📗 Storyboard Your CYOA Game

📗 Storyboard Your CYOA Game 📗 Storyboard Your CYOA Game

Get your creative juices flowing by coming up with ideas for your stories.

Lesson Steps

Have students navigate to the Design Your Story section.
Students should have paper and pencils ready. Instruct them to come up with stories that have branching paths. They can refer to the tree diagram on their screen.
For each decision making part of their stories, students will create two options:
- A dead end (game over)
- A good choice that continues the story
If you'd like, you can print out our story code blocks for students to glue onto their papers. This will help them incorporate some code into their rough drafts. They can also simply write in IF/THEN statements instead.
Check for understanding and answer any questions they may have before moving on to the next section.

What's Storyboarding?

When designing a game, most designers will start out by getting the story written first. So the first thing we are going to do is write our story! Your Choose Your Own Adventure game can be about anything you want!

Choose Your Own Adventures are where the reader makes decisions on how the story progresses.

Does the main character open the box? Turn to page 37.
Or perhaps the box stays closed. In that case, turn to page 15.

Your story should have branching decisions so that the adventure can go in many different directions. You can have multiple different endings or options to go back to the start, like if your character meets his doom (a dead end) so you have to start the story over. The possibilities are endless!

Plan out your CYOA game by writing your story on a piece of paper or journal. You can use these optional printed code blocks (download here) or write IF/THEN statements to integrate some code in your rough draft.

I encourage you to get as creative as possible here – you can draw pictures as well. Let the only limit be your imagination!