Your vision left you the second the vortex pulled you in. In fact, aside from a sensation similar to when you lean too far back in a chair and suddenly realize you're about to fall, you didn't have any senses left at all. You were right in the middle of trying to figure out what just happened (and trying not to freak out) when, with another sensation, this one similar to getting punched in the stomach, you found yourself laying on your stomach on a hardwood floor. You try to move, but it feels like your arms and legs are asleep, so instead you focus on listening, and realize someone is jumping around you.
"Hah! It worked! It actually worked! Princess Celestia and Twilight Sparkle were right! I successfully pulled a human into Equestria! Hahahah!" You aren't familiar with the voice, and you force your head up just enough to get a good look at the source of the noise, not entirely sure if you heard everything right, or if your mind is just playing tricks on you. You open your eyes, and after a flash of light and color, everything regains focus. You see yourself staring at a cyan pony with a lyre cutie mark, and a huge grin on her face.
"Lyra? What?" You mumble, still heavily disoriented from the spell. As you regain feeling in your arms and legs, you slowly move to a sitting position, and you realize you just said something you shouldn't technically know. You begin to think of a way to counter the obvious questions, but to your surprise, she doesn't look suspicious. In fact, she only looks more excited, and begins laughing again.
"Hah! The knowledge spell worked too! It already knows my name!" Well, you certainly weren't expecting THAT. "You know about Twilight Sparkle, the Elements of Harmony, Discord, Princesses Celestia and Luna, and all sorts of other things too right?" You nod slowly, attempting to soak everything in as the unicorn nearly gives a squee of excitement.
"I can't believe all of this is actually happening! Twilight and I were supposed to do the spell together, but, well-" suddenly a large booming noise, like thunder, comes from outside, and for the first time since you've got here you see Lyra drop the grin, and look genuinely worried.
"THAT, is why Twilight couldn't help with this. Dreamweaver some how got wind of our plan and ambushed all of Ponyville. The Elements of Harmony are fighting him off right now, but they need your help. The Elements don't actually have their... Elements." Lyra explains, giving an annoyed glance at the ground as if bothered by her own phrasing, but you understand well enough, and get to your feet.
"Yeah! Good! You get up, I'll lead you outside. Watch your head. I can answer a few questions on the way to the door, but we really need to hurry!" You stand and realize you are only a few inches shorter than the ceiling, and idly note that you'll have to duck past every door between here and outside. You also notice something incredibly strange...
You're wearing a different set of clothes.
Instead of your usual attire, you find yourself wearing a purple t-shirt the same color as Rarity's hair, and white pants the same color as Rarity's coat. Considering the colors and the fact that the clothes fit exactly how you'd like them to, it's easy to tell who made them. After the pants you see a pair of black boots, made of some material that feels both incredibly durable and comfortable. If you wore glasses or contacts before coming here, then you find that you no longer seem to need them. You also notice what you guess is the summoning circle used in whatever spell brought you here, and also several sets of clothes just like the ones you are wearing, but in different sizes, scattered all over the floor among stacks of open and closed books.
You process all of this in a few seconds, and hear another boom coming from being you. You turn and see a large window, and while your vision is blurred by the light rain, you see the Mane Six in the distance, surrounding a cloaked unicorn.
"Come on!" Lyra says, rushing out the room and turning left.
What's your plan?
-Ask Questions-
Get some knowledge while rushing to help the Mane six.
-Demand Answers-
The Mane Six can hold their own for a bit longer, but you REALLY need to figure some stuff out before you can decide what to do, or even what you CAN do.
-Demand To Be Sent Back Home-
Someone else can save the day. You've got too much going on at home to be here right now, and you aren't entirely sure you're the right one for the job.
-Rush Outside-
Questions can wait, the Mane Six need you NOW.
-Jump Out The Window- Wait, seriously?!
It'll get you outside even faster, and you THINK this room is on the first floor. MAYBE second.
Well, here goes nothing!
2630962
Quick question, Is there any chance at all of getting our original set of cloths back in the story?
2630962
Also, i like the idea of this story and can't wait to see it progress
2631150
Not really, at least, not until the end. I just wanted to make sure that the reader would understand they don't have any items or anything from their own world with them, and giving them a different set of clothes seemed like a good way to get the point across of there being no chance for a difference in the adventure because of what you in particular have a habit of wearing regularly or carrying around with you a lot. Diversity is something I really look for when thinking of Choose Your Own Adventure novels, so I'm trying to add all sorts of options for you to do in the story, and a lot of challenges will have multiple ways of solving them depending on the choices that led you there, but I needed to at least get a basic template to work with from the beginning, so I made up the clothes thing.
If it helps though, you still have underwear and socks and such, I'm just choosing not to mention that fact in particular in the actual story, cuz I couldn't find a non awkward way of fitting it in.
I'm honestly making this whole thing up as I go.
2631178
well thanks, that actually makes sense, thanks for taking the time to answer this and good luck with the story, i can't wait to see where this goes.
I was planning to do a game thing as well, but it would be hard to pull off.
Suggestions: COLOR CODE YOUR NEXT ACTION. I've thought of how to tackle 1000 chapters, one for each action, and the answer was to color code them and put them in one chapter. Then all we ponies need to do is read that section, and go on from there. I might even suggest linking different chapters. E.g. Chapter 5's Action 1 leads to Chapter 8, whereas Action 2 leads to 9, then 8 etc.
Also, try centering the action plan, and make it more appealing. Formatting is crucial in this, as I don't want to be skimping past the important things. Bold and underline objects and stuff, and perhaps even italicise certain features. It would make playing this more exciting XD
Also, please include dead ends and multiple endings
2631168 Thank you very much! Thanks for reading it!
2631188 Thank you again! I'm more than happy to answer any questions, I need to think about this in as many different ways as possible to get a handle on what the heck I'm going to do with it. I'm not going to lie, I haven't even planned out all directions the beginning choices will go in. My brain's stuck thinking mostly of the beginning-middle and ending-middle parts right now.
I like this idea. It's something that there definitely should be more of but unfortunately isn't
2631192 Yes the game thing is VERY hard to pull off, I've been thinking about this well before I finished watching season two, but I kept putting it off and finally decided either I do a quick run, make some mistakes, and fix this later on if I make any major game mechanic or story line problems, or I over think it and end up never making it at all, so this is me just charging forward and hoping I'm able to pull this off. I'll be using this emoticon a lot I think.
I'm a little confused what you mean by color coding the chapters. I'm thinking you mean like, each choice branches off to a different color, then you scroll down to that color, and that will offer choices that are also in a different set of colors, so on and so forth? I'll admit that sounds pretty cool, but I don't know how to color code things beyond the basic ones the text editor gives you, and that honestly sounds like a lot of scrolling work for readers. Course, I think there's a way to get links to lead to other areas of a page, if I could use that, it'd be perfect for auto scrolling, but I really wanted to avoid people accidentally running into spoilers. The only real system I have going on right now is that each set of choices is a number, and each choice from there is . something of that.
Jumping out of the window is 1.1, and the choice after that is 2.1, asking questions is 1.2, and one of the questions will be 2.2, and another will be 2.3. OR I could stack the point system to make sense. Jumping is 1, the choice after that is either 1.1 or 1.2. asking questions is 2, and the questions will lead to 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and whatever happens after you ask a question will be 2.1.1, or 2.2.1, or 2.1.2 and so on and so forth, but that's also really complicated...
BLARG THIS IS DIFFICULT.
I'll try getting a consistent and interesting system for decision making. Centering and having the choices bolded and underlined sound good.
I'll be sure to include bad endings and multiple major endings where you end up having saved or doomed Equestria and what you do with the rest of your life. One thing I'm a major of is writing major endings for everything. There was a PS2 game I played where very time you failed a level, depending on what level it was and how exactly you failed, you'd get a few paragraphs on how the rest of the world eventually met its end and what happened to your allies and enemies, it was great.
One thing I'm trying to work on more than different endings, is different ways to reach the same path, and different ways the major part of the game can go down. I'm still clueless how to write the whole direction of you being evil though.
2631241 Honestly if you know of any MLP CYOA fanfics, HiE or not, let me know. I've been looking for them, but the only two I ever found were the two posted on Equestria Daily, and they were both kind of joke fanfics.
I mean, in one, you ran around in your boxers and could hit on Princess Celestia (and get turned to stone) or Princess Luna (and die) and other silly stuff.
The second one was a bit better, with you helping save the Mane Five from Discord's control again (Twilight was trapped by a barrier) but it also involved a lot of jokes and ridiculousness.
They first story was good in its own way (didn't care for it much), and the second story was much better, but still too short and too ridiculous for my taste. I was always wanting an actual, SERIOUS CYOA story, and after reading those two, decided to begin work on my own while looking for one to read.
I'm not gonna lie to you man. You are in for a world of hurt with this type of "choose your own adventure" storytelling. Each choice branching out towards multiple outcomes and each outcome comes with a choice that may or may not be affected by a statistic. I have attempted this feat before and must let you know that It really isn't easy. Still I commend you for attempting this. Go forth brave writer. GOD SPEED.
BTW. If you need support, I'd be happy to provide it. Feel free to PM me about it.
2631275 its simple
[.color=red][./color]
^ you see that? Now replace the word red with html color codes, which can be easily googled. Just google html color codes, and replace the word red with the code (e.g. #009900) and viola!, rainbow coloured text, here I come.
Yea, use the color to seperate branching
2631441
What the heck, I tried that before and it didn't work at all!
Eh, oh well. Thanks for the info, I might give it a shot later, but I'm kind of leaning away from colored archives of stuff for now, primarily because I'd end up trying a ton for one chapter and wouldn't really know when to disconnect it from one chapter to the next. Maybe I'll make an index thing for it though that connects to other chapters, but man that also sounds like a lot of extra work...
I dunno, I'm tired and lazy right now, I really appreciate your advice, and I'll try to seriously experiment with it after a good night's rest. For now I'm going to wrap up a few of the first choice branches, format the choices a bit better, and hit the hay.
2631364
Thanks a ton for offering your help. I'm always open to ideas on how to get this thing to work (even if I might be too tired right now to use any of them). I'm aware how difficult this is going to be (though perhaps I'm overestimating how willing I am to go through with this) but I'm going to try my best and with any luck I'll get something done. If all else fails, and if you're willing, maybe I'll divide parts of the challenges and let you and others write some of them, but I'm not sure how willing I am to not have full control of the story. I kind of have control issues with things.
I'm hoping to have the first batch of choices done by tomorrow, which is good, considering none of them have more than like, 250 words.
2630962
. . . Oh dear lord, you're trying to pull off a Visual Novel styled Fanfic.
Best of luck to you chap.