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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/47021
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Suppose I would like to create a text adventure game, but my imagination is not sufficient for creating a whole game. But there are fiction books (in the public domain) that are very imaginative and could potentially make a great game. The main problem is that, a standard fiction book is sequential, while in a game there are many branches. Even if I have, say, only 10 branches, I still have to write 9 of these on my own.

Is there a process that can make this easier? A structured procedure by which I can work, that can help me convert a novel to a text adventure, with minimal need to use my "rusty" imagination?

I looked around the web and found some links that apparently discuss this topic, but with few details:

- [Five tips for turning a book into an interactive game](https://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/five-tips-turning-book-interactive-game-514791) - mainly discusses what should be in a book in order to be able to make a game out of it, namely: scalability, strong characters, first-person narrative, and genre. But, it does not speak about the conversion process itself.
- [What the heck is interactive fiction?](https://sub-q.com/what-the-heck-is-interactive-fiction-a-guide-for-authors/) - a subsection titled "Converting Fiction to IF" gives some hints: pick a shorter story, think about the choices your character makes, think how to display text on the page, think outside the page. Again, few details about the process itself are given.

EDIT: thanks a lot to all the repliers for the wonderful ideas and the warm welcome!

Original score: 10