Project Description
Background
“Choose Your Own Adventure” is a series of children’s “gamebooks” where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character’s actions and the plot’s outcome. The series was based upon a concept created by Edward Packard and then published by Bantam Books. The book series was one of the most popular children’s series during the 1980s and 1990s, selling more than 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998.
Originally created for 7- to 14-year-olds, the books are written in the second person. The protagonist—that is, the reader—takes on a role relevant to the adventure, such as a private investigator, mountain climber, race car driver, doctor, or spy. Certain books in the series allow readers choice of who to take the role of, for example, in an adventure book, readers may be prompted to choose between a climber, a hiker, or a traveler.
The stories are formatted so that, after a few pages of reading, the protagonist faces two or three options, each of which leads to further pages and further options, and so on until they arrive at one of the many story endings. The number of endings varies from as many as 44 in the early titles to as few as 7 in later adventures. Likewise, there is no clear pattern among the various titles regarding the number of pages per ending, the ratio of good to bad endings, or the reader’s progression backwards and forwards through the pages of the book. This allows for a realistic sense of unpredictability, and leads to the possibility of repeat readings, which is one of the distinguishing features of the books.
Your Task
In this project, you are going to create your own “choose your own adventure” story by wielding the power of the Python programming language! The requirements are simple: use Python text strings, user input, and branching if-elif-else conditionals to create a spooky Halloween story. You will need to nest conditionals within other conditionals, and when you get to the end of one of your possible story endings, you will need to insert the quit( ) function to stop the code in your project. You should create at least 6 different endings, but you can also add more and make your story as intricate as you’d like. Be creative and have fun!
