#check out ao3 user gifbot who did the doom thing

[themanwhowouldbefruit]

Oh my god, feel free to answer this or not, but, I just played your fic ? game ? And I am astounded? It's such a cool idea and so much could be expanded upon it in terms of interactive story telling. Would you consider making a tutorial or explaining how you did it? And also may I ask, why is it only for today? Is it because of the transnatural week ending or because of some AO3 limit? Sorry for the novel length ask, but I'm losing my mind over how cool your fic is!!!!!!!! <3

Hey! The game is up forever (hopefully), sorry for the confusion!!! I have no plans to take it down, the only urgency was getting it posted in time for transnaturalweek day 7. If it does for some unseen reason go down or the images do down just let me know! I have contingencies😇😇😇😇🔪

Yes I do want to make a tutorial at some point, it’s just kinda hard because I learned how to do the css in exactly one week, which was actually last week, and so like, in some ways I myself don’t fully understand how it works? It’s all a blur.

Basically the game is all workskin based, which is how ao3 lets you add css styling to your fics. css is basically this funky little language that says hey lets do a little container thingy here, we’re going to control everything inside this container, we’re gonna give it a name so we can summon it, hey let’s make it red, then let’s put a picture inside of it, so we can summon this red background box with picture inside whenever we want to see it. Um so basically you go to workskin editor and you write out the recipe for the container thingy with the dimensions, properties, ect. (In this case I made a container for each outfit variation that used each png as a background image)(so like 389) Then in the actual fic typing window, you have to summon the box like <div class="x0000"> everything else you want within the box goes here, like text and stuff </div>. Um....and you can have other little boxes inside that box? Like that was how I did the text bubbles, which were like <p class="left dean">Um….</p> for the talking bubble, the bubbles which I did not code myself and learned how to do from this guide. <-------- Um......that guide is probably a really good place for you to start honestly, it’s like a real tutorial which this is not.

Also on top of all this ao3 was giving me some fun little 500 errors which made things more difficult. Originally I was going to do this game as one workskin, one work, but whenever I pasted all the code into the skin editor it would just 500 error me, and so I tried like half the code.......a third of the code........eventually I found that one fifth of the code would go through and save and that’s why the game had to get chopped up in 5 different workskins/works.   

And I talked briefly with ao3 support about that, but they haven’t gotten back to me yet with a different solution. (Apparently it shouldn’t happen because the character limit for workskins is 500,000 which I didn’t come close to passing)(Sometimes your workskin code will 500 error if there’s something undoable in it? but i was able to get all my code saved, just in portions so.........) Um so I kind of want to wait and see if they do respond, just because it would make things soooooooo much easier for everyone if they were able to work with all the code at once instead of juggling it.

ALSO ALSO ALSO there’s a big part of this that isn’t coding based at all, and is just my batshit crazy um.........spreadsheets??? maps?? I don’t even know what to call them...can’t even take screenshots either cause they got stupid big so I’m just linking them.

Here’s the road mappy one??

Here’s the master list one?

Fully aware that these are batshit insane though! And probably just raise more questions than they answer! If you look at them you may notice that I lowkey invented this bullshit counting language to help myself understand and keep track of all the outfits and yeah it totally is complete and utter bullshit that makes no sense if you haven’t been dealing with it for a month. I literally have no idea how to explain that to people with a straight face and kind of want to go live in cave lol.

I guess overall disclaimer..........I went to art school and I am insane😍😍😍✌ I do want to see more interactive work and I do want to share what I learned but finding a way for me to make this accessible for other people is gonna take a hot minute.