passages written.