THE FORKTOON

What is a forktoon?

A forktoon is essentially a collaborative webcomic. While you can't directly modify someone else's comic, you can 'fork' it, and create your own version of a story. When you fork a comic, you pick a certain point in the story you'd like to diverge from, and write your own path begining from there. Now, a reader can go the original point of divergence, and pick which continuation of the story they'd like to see—The original author's continuation, or yours! While this may seem very simple, it's enough to construct choose-you-own-adventure games, or even a visual novel, if you so desire.

A forktoon has four different types of pages. The start, a tine, a fork, or an end. A tine is a page with a single continuation, whether it's the original author's or a fan's comic. A fork is a page which has multiple continuations, whether it be by fans or the author. The start and ends are self explanatory.

How do I participate?

Though the UI is still quite crude, it's very simple to start forking. First, you have to register an account. Then, navigate to the page you'd like to fork. Click the "Fork this page" link, and it will take you to a webpage where you can upload files.

The website currently supports JPG, PNG, GIF, and a variety of image formats, and to add text to a page, upload a TXT file as well. Once you've selected all the files you'd like to upload to the page,(remember you can use ctrl+left_click to select multiple) set the name of the page and click submit.

Congrats! if nothing's gone wrong, you have uploaded your first forktoon page!

Tips:

• When uploaded, files are sorted in alphabetical order according to their name. To ensure a specific order, you can prefix the files with a number. For example, 001_image.gif 002_text.txt 003_image2.png 004_text2.txt
• The name you choose for the page will show up as an option on the previous page. If you choose no name, it will default to →→→.
• Inserting HTML code into .txt files won't work. Instead, upload an .html file.

Don't know how to draw but still want to participate?

If you can't make something yourself, but you'd still like to contribute to the forktoon, you can leave suggestions on how a story should progress. If a forktooner presents their pages as a text-based adventure game, or some kind of visual novel, you can leave a comment with the action you'd like to take. For example, if the main character reaches a set of two open doors, I can comment below, ">take the door on the left" or ">take the door on the right." The creator of the comic can then read my comment, and draw the next panel where the character does the action I suggested.

If you can write, but can't really draw, you can also make a fork that entirely uses text instead of graphics.