April A to Z - K is for Kickstarter campaigns

Crowdfunding seems to have really taken off in the last year and gamebooks have not been left behind by the
trend.  Here is a list of all the gamebook projects that I have found/funded/been part of on Kickstarter and Indiegogo.  These are all great projects so make sure you buy them when they come out.

Trial of the Clone 

This is a gamebook by Zach Weiner, cartoonist at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cerial who managed to get a huge amount of funding for it.  You are now able to get a copy from Amazon and there is also an Audio version read by Wil Wheaton which will be ready in app form thanks to Tin Man Games.   

YOU ARE THE HERO

Jonathon Green  has managed to raise the money he needed to write this comprehensive history of Fighting Fantasy. Now that it is funded, Jon is well underway with writing it.  I'm looking forward to this one.  Jon Green is also planning to write a gamebook based on Beowulf which may get a kickstarter in the future.

TURN TO 400

This was a planned documentary on the story of Fighting Fantasy.  Unfortunately, it did not get its funding, but Sean Riley, its creator has not given up.  He is gathering fans to register their interest for seeing this project succeed in the future.

Underground Kingdom

This is a gamebook project that I discovered after the closing date.  It is by Edward Packard and looks absolutely gorgeous.  You can buy it from the website here.

Maelorum: An Epic Gamebook

This is an awesome gamebook with beautiful  art which has three stories and planty of stuff to do.  You can buy a physical book from here.

Survivor - An "Elite:  Dangerous" Gamebook

This is a scifi gamebook which has been successfully funded and is due out next year.  Keep you eyes peeled!

Arcana Agency:  The Thief of Memories Gamebook

A wonderful gamebook by Paul Gresty, set in 1930s New York where you are the head of the agency.  Spooky goings on and trickery are abound in this book with wonderful art.  The Arcana Agency page is here and you can buy a hardback copy for $40 if you email contact@megara-entertainment.com.  A PDF copy will be out soon.

Blacksand!

Back in the 1990s, Advanced Fighting Fantasy released a second book about city adventures called Blacksand!  Now, after a successful kickstart, Arion Games is going to release a new version using the new Advanced Fighting Fantasy system and packing loads more new stuff into it.  Release is imminent so keep watching the website.


Goblin's Bounty

Now this is one that I am involved with.  This is the brainchild of Attic Squad Games  which teamed up with Jon Green to write Warlock's Bounty.  The premise is excellent.  It is a gamebook but combat is resolved in the form of a collectable which is awesome.  Ashton and I are working on Goblin's Bounty and it will be released despite not making the kickstarter so keep your eyes peeled and in the mean time, have a go at Warlock's Bounty.


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April A to Z - J is for Michael J. Ward

Michael J. Ward is the brilliant writer behind the excellent Destiny Quest series.  I interviewed him last year and he is back again to tell us what he's been up to since April.  I also had the privilege of meeting Michael at Dragonmeet last November  And he has been a busy boy.  Let's find out more...

Who are you and how you got into gamebooks?

My name is Mike Ward (sorry, Michael J. Ward if we’re being all ‘authory’ and officious!). I’m responsible for the DestinyQuest series of gamebooks – the first of which I originally self-published, but was subsequently taken on by Gollancz/Orion Books.  

I think most people probably know how I first got into gamebooks. I grew up in the seventies/eighties, so I’m old enough to remember the first release of Warlock of Firetop Mountain (and the slightly less cool, CYOA books). As computer games were still in their ‘Neanderthal’ phase, nothing could really come close to the interactivity and fun of a gamebook or RPG, like Dungeons & Dragons. I was hooked (although managed to avoid sporting a dodgy beard).

What have you done since April 2012?

I’ve completed the second book in the DestinyQuest series, The Heart of Fire – which was published in November of last year. I had listened and taken note of feedback regarding the first book (and of course, no one is a harsher critic than myself), so with The Heart of Fire I really sought to give the reader a lot more choices and control over the story. As well as introducing factions, which the player can choose to side with, I also tweaked the combat mechanics (hopefully making it quicker and more dynamic to play), and added the team  battles (where you can team up your heroes from different books to take on epic foes). I was really pleased with The Heart of Fire – it felt more like the book I always wanted to write to kick start the series in style.  

Since July/August of last year, I have been writing the third book in the series, The Eye of Winter’s Fury. In fact, as I type this for your blog, I’m a couple of weeks away from completing it. This has been a tough book to write, mainly because of the subject matter, but also because (again) I really wanted to push the level of the story-telling and the choices that the reader is given in the narrative. The book takes place in the frozen north of Valeron, where we take on a specific character and follow their adventures. The story takes place after the events of The Heart of Fire, so there will be references to that book, but it can also be played completely separately if readers choose to do so.

In The Eye of Winter’s Fury, I think the story is a lot darker and a bit more adult. Some readers may even be a little shocked by just how brutal and unrelenting some of the elements can be. I haven’t held back anything on this one; I want the reader to be completely immersed in the brutal and dangerous environment of the north, to feel for their character and to also be left with a sense that they have experienced a real journey by its end.

For the game/strategists out there, The Eye of Winter’s Fury will also pack a punch in the game stakes too. A new special ability has been introduced, which will actually have quite an impact on combats and strategies. I’ve had a lot of fun with the careers this time around, too – and really tried to make them feel more dynamic and play very differently. There are also some ‘dice/game challenges’ that don’t involve combat. I don’t want to give too much a way at this point, but I think players will have a lot of fun with the sub-game that has been introduced. It also means there will be a new hero sheet!

Finally, to please the hardcore who feel that Legion and Heart were just not punishing enough, there is a death penalty system in DQ3. Players will now have to record each combat defeat, which can then lead onto penalties and afflictions for their character. Of course, there will be chances to ‘remove’ these also, if you can find the correct items.

What do you plan on doing now?

Well, the next month or so, I’ll be finishing up The Eye of Winter’s Fury, proofing and checking the copy and also testing the combat. I hope to have all that done and with my publishers by mid-May. Then, after probably a week of getting very, very drunk (!) I’ll actually be back to my ‘day job’, freelancing and writing education materials for schools – got to earn the pennies, I’m afraid. At this point, I’m not commissioned to write any more gamebooks; it will be up to my publishers and the sales of the first three books, as to whether I’ll get the green light to work on DQ4.

The end of the year will also see the release of The Legion of Shadow in French and Spanish versions. I’m really looking forward to seeing these – will be odd to see my text in another language! It also means that French and Spanish gamers can finally get hold of the books and, hopefully, swell the ranks of the DQ fans around the world. So all good.

What do you think the future of gamebooks is?

I think the next few years may see quite a split in the genre – with gamebooks probably becoming more interactive and gamery (thanks to the blossoming app market), whilst more story/narrative focused ‘gamebooks’ may go the other way, removing the game and combat mechanics altogether (or at least making them transparent), and just solely focusing on narrative choices. I think there is a big market of readers who may enjoy the fun and control of reading a story where they are the ‘hero’ and can influence the narrative, but are put off by the more fantasy/game-orientated aspects.

I also think, with mobile technology, there is huge potential for gamebooks to cease being solo experiences – and instead, open up opportunities for readers to collaborate, be able to share and influence each others’ narratives, give gamebooks almost an MMO feel.

I think it is quite an exciting time for gamebooks, particularly with the technology that we now have available . But I’m afraid, at heart, I’m still a print lover – so, I hope gamebook readers will keep supporting old fogies like me! (I still haven’t grown the beard though…)   

Check out the Destiny Quest website and Michael's Twitter feed.

You can get the Legion of Shadow here.

You can get the Heart of Fire here.

Both books are available in physical and Kindle forms.

   

April A to Z - I is for Inkle

Inkle Studios specialises in interactive stories.  It has provided the code for Frankenstein by Dave Morris (yes, I know Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, but wonderful gamebook writer Dave Morris converted it into an interactive story) and it is also adapting Steve Jackson's Sorcery! into digital.  It also has its own tool for developing interactive stories, Inklewriter. 

Which is why it is great to have an interview from Jon Ingold, one of Inkle's founders.  And without further ado, I hand you over to Jon.

My name is Jon Ingold, and I'm the co-founder, with Joseph Humfrey, of inkle, a software and design company who specialise in making interactive stories. Which is to say, we're making things a lot like gamebooks and text adventures, but we're trying to make them feel as fresh and vibrant as possible on tablets and smartphones.

When we started - which was December 2011 - it felt like there were only a few people working in this space - the guys at FailBetter, the guys at Choice of Games, and of course, the Tin Man. Now, barely a year and a half later, it feels like a very busy place indeed!

It's particularly surprising for me because when I got started in interactive fiction thirteen years ago, writing text adventure games in the Inform language, it was a very niche past-time indeed. We'd make games that would be played, discussed, compared and dissected by at most 500 people. And there weren't many games, which meant those people would tolerate extremely difficult, opaque games which took weeks or months to complete. There were small competitions and awards and I was lucky enough to win a few. But whenever I showed one of my games to someone who hadn't played a text adventure, they would be completely stumped. "You're meant to type in what to do? But what should you type? What should I do?"

Frankenstein

Skip forward ten years, and after working at Playstation and meeting Joe, we founded inkle and started thinking about ways to tell interactive stories that anyone could play. They had to be simple, smooth and elegant - and they had to be beautiful. Frankenstein, our first app project, was born. (Actually, inklewriter - our framework for story-writing, was born: Frankenstein was Dave Morris' idea, we simply provided the loom on which he wove his tale.) Frankenstein came out last April, and was pretty well received. A lot of people enjoyed reading it - including people who don't like games. In fact, most people didn't think it was a game at all. We had several reviews in the literature sections of newspapers.

Our next step was to get inklewriter online (http://writer.inklestudios.com), so that anyone could write a story with the same kind of interactivity as Frankenstein. We thought that was really important, because when it comes to writers, Dave Morris is an exception and not the rule: most writers would get lost pretty fast writing interactive, branching stories. Indeed, most wouldn't want to try. inklewriter is an attempt to prove that with a good interface, anyone can write a branching story. A year later, it's being used in schools with kids as young as eight, as well as being used by professional game developers. We've also see people making training manuals and Spanish-language quizzes. It's still not as easy to inklewrite a story as to pick up a pen and write a "normal" story - but it's a lot easier than learning to code!

Sorcery

Right now, we're working on our next big app, Steve Jackson's Sorcery! which should be out in early May - and I'm hoping anyone reading this post knows about it already! We met Steve last year and took on the challenge of adapting Sorcery! into something "high-tech". We started with a gamebook and we've ended up with something quite different in style - it's still an interactive story, but it's got a lot more choices (original book, 450 paragraphs; our version, 3272 or so… but all quite a lot shorter!)

We've removed all the dice-rolls, replacing combat with a simple, elegant sword-game of cut-and-thrust that rather nicely generates fight descriptions for the story as you play. And there's also the map, drawn by Mike Schley and rendered into 3D by Joe, over which you make your journey. That's the heart of the app now, so that what we've created is almost closer to a tabletop game than a gamebook. We're pretty excited, and looking forward to getting started on adapting Book 2 in force (Sorcery! is a series of four connected books). So we're hoping people will really enjoy it.

Looking ahead, I think the future of gamebooks and interactive stories is rosy, and best of all, diverse. Lots of people are trying lots of different things, both in the print and digital spaces. At inkle we've got a list of ideas in a notepad that we're dying to try out, and I know that everyone else has as well. So I'm looking forward to a few years of downloading other people's apps and saying, damn, I wish we'd thought of that… and hopefully, a few years of other people doing the same with our stuff!

 So check out Inkle, download Frankenstein and keep your eyes peeled for Sorcery!

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April A to Z - H is for Helpful hints from Zachary Carango

As you read on my D post, Wayne Densley has been running the Windhammer short gamebook competition since 2008.

Well today, we have some advice from the competition's most successful entrant, Zachary Carango, who has one win and two merit awards to his name after making four entries.  So for those of you who are thinking of entering (the deadline is the 7th September, so you have plenty of time to plan and write a short gamebook), then here is some sage advice from Zachary:


I guess the best advice I can give is to think about the reader as you're writing.  Create an experience that you would want to see in a gamebook.

Putting myself in the reader's shoes has helped me see and improve on flaws in my gamebooks.  It's easy to get excited about a certain setting or set of rules.  This is good because if you aren't having fun it's much harder to write.  You have to be careful too, because it's really all for someone else.

With Red World, I had a decent system, but a boring setting.  There was stuff to do, but no real reason to do it.

With Above the Waves, I had a decent story, but a system that restricted choices.  After all the passwords and item checks there were only a few places the reader actually got to decide anything.

I think I did a better job with Final Payment.  The story was strong enough to keep people reading but simple enough to allow for meaningful choices.  The system is supposed to give the reader more to do by adding a layer of interaction outside of the written choices.

You can find Zachary's great gamebooks at Arborell, www.ffproject.com and www.fightingfantasy.org so check them out and the other great additions.

April A to Z - G is for Gamebooks.org

Demian Katz is the creator and owner of the encyclopedic gamebook website www.gamebooks.org which has details and reviews on every work that could be called a gamebook.  I interviewed Demian last year and he has kindly provided me with an update on his activities.

And here it is...

I'm Demian Katz of gamebooks.org; last year, I introduced myself, and a link to the previous blog entry should cover the gory details.

The most exciting gamebook-related development in my life since April, 2012 is the donation of my 2,000+ volume gamebook collection to the University of California Santa Barbara.  By sending my collection to a university, I ensure that it will be better preserved than it could be in my own home and that it is now available for others to study.  I also hope that by making this large donation, I have seeded a collection that can continue to grow over the years -- the next step is to begin approaching gamebook authors and publishers to see if any archival materials can be added.

Outside of gamebooks, I have taken my obsession with series fiction and bibliography to a different century and begun studying dime novels, one of the leading forms of American popular entertainment from approximately 1860-1915.  The parallels with gamebooks are interesting, and the stories remain surprisingly entertaining.  Since these books are so old, the possibilities for digitization and adaptation are limitless -- I'm currently working with a colleague on a "posthumous collaboration" to turn a particularly memorable example of the form into an interactive adventure.  Stay tuned for more details -- though this is going to take a while!

As for the future of gamebooks, I'm trying to prove that it can be found in the past -- but that's just one thread of many, and as I mentioned last year, the digital revolution still seems to be going strong.

Visit Demian's website at www.gamebooks.org.  I don't want to sound like I'm making an understatement but it is literally the most comprehensive webiste on gamebooks that has ever existed.

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Adventurer Character sheets

So I hope you've all looked at The Adventurer rulebook because I'll be posting some little expeditions that

you can set out on.

The good thing about Adventurer is that it makes it easy to write a gamebook that can cater for all levels and adventuring styles, so I have made a character that you might want to try out in the dungeons and other adventures that you will come across.  I have created a dwarf warrior type (like with most game systems, warriors are the simplest class to start off with) at levels 1, 5, 9 and 13 so that you can enjoy each adventure in four different ways.

There will be a couple of things you will be able try with these heroes in upcoming posts, so keep your eyes peeled...

Here are the links:

Level 1 Warrior.

Level 5 Warrior.

Level 9 Warrior.

Level 13 Warrior.

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April A to Z - F is for Fighting For Your Fantasy

Marston is the blogger down at Fighting For Your Fantasy which chronicles his attempts at various Fighting Fantasy books.  Here is a picture of the man behind the blog:

Well, my name's MJ. I grew up in the 80s and 90s and gamebooks made a huge impact on how I'd read during my early years. I'm pretty new to the whole gamebook scene. I've been making posts regularly though, at a rate of about one a weekend, and I've been at this since May last year. 

I've basically started it as a means to have a bit of nostalgia and to complete a full collection of Fighting Fantasy books, which I always wanted to have when I was a kid. Over the months, the idea of collecting these books and reporting on my search for them pretty much fell to the wayside, as posts consisting of "I have found two more books today" tends to be a bit boring. So I've gradually focused more and more on playthroughs. 

I have a few rules that I've set myself for the playthroughs, namely that I complete each book without reading through them to refresh my memory, which has ensured that the huge majority of these playthroughs have all ended in humiliating and embarassing deaths. The worst of which was my playthrough of 'Khare- Cityport of Traps', in which I was beaten up by every living being inside the city and then drowned in poo. It was quite an adventure. 

The Fighting Fantasy series is a big series, but we're gradually getting closer and closer to the end of it, and I have a few ideas as to what I can do following it. I'm considering playthroughs of other gamebooks like Lone Wolf, and I'm also strongly thinking of doing full 'until I win' walkthroughs of the FF books, perhaps with maps and so on, but that's a lot of work. 

The real joy with this blog is that it's given me the chance to meet and interact with people who share this interest, some of who are amazingly enthusiastic about this hobby. That in itself has been a real joy, and has reminded me that I'm not the only person who shares this kind of hobby. Being able to read through the comments on my posts, and see how many people are reading and enjoying them, is just a sheer joy. 

I'm glad that the gamebook genre is still going strong after all this time, and I'm pleased to see how it is embracing emerging technology, like iphone apps and so on. Just as gamebooks were developed in an enterprising manner, it pleases me to see similar enterprising spirits in embracing new technology, and I genuinely have started to feel that this is one of the strongest way for the gamebook format to continue in the future. It's a unique and involving hobby and I'm glad to see that it has such a vibrant community. 

Have a look at Marston's post at Fighting For Your Fantasy.  

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