Building a Traditional CYOA Experience for Digital Formats

For the past few months, I’ve been working on a project that aims to recreate the feel of a traditional Choose Your Own Adventure book—while making it fully compatible with digital reading formats like EPUB and PDF. I wanted to preserve the classic book-style experience, so I intentionally avoided HTML-based frameworks and interactive engines. Everything had to function within fixed-text formats while still offering meaningful branching paths.

This meant a huge amount of logic design, coding, and testing behind the scenes. Because the text can’t be programmatically altered once exported, every branch had to be carefully planned:

• Scenes that converge from multiple paths still needed to make sense narratively.

• Branches had to remain fun and surprising without breaking continuity.

• The structure had to be readable, replayable, and stable across different ebook readers.

I created a custom branching system that allowed me to track and test all the scene connections, and I spent a lot of time refining it until the playthrough felt smooth and coherent. I’ll be sharing an image of the branching structure in this dev log so you can get a look at how everything fits together behind the scenes.

If you're interested, you can download the book for free in whichever format suits you best. I’d love to hear your thoughts—feedback, comments, questions, anything is welcome. Thanks in advance!