Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' written in Emacs Org Mode

155 points

a year ago

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

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