[HN Gopher] Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Written in Em...
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Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Written in Emacs Org Mode
I authored and developed an interactive children's book about
entrepreneurship and money management. The journey started with
Twinery, the open-source tool for making interactive fiction,
discovered right here on HN. The tool kindled memories of reading
CYOA style books when I was a kid, and I thought the format would
be awesome for writing a story my kids could follow along,
incorporating play money to learn about transactions as they
occurred in the story. Twinery is a fantastic tool, and I used it
to layout the story map. I really wanted to write the content of
the story in Emacs and Org Mode however. Thankfully, Twinery
provided the ability to write custom Story Formats that defined how
a story was exported. I wrote a Story Format called Twiorg that
would export the Twinery file to an Org file and then a Org export
backend (ox-twee) to do the reverse. With these tools, I could go
back and forth between Emacs and Twinery for authoring the story.
The project snowballed and I ended up with the book in digital and
physical book formats. The Web Book is created using another Org
export backend. Ten Dollar Adventure:
https://tendollaradventure.com Sample the Web Book (one complete
storyline/adventure): https://tendollaradventure.com/sample/ I
couldn't muster the effort to write a special org export backend
for the physical books unfortunately and used a commercial editor
to format these. Twiorg: https://github.com/danishec/twiorg ox-
twee: https://github.com/danishec/ox-twee Previous HN post on
writing the transaction logic using an LLM in Emacs:
https://blog.tendollaradventure.com/automating-story-logic-w...
Twinery 2: <https://twinery.org/> and discussion on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32788965
Author : dskhatri
Score : 19 points
Date : 2025-07-16 21:58 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tendollaradventure.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tendollaradventure.com)
| laurentlb wrote:
| Interesting project!
|
| When I looked into CYOA, I opted for Ink. It's using a nice text-
| based language, a bit like markdown. It worked well for me, and I
| think it's a good option if you want to use a text editor.
|
| I wrote about my experiments here: https://laurent.le-
| brun.eu/blog/my-adventures-with-narrative...
| chrisweekly wrote:
| This is awesome! Thank you for sharing the backstory, and open-
| sourcing the tools you built. THIS is the kind of thing that
| keeps me coming back to HN more often than I should.
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