Pictures, sound and video
A page doesn’t have to be only text. The Page type drop-down at the top of the Page tab is where most of this lives, and the Action tab handles sound.
| Page type | What it does |
|---|---|
| Text | A paragraph and its links. The default. |
| Picture | The same, with a picture above the text. |
| YouTube | The same, with a video above the text. |
| External link | Sends the reader to another website instead of showing a page. |
| Script | Runs a script and shows nothing of its own. |
| Script + Text | Runs a script, then shows the text and links as usual. |
The last two are what Keeping track is built on.
A picture
Section titled “A picture”Set a page’s type to Picture and a “Picture” box appears above the description, with an Upload… button beside it. Click it, choose a file, and the picture is added to your game and to that page.
The box also drops down a list of every picture already in the game, so you only ever upload each one once - handy when the same establishing shot opens several branches.
Try it on The Lighthouse’s Start page: find or make an image of a lighthouse at night, set the page type to Picture, and upload it.
JPEG suits photographs; PNG suits everything else, because it compresses without losing quality and can have transparent parts. Keep an eye on file sizes - every file in your game is packaged when you publish, and pictures are usually what makes a gamebook large. Manage assets on the toolbar lists every file in the game and lets you delete the ones you have stopped using.
A video
Section titled “A video”Set the page type to YouTube and you get a “YouTube id” box. The id is the short code at the end of a YouTube share link: click Share under the video, and in a URL like https://youtu.be/8jPyg2pK11M the id is 8jPyg2pK11M. Paste just that part - not the whole address.
The video appears above the text, and the reader can play it and then carry on down the page.
Sound is on the Action tab, which applies to any page type. There is one box, “Play sound when the player enters this page”, with its own Upload… button.
By default a sound stops when the reader turns the page. Tick “Continue to play sound on next page” if it should carry on - which is how you get a storm, or a piece of music, running across a run of pages rather than restarting at each one.
For The Lighthouse, a loop of rain and sea on the Start page with “continue” ticked, and something quieter once the reader is inside, does most of the work of setting a scene.
Two things worth knowing. Browsers do not let a page start making noise until the reader has interacted with it, but you do not have to design around that - Quest Viva notices that a game has sound in it and shows a Begin button on the loading screen, which is the click the browser is waiting for, so a sound on the very first page plays as it should. Autoplay has the detail. And a reader may well be somewhere they cannot have sound on at all, so never make a sound the only way to learn something.
Sending the reader elsewhere
Section titled “Sending the reader elsewhere”External link is a page that isn’t really a page: it takes the reader straight to a web address, and shows nothing of its own. It is there for a link to your own site or to something the story refers to.
Use it sparingly, and never as an ending - a reader who clicks it has left your game, and the back button is their only way home.
Styling text
Section titled “Styling text”You don’t need a special page type for bold and italic. The description box has a toolbar with B, I and underline buttons, which wrap whatever you have selected, and an Insert menu with the rest - including Once for text that only appears the first time a page is seen, and Random text for a line that varies.
Those come from the text processor, which runs on everything your game prints. The next chapter uses it in earnest.