I spent some time a while ago developing my own system to create CYOA books based on Markdown (called Ficdown). The goal was to develop a simple way to write bo

I spent some time a while ago developing my own system to create CYOA books based on Markdown (called Ficdown). The goal was to develop a simple way to write books without having to write code, and that could be exported to normal e-book formats like epub, mobi, or html with clickable links used to make your decisions as you read the book. I ran into a lot of unexpected technical complexities in the compilation step, for example trying to remove unreachable branches of the story, and optimizing situations where branches merged back together, or removing variables that were being tracked that no longer had any effect on the story from that point on. It was a fun exercise. It makes me wonder how earlier CYOA books and series were actually written. How hard was it to keep track of the various branching plot lines? Were there ever cases where "bugs" were published? I was a massive fan of CYOA, especially Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series.