Choose your own adventure ...phone call.

[Owen]

After having a chat with James (GeeksAreForLife, weird how I remember handles better than names) last week, I've had a bit of an idea of something fun we could do with the VoIP phone system (FreePBX), but I'll need a bit of help.

The idea:

You, hopefully, remember those 'choose your own adventure' books where you could turn to a certain page to steer the story in a particular direction?  (A bit like old textual computer games.)  Well, we could do that with a bunch of IVR's (interactive voice recordings) on the phone system.

Where I'd need the help:

1) I'm not super creative with words, so I could do with some help writing up a script.

2) Only one voice would be well boring. Also with a couple of different people doing a couple of different voices this could get pretty cool pretty quickly!

I could then tie it to a normal, external, Nottingham based number for people to ring and take part in.

What do you think?

Owen

[Kate Bolin]

I've always wanted to write a CYOA.

I'm in.

Owen

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Kate Bolin
www.katebolin.com

[Owen]

Awesome!

I'll start looking around for some story line inspiration.  Maybe something based on Bill & Ted, or Doctor Who (given the telephone theme)?  (Although my first thought was much more D&D than either of those.)

[Matthew Gates]

I remember the names of people's dogs and not the people's names...
Names are problematic.

<:3⁐)---

[Matthew Gates]

The CYOA thing is totally doable in Asterisk without any coding, but
with some effort. If you're strapped for ideas, how about taking a
classic like Deathtrap Dungeon, and implementing it word-for-word as
an Asterisk thing?

The combat system would need some coding as it requires dice rolls and
hit points to be tracked, but I figure it's pretty simple.

Re-implementing a classic would be a good way to focus on the
mechanism without having to worry about the creative side just to get
the functionality... once done making an original would be
technically simpler.

Mouse

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<:3⁐)---

[Owen]

I was thinking of keeping it simple with straight CYOA style 'press 1 to go left', '2 to go right' options to start.  That should be easy enough, although it'll require quite a few IVR's linked up in the right order.  Maybe we could through in some maths equations for people to make the path selection?

The dice rolling idea sounds interesting for a 2nd adventure or expansion once the first one is done. Eventually we could use that to launch one of our journeys at random.

Whatever we do there are going to be a fair few IVR's, so my plan was to draw up an accompanying flow diagram so we can keep the admin/expansion of it simple.

[Kate Bolin]

Since it's a payphone, why not a total noir reporter/private detective sort of shindig?

Oooh, wait. Let's get all Nigel Kneale Quatermass on this, all ancient aliens and ley lines and creeping dread...

Sent via the power of the FUTURE. Or a tablet. Whatever.

[Owen]

It doesn't have to be via the pay phone.

We can use an external number, for free, so anyone can take part.

[Kate Bolin]

Whatever we decide plotwise, we can script it out on Inklewriter so that we have it planned out nicely before we program it in:

http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/

--

Kate Bolin
www.katebolin.com

[Matthew Gates]

The dice rolling stuff would be for combat. IIRC the books would
usually offer an option fight a monster or try to flee. If a fight
happened, there was a simple combat system which required the rolling
of dice, and you had some number of hit points which you tracked in a
page at the front of the book. The "dice" would be for such a combat
system.

I once wrote a Perl program to read a text file containing a simple
markup of a CYOA, and output a document with the page numbers
populated. Writing something like that which output files for making
the IVR graph seems possible - assuming the IVR setup doesn't need to
be done through some clunky GUI. It would make authorship and
maintenance of a CYOA much easier - the source document and program to
generate the IVRs from it could be tracked with git or similar.

Mouse

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<:3⁐)---

[Johanna Sharland]

I've got a few different voices for different characters.  Let me know. 

[Owen Ballentine]

I've got the very beginnings of the COYA connected to 01157 010 322.

It's literally just two choices that point to each other for the time being as a place holder.

Has anyone got any ideas for a script for this?  If not, I'm thinking of putting together a simple 3 x 3 grid style "dungeon" where the options are generally one of forward, back, left or right with some rooms having all 4, and others having less, to create a bit of a maze.

As far as recordings go, we can either upload them or ring in on an internal extension (there's two phones in the blue room connected to it, or I can set up an extension that you can connect to with something like Zoiper (Computer or Smartphone)).  If you're using an internal extension one of the FreePBX admins will need to put your extension number in, then you dial *77 and record what you want.  Once you're finished the FreePBX admins give it a name and save it.

There's a note on the System Recordings page that says this:

Note that if you're using .wav, (eg, recorded with Microsoft Recorder) the file must be PCM Encoded, 16 Bits, at 8000Hz

So yeah.  It's up and ready for interesting, creative things to be done with it.  Ideas are very welcome!

Ta,

Owen

[Kaneda]

There has to be a "you have been eaten by a grue" endpoint somewhere.
Can the system be programmed to hang up after reading certain options like that?

I'd like to get involved with this.

[Owen]

Yep.

I'm in the space at the minute if you are and want to chat about it.