CYOA Thread pasta

What's a CYOA?
It's like a cross between an RPG's character creation system and game of "would you rather".

What are they for?
CYOAs are there to spark your imagination, provide escapsism, and occasionally act as writing prompts. Some of more complex CYOAs could be used to generate characters for a RPG.

Who makes them?
Anonymous individuals, just like you!

Where can I find them?
There are hundreds of the things.
A partial archive can be found here: http://grognard.booru.org/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=cyoa
You can request a particular CYOA in the thread, but don't get your hopes up.
If you must, you can try /r/makeyourchoice. They have the biggest online collection of CYOAs.
Here's an archive of CYOA threads: http://archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/subject/cyoa/text/cyoa/

I want to make a CYOA. How?
You start with an idea, or crib a setting from your favorite book/game/chinese cartoon. Sketch out some ideas for choices in notepad.
Start out small. Keep your big ideas in reserve until you have the skill to actualize them properly.

What do I need?
You're going to need an image editor or DTP program. Paint or Word will suffice, but better looking CYOAs require better software.
Paint.net (www.getpaint.net) is excellent for novices. GIMP (www.gimp.org) is more powerful, but it has the doesn't have a learning curve so much as a learning cliff.
Image editors like those are fine for simple, text-light CYOAs (Paint.net has particularly dreadful text editing), but longer CYOAs demand more suitable software.
Scribus (www.scribus.net) is an open-source desktop-publishing software. It has solid text editing and layout functionality, but you'll need an image editor for any fancy graphics.
Photoshop is perhaps the ultimate tool for CYOA creation. It's tricky to get to grips with, but that shouldn't stop you from finding a torrent somewhere.

I need images. Where?
The /tg/ booru (grognard.booru.org) is stuffed with character and setting art of all description, all neatly tagged and sorted. It should be your first port of call.
Google image searches appended with "art" are good too. There's plenty of good stuff to be found trawling through deviantart.
There's usually a character art thread running on /tg/. You can request stuff there. You can try /hr/ and /wg/.

Any tips?
You should only have to scroll one way when reading a CYOA. Make vertically aligned CYOAs about 1200px wide. Remember: the most common screen resolution is 1366*768, and some readers will be using mobiles.
PNGs are the preferred format. JPGs degrade the quality of the text - for this reason, be wary of uploading CYOAs to imgur.
/tg/ supports PDFs. You can export PDFs from some programs, or use http://smallpdf.com/jpg-to-pdf to convert your images to PDF. Some people dislike PDFs. They have advantages: they're easy to upload, and don't take up a lot of space in the thread. However, they're awkward to scroll through when saved, take a while to load and process, and can cause difficulties for those on mobile devices.
If you want some thematically-appropriate fonts, try www.dafont.com and www.google.com/fonts.
Here are some polls that were conducted about CYOAs: http://strawpoll.me/2729937/r, http://strawpoll.me/2729372/r, http://strawpoll.me/2740198/r, http://strawpoll.me/2770406/r.

Remember this: Good design will draw people to your CYOA. Good writing will keep them reading.

Any final words?
Post your builds. Criticize. Praise. Make good OC. Be excellent to one another.
If you want to hang with the cool kids, swing by the IRC. #cyoa on Rizon. Just use a number if you don't want to namefag. A lot of veteran creators can be found on the IRC, and we're happy to give advice and critique.
If you don't know what that is: http://mibbit.com/?channel=%23CYOA&server=irc.rizon.net