Choose your own adventure

Choose Your Own Adventure is (was?) a series of books intended for children where as you read you would occasionally be given options about how you want to proceed. For instance, you might read about a boy walking in a cave when he stumbles across a dark passage or a ladder leading to an upper level and the reader will be presented with two options like:

• Turn to page 44 to go up the ladder.
• Turn to page 87 to venture down the dark passage.

The goal of this exercise is to recreate this experience via a web application where each page will be a portion of the story, and at the end of every page the user will be given a series of options to choose from (or be told that they have reached the end of that particular story arc).

Stories will be provided via a JSON file with the following format:

{
  // Each story arc will have a unique key that represents
  // the name of that particular arc.
  "story-arc": {
    "title": "A title for that story arc. Think of it like a chapter title.",
    "story": [
      "A series of paragraphs, each represented as a string in a slice.",
      "This is a new paragraph in this particular story arc."
    ],
    // Options will be empty if it is the end of that
    // particular story arc. Otherwise it will have one or
    // more JSON objects that represent an "option" that the
    // reader has at the end of a story arc.
    "options": [
      {
        "text": "the text to render for this option. eg 'venture down the dark passage'",
        "arc": "the name of the story arc to navigate to. This will match the story-arc key at the very root of the JSON document"
      }
    ]
  },
  ...
}

See gopher.json for a real example of a JSON story. I find that seeing the real JSON file really helps answer any confusion or questions about the JSON format.

Ussage

To view the help:

go run ./cmd/cyaoweb/main.go --help

To run the cyoa with the default settings, run:

go run ./cmd/cyaoweb/main.go

The original idea is taken from https://github.com/gophercises/cyoa