Gamebook Creator/player?


Jeric

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For those who didn't know about Gamebooks, they were novels which had a nice success during the 80's, and which were allowing the readers to choose their own path by jumping from one numbered section to another, in a fun and interactive way. They were introducing the concepts of inventory, enemies fights, random dice results, and other nice ideas which were the precursors of what we find today in role playing video games.


Yes the pandora is overkill for text adventures/choose your own adventures, but for people like me who want to create a story, yet allow it to branch out and such, this would be interesting, especially if it all ran under the umbrella of a single app where you could select your story/adventure from (ala info-com's thing for windows/the ds app that does this for the old infocom goodies). However since this IS the pandora, and because I don't want to stick strictly to the written word as a limiting factor it'd be nice if the following were added.

Image support (so you can link a specific word/sentance to an image so you get an immidiate refference to what exactly they're talking about).

Dynamic music. IE music that shifts depending on which chapter/section you're in, if your health is low, if a dramatic event occores, or if you get to the ever preasent game over/death ending.

an easy way to handle invintory/other actions. Possibly the use of tabs so you can read the story text, and have a seconed (or third) tab so you can muck about with stuff that wont' effect the scene itself (such as glancing at your backpack, or reviewing party member describers, or whatever)

Think of this like an engine for people to build radical dreamers like games. Is there interest in doing this? If so what system should be used? I've a few ideas, but given I really havent' been exposed to much I'd preffer to hear input.
 
I've got/had several such books and they were pretty cool, although very limited.

Such a program would be easy to code - the hard bit would be all the text/imagery and music required for a decent story.

I can't see this having more than a limited interest in regular users though, so the effort involved in coding something like this would probably not be worth it.
 
In Japan, software equivalent to gamebooks are pretty popular, even more between hentai lovers, so it's possible that some like this could atract other potential users.

PD: I don't know nothing about that... I've read this in some places... I guess... XD
 
If you guys like this kind of stuff, you might be interested in Interactive Fiction. In these games, you do more than pick a number: you actually control the character and the games usually do a very, very nice job in responding intelligently. :)

The famous one is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's playable here (just keep reading).
 
Well my initial thought was something along the lines of one of those adventure books as a base, but then i remembered the lonewolf project for the ds which had stats, inventory, and even a few minigames for good measure, though having an odd throwback to infocom goodness would be nice too. I'm, to put bluntly, not a programmer.
 
Quite a few years ago, Paul Stapleton (Grebn) made a gamebook game called Warlock Of Firetop Mountain, It was created using Virtualeech`s Virtual Novel System (VNS). It worked in exactly the same way as those interactive adventure books you describe. But sadly, It was only developed for the GP32 console, And Paul Stapleton (Grebn) only did ever create one book using Virtualeech`s Virtual Novel System (VNS).

The book is available here.
http://www.gp32x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,26,696

And the VNS use to create it is here, But there sadly doesn`t seem to be any source code.
http://www.gp32x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,14,412

Trooper
 
Well what came to my mind was a book based on zelazny's amber chronicals. It was simple-ish, but it showed the potential these books had beyond fifth grade reading material.
 
I was surprised that VNS never made it to the GP2x, I thought it was a cool way for non-coders to make nice games. Would like to see it revived on the Pandora.
 
It might have been something to do with onscripter turning up on the GP2x very shortly after release, which brought a number of virtual novels to us (in particular, Narcissu).

That is, of course, something else I'm hoping will end up ported, but suspect it may take a few years to happen...
 
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