i've been looking through choose your own adventure books lately, viewing them as graphs of nodes for pages and edges for choices. to help debug whether i was walking though the trees properly i built a force-directed graph viewer using a small physics library.

this is a graph from one of the books that's currently rendering properly. the starting page is drawn as a dark grey dot and pages which involve a choice are light grey. ending pages are color-coded based on the relative goodness of that ending. unfavorable outcomes are red, mediocre ones are yellow and the ‘best’ endings are blue. line-thickness shows, out of the set of all possible readings of the book, how many took a particular path.

since it's difficult to find an optimal layout for graphs with this many nodes, they're being modeled as points in a particle system. by having each node slightly repel every other node, but remain tied together through the edges, the graph is usually able to untangle itself after a little while. here the nodes are randomly positioned at the first frame, then the system is allowed to percolate until it settles down.