The imps here are running around, squeaking and hitting boxes in excitement. Crumbly Head Games is proud to announce its first ever release. We’re releasing The GameBook Authoring Tool!
We write adventures. We quickly fell into a problem where we’d lose track of all our branches, or worry that we’d place the reader in an unwinnable situation, or put them in some dreadful infinite loop. Even the patriarch of gamebooks, the Fighting Fantasy series, is not immune to these game-breaking bugs. Revenge of the vampire has a problem where you need to both buy a horse and stay at an inn to win. Unfortunately, there is not enough gold to go around to do both.
What is a gamebook? If you strip away all the words and all the adventures you basically have a directed graph. There have been some attempts to show a choose-your-own adventure as a graph and it does look really cool. It is also labour-intensive. So we started thinking how it would be good to design a book from the ground-up using this form.
Here’s a small adventure in which the hero decides to stand in the kitchen thinking about biscuits. It’s a very exciting adventure.
In future versions we’re going to add all sorts of validations, export options and features to make this one of the most useful tools for any gamebook and adventure author. For the version version we only have raw text output, but this will change. Make sure you try out The GameBook Authoring Tool and let us know what you think. The free version lets you write 100 sections, which is more than enough to design a chunky adventure. In the meantime, here is the Biscuit Adventure in full:
1 You are stood in the kitchen, unsure of yourself and your place and time in the universe. A small packet of hobnobs lies on the kitchen counter. -Eat a biscuit - 2 -leave a biscuit - 3 2 You pop the biscuit into your mouth. You feel so happy! Well done! You have won the game! 3 The packet of biscuits lays half opened. Something oaty and delicious peeps out between the wrappings. You could just grab one of those biscuits and pop it into your mouth. -Eat a biscuit - 2 -Keep looking at the biscuits - 3