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[rey-o]

hi guys, i've been checking out tigsource for about a year now, i'm a big fan of indy gaming and one day i'd like to try my hand at it! i'm pretty much new to the forums but i'd like to become apart of this awesome community:-)

while this isn't necessarily a video game i thought you guys might like this  interactive 'choose your own adventure' novel i made (although i guess all adventure novels are interactive ):



there is both a hard copy version and also an online version, which you can go through in its entirety here!

there are a couple of branching paths but they all streamline into one ending (which is to be continued). of course, like all good adventure novels there should be death scenes! like this:



thats about it, let me know what you think!

cheers,
rey-o

[jkd]

I loved choose your own adventure style books as a kid.

I played through your book multiple times. Actually, I tried every single path! It's short, but entertaining. The art is really nice. The ending is unexpected and humourous, and so are a few other parts. I like it.

[rey-o]

thanks jkd!

i had a few adventure novels as a kid - including one based off of Zelda, and another more elaborate one that involved dice, that one was called 'fighting fantasy'.

[jkd]

Yeah, I had a fighting fantasy book, too.

Now that I think about it, these types of adventure books are what got me into computer games in the first place!

[moi]

I'm a fan of these "choose your path" adventure and I think there's a good potential there for would be "casual" adventure devs.
There was a nice Infocom example of such a computer game (underdogs) but unfortunately there's a place where I got stuck and I think you had to use a prop from the game box to advance (piracy protection probably)

[EDIT] Oh BTW your game is very nice rey, how long ago did you create it?

[rey-o]

jkd: same here, i think i was simultaneously reading a choose your own adventure book as well as playing video games and then that pretty much set the course for the rest of my life

moi: thanks for taking  a look! i worked on it over the course of 4 months, inbetween school work and stuff. the online version took a week or so to get up (resizing images and blah blah blah)

[Slash - Santiago Zapata]

I won after being biten to the death by piranhas and then stomped by a stone guardian 

Very fun

[Guert]

Eh he, nice little book you got there!
I like it a lot. I ended up as a duck

You should make a pdf of this or think about prints... Dunno if therE's still a market but it would be great!

Good work!

[Robotacon]

'fighting fantasy' were the best. I had them in swedish as a kid but lost them somehow (prolly someone who borrowed them and never returned them) but they are on reprint so I picked up a few in english and played them with my girlfriend. I read em (to practice on my english pronunciation) and she made the choices for where to go.

[Alec]

Hehe, Fighting Fantasy was classic. 

[Robotacon]

Great adventure btw rey-o.
I definitely want more.

[rey-o]

thanks slashie - it was fun asking other folks what paths they took - they'd laugh about the different ways they died!

guert - i do have an book version made also, i'm thinking about showing it to some publishers and stuff.

surprisingly, the publisher responsible for making those adventure novels are still in business! the cover layout is exactly the same too, even after all these years.

roboticon and alec - yeah fighting fantasy! those guys are still in business also. i had 'deathtrap dungeon' and when i generated my characters i tried to make them as close as possible to final fantasy 2 guys. haha

[Chris Whitman]

You should definitely look into getting publishing for that: it's excellent!

I always enjoyed the arbitrariness of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, and it's nice to see a bit of that reflected in yours -- the river water part made me laugh a bit.

I played the shit out of those Fighting Fantasy books when I was kid. I think the best thing about those, and about pen and paper games in general, was the interactivity of having actual tangible objects like dice or coins and the necessity of noting your inventory or health with a pencil and paper. I think it somehow taps into the same participatory enjoyment that has people lamenting the days when video games didn't provide you with maps, so you had to draw your own. There's something inherently neat about having objects to hold and manipulate and draw on.

[moi]

Yeah the quality of the art alone makes it worth printing.

[Musenik]

rey-o,

Your drawings are definitely this entertainment's strong point. They really make the product stand out as unique and inticing. I'm not, personally, a big fan of death around every corner, but it works as a parody of the genre. So I had fun!

A while back, I created a casual game of interactive fiction. It was almost as simple as 'choose your adventure' books. It didn't do very well, because most casual gamers don't want to read text very much. Something to think about, if you decide to take this book pro. You might get away with it, since your book sticks to short narrative.

Mine was a bit more wordy. It involved dramatic exchanges between characters in the story. That was probably too much for a Match-3 Mom.

Keep up the good work!

[Robotacon]

Mine was a bit more wordy. It involved dramatic exchanges between characters in the story. That was probably too much for a Match-3 Mom.

I did one of those too where you played three different characters. In mine the characcters went separate ways and had to cooperate over radio to perform a heist. I only did a process chart and dropped the project when it was time to actually write the damn thing. Don't know why but the genre lends itself to adventure/fantasy the most if you ask me.

The artwork does alot to these games too. To get a nice pace you don't want too lenghty paragraphs so a picture now and then to tell an extra "thousand words" does alot.

[rey-o]

heya cake - i'm currently looking into finding a publisher with its we'll see!. i totally agree with you about interactivity and holding something in your hand. maybe thats why the wii and ds are having as much success as they are these days?

you've also nailed on the head why i made the book in the first place. since my formal training is in illustration many of my peers are comfortable with creating images that simply exist with the pursope of 'being there to be looked at'. paintings and stuff for magazines. since i've been reading playing games as a kid as well as drawing i think there was always a need to make my images something a bit more interactive. in the future i'll be looking into other ways to be more interactive with my drawings, ultimately leading up to a video game of some sort.

musenik - thanks:-) i guess it might be a bit toooo discouraging to die so often, so maybe next time around i'll space them out a bit more. thanks for the input regarding taking it to a wider audience. do you have your interactive fiction game available? i'd like to see it!

[Musenik]

musenik - thanks:-) i guess it might be a bit toooo discouraging to die so often, so maybe next time around i'll space them out a bit more. thanks for the input regarding taking it to a wider audience. do you have your interactive fiction game available? i'd like to see it!

You're welcome to. It's 'The Witch's Yarn'. Download it from my website. Use the link at bottom of my signature.