Tag: Choose your own adventure »

Tin Man Games is offering all Gamebook Adventures at 66% off! Each adventure is a complete story where, just like a Choose Your Own Adventure, you get to control how the story progresses. The books have a realistic dice-based battle system that adds a bit of action to the story.

So that's An Assassin in Orlandes, The Siege of the Necromancer, Slaves of Rema, Revenant Rising, The Wizard from Tarnath Tor, Temple of the Spider God, Curse of the Assassin, and Sultans of Rema - all for $1.99 each.

As a bonus, the fifth game, Catacombs of the Undercity, is free so you can try it one out before you buy.

The sale will only be around for a limited time so pick up your next Gamebook Adventure today.

NOLA Is Burning, the latest in a series of interactive-fiction games from Choice of Games, is now available on the App Store. In this blood-soaked text-based noir thriller set in New Orleans, your choices control the story.

Your boss, named The Bull, has given you the task of rescuing his girlfriend (who also happens to unofficially be your girlfriend) before dawn. You'll need to slaughter anyone who stands in your way, including gangsters and cops, as your go deep into the underbelly of the city. Death is probable along the way, but in New Orleans, death is only the beginning.

NOLA Is Burning is available now and is free to download , which will allow you to play the first three chapters. An in-app purchase of $1.99 is necessary in order to play chapter four and beyond.

Everyone loves interactive fiction, right? Ok, I might be a little biased due to my huge love of the genre, but I'm certainly not alone there. Plenty of people love the dark world created by H.P. Lovecraft, too, and his work has proved a fantastic inspiration for many great games and other forms of media. One such title that's set to capture this spirit is The Moaning Words: a game currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign and looking rather promising.

The game is written by Science Fiction author, Alan Dean Foster, and follows a dark investigation across 18 episodes set to be released daily. Players will be able to shape their own adventure through the choices they make. Uniquely, the app will also offer a form of social adventuring with the ability to share one's story with others as well as invite friends to unlock new content.

Continuing with an original twist on the interactive fiction idea, a card game of sorts will also feature alongside numerous riddles and conundrums. Plus, there's set to be even more options thanks to the free writing tool that will allow users to create their own story! Not bad, eh?

We talked to co-founder and designer, Manea Castet, to learn more about this ambitious project.

148apps: Did any other books, games, or films influence The Moaning Words, besides H.P Lovecraft?
Manea Castet (MC): The design of The Moaning Words was influenced by the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books and popular video games Heavy Rain, Baldur’s Gate, and the Dragon Age series. In fact, our interactive fiction is built around different video games mechanisms. These mechanisms were specifically taken into consideration when writing the alternative [choices] and when designing how players interact with the story.

The first influence of our story is H.P Lovecraft’s body of work. Our app is designed to be a tribute to this well-known author. We believe it will please veteran readers of the “Lovecraftian” stories. It will also be a very good start for people who discover the Cthulhu Mythos for the first time. The story, written by Alan Dean Foster, is contemporary and its events will take place in many countries around the globe.

148apps: Some of the Kickstarter pledge rewards involve gaining a pack of gold to use in game, how will these help in game? Are they crucial to progression?
MC: In The Moaning Words, gold is the virtual currency. It can be obtained for free through card games for example. Users will not necessarily have to purchase gold to progress. Every time a user wins a card game, he or she will gain gold.

When people purchase our “Curious” Pack on Kickstarter, we will provide a ‘huge pack of gold’ to start with. Players will then experience the game with more freedom at the beginning. However, anyone can experience the whole story and progress through the 18 episodes without having to purchase anything with actual money. As in many free to play games, the players will have access to premium optional content if [they] decide to purchase it.

148apps: Will it be vital to recruit friends in order to progress, or will it be possible to see everything the game has to offer without?
MC: Although recruiting friends will never be vital in order to progress in the game, we think this feature is a lot of fun. Friends will help you shape the story in a different and meaningful way. They have the ability to transform your own adventure. They can also give you information about what happened in their story. You can experience the whole story without inviting any friends.

148apps: How open-ended is the story? How many different endings will it offer?
MC: The story has 6 different main endings arcs. However, each arc can and will be modified by the player’s decisions. Each one will be drastically modified by previous choices and by the final decisions. Different characters in the story can disappear or become insane for example. The changes can affect the environment on different scale, grand or small.

148apps: How simple will it be to create your own story?
MC: At any time in the app, players can access our writing tool for free. They can either use it directly in the mobile app or on their computer. It is a simpler version of the tool we use. We want it to be as complete as possible. Users will be able to write their fiction, add choices, grant mental sanity points and implement card games in just a few clicks.

No development skills are required to create an interactive fiction; the writer will only need to have a clear idea of the kind of interactive fiction he or she wants to write. Writers can publish their stories directly through the app and will be rewarded if the story is well reviewed by other users.

The Moaning Words sounds like it's shaping up to be quite an interesting twist on an increasingly popular genre. Keen to be a part of it? Take a look at their Kickstarter campaign for the pledge rewards available.

We'll be sure to keep an eye on its development. It's currently set for release later this year.

As a huge fan of interactive fiction thanks to a childhood full of Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure books, it's been a pretty exciting time on the App Store of late. Besides Tin Man Games's steady conquering of all things Fighting Fantasy, the release of Sorcery!, and Visual Baker's Underground Kingdom, things have been kicked up a further notch.

That's thanks to the latest Kickstarter campaign, focused on Choose Your Own Adventure books aimed at younger readers and now known as Choose 'Toons. With the Kickstarter just launched, we took some time to chat to Shannon Gilligan, publisher at Chooseco.

"Choose 'Toons are interactive cartoons, plain and simple. There are very abbreviated amounts of text at the choice points, but that's it. Otherwise, you are watching an animated story, with choices!" explained Shannon.

The first app is based on Your Very Own Robot in which the reader uses their parents' robot lab to put together a robot named Gus, leading to some entertaining mishaps. While Shannon told us that there are some "slight amendments and additions", the app is set to follow the book "pretty faithfully".

"It was interesting to adapt because I actually found that typical cable or Saturday morning cartoons are much more physically violent than what's in our books," Shannon noted. "It has something to do with watching vs. reading I think. And it's nothing new. I watched Roadrunner as a kid and it's quite violent, sometimes to the point of sadism. Our eyes are trained to be entertained which might demand certain kinds of less cerebral plot points."

So, young readers and their parents should have nothing to worry about when it comes to the content of this forthcoming adaptation!

The Kickstarter comes with some fairly typical pledge awards, as well as some rather exciting high-end ones such as being able to pay to have one's voice featured in the app. Most thrilling of all, though, has to be the one-off $10,000 pledge. Unlike anything else I've seen before, it gives the buyer their very own Choose Your Own Adventure for real. Throughout the campaign, backers and followers will be asked two questions each week, which will eventually lead to the adventure of a lifetime. While Shannon explained that Antarctica is out because of costs, pretty much everything else is up for grabs. Adventurous spirit and $10,000 to spare? You know what to do.

On a serious final note, anything that encourages kids and their families to read together has to be a hugely positive step. Even better, for this series, it looks set to combine nostalgia for the parents with new discoveries for the kids. We'll be sure to keep an eye on this Kickstarter's progress. For now, check out the campaign page if you're interested in participating or you fancy a $10,000 adventure of a lifetime. The campaign ends on September 12.

Remember grade school recess, trolling the library, looking for interesting new books to read? Who needed all of that pesky social interaction when literature was the only friend that a kid could ever want? A bastion of that glorious reading joy was the widely consumed Choose Your Own Adventure series. Nothing could better engage the creativity of a youth’s inquisitive mind while simultaneously boosting their reading comprehension and decision-making skills. All these years later, Linden Lab is attempting to put an interactive spin on the genre with the introduction of their upcoming digital fiction platform, Versu.

Despite drawing a heavy influence from the popular book series, Versu prides itself on being far from a standard, “Choose Your Own Adventure,” experience. While there are plenty of similarities between the two forms of media, the interactive nature of Versu renders it a far more flexible storytelling medium than its print-shackled counterpart. The scripted interactions available in the narrative change every single playthrough, thanks to an AI system that reacts to the player/reader’s decisions in real-time. Additionally, if there are multiple non-playable characters in a given scene, their dialog options and reactions will also play off of each other, creating a far more realistic group dynamic.

Overall, the storytelling mechanics of the application are fairly straightforward. There are a series of actions that can be pursued at any given point, which will in turn effect how other characters feel about the player controlled avatar. Both dialog options and other physical actions are then triggered as a result of each decision. It is amazing to see how differently stories can play out, especially when replayed while controlling a completely different character in the scene. In another interesting touch, there are certain narratives where a diverse variety of characters are available to use as both NPCs and the reader controlled avatar. The selection of a separate cast can even influence how a given plot will play out.

As was previously alluded to, this is not just a collection of three interactive stories, but rather an entirely new literature platform. Versu has a store available at launch with an additional story that can be purchased, as well as the promise of many more to come. Even more exciting is Linden Lab’s announcement that they will eventually release authoring tools to the general public. It is going to be fascinating to see how other authors can put Versu’s unique toolset to work for their storytelling purposes. Be sure to keep an eye out for its launch, later this week.

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