Exciting news, Gamebook fans. The Lindenbaum Prize for short gamebooks is back, resurrected by warlock Lloyd of Gamebooks!
Crumbly Head Games are proud to be a sponsor for the competition this year. Here’s the kickoff post. 16 brand new gamebooks from new authors – enjoy!
Hey! Do you like writing gamebooks? Do you want to win prizes for writing gamebooks? Do you like reading gamebooks?
If any of those things are true, turn to http://www.lloydofgamebooks.com/p/the-lindenbaum-prize-for-short-gamebook.html .
Lloydofgamebooks has cast a resurrection spell over the marvellous Windhammer Prize, and now it’s back as The Lindenbaum prize for gamebooks. Get your entries in now! It’s for short gamebooks of 100 entries (which you can do in the free version of GBAT) and get your creation out to a captive audience!
Win cash, experience points and even a license for Gamebook Authoring Tool Pro. Good luck! Let us know if you are entering!
Happy merry merrimas from all the CHG team! We pushed a small update to the 1.18 release recently to fix a crash using special characters in folder names. Also some changes to the installer because the visual studio runtimes have been updated.
What GBAT changes would you like to see next year? A web version?
The Master was tired of nearly breaking his neck falling over imp toys this week, so Crumbly Head Castle has had a bit of a clear out.
The vaults, secret rooms and treasure chests were cracked open and each item was placed in the throne room, with only a handful of imps lost to long forgotten traps or devoured by hungry monsters.
With items including the battle axe of the dwarf giant, the face of an Amazon princess, socks, the misery of a dragon king and the arm of the master’s mortal enemy, each was held and carefully appraised with the simple question: Does this bring you joy? If not, the item was thanked and tossed away into the infinite pit of emptiness. If yes, it was lovingly packed into a treasure chest and placed behind a brand new deadly trap.
Crumbly Head Castle is now decluttered and full of joy – at least until the next hero invasion.
In other news, Grrexit is moving slowly. In case you have been living in a cave for the last couple of years (I know some of you have), Grrexit is the process of breaking up from our nearest trading partners, the Stink Trolls. Despite the troll region being our primary source of food, horse carts and attractive, foreign imps, the vote from two years ago must be respected, where a small majority of imps voted to leave.
The imp in charge of Grrexit negotiations, Theresa Slay, has so far spent last two years by not bothering to negotiate a deal and learning to dance like an awkward robot. With just a couple of months left, the castle is preparing for a hard Grrexit, with the pitchforks being sharpened and the castle moat being filled with fresh sharks.
It’s that time of year again when our goblins and elves are running around in an overly excited fashion, stabbing each other and setting fire to things.
It can only mean it’s Christmas!
To celebrate this occasion, we are proud to announce the latest version of the GameBook Authoring Tool. Let’s look at the new things:
In our biggest feature this time around, you can now export your book into multiple HTML files, with one section per file.
This means you can now check your gameplay at any point by opening up the numbered html file or quickly prototype your game outside of GBAT.
For the technical imps, this means you can upload your exported folder as-is onto your webserver and you have an instant playable gamebook. Joy!
Download The GameBook Authoring Tool 1.18 for free today! Please share the word on your blog and social media. Thanks for all of your support!
Next year we’ll be looking at your most requested features – please contribute to the twitter thread or email us if you have other great ideas!
https://twitter.com/CrumblyHeadGame/status/1072930550078410752
Beloved Gamebook Authors,
Thank you for rolling high stamina scores for this one. Gamebook Authoring Tool 1.17 is finally out – and it’s a biggie.
You know those gamebooks where you can play the Magical Ukulele of the Boogeyman by adding +20 to the current section and seeing if the new paragraph makes sense? Well, now you can do that.
Tick the hidden box and the choice will no longer show up in your preview or your exported book.
It does show up in your flow chart though, with a dotted line.
Top tip: You can combine this feature with turning auto shuffle off for both the section where you use the item and the section it takes you too!
It also shows up in your exported json/xml files if you’re a developer and you’re using those.
Relive those Choose Your Own Adventures by making each section appear on a new page. This will work best when your sections are full of text. For shorter, snappier sections (Fighting Fantasy) you are probably better off sticking to the default continuous sections.
This option will affect your book preview and your exporting – although only rtf export makes sense for now.
My god, so many bugs. Thank you if you reported these.
Download The GameBook Authoring Tool 1.17 for free today! Please share the word on your blog and social media. Thanks for all of your support!
Where do we go from here? Let us know! Send ideas to ideas@crumblyheadgames.co.uk and if they get past the troll we’ll get them implemented!
Hey Gamebooksters!
We’ve updated the installer for GBAT. One of our dependencies was installing its temporary files into the root directory and then not tidying up. It’s fixed.
See more details here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/950683
Or just write some gamebooks!
Love,
Crumbly Head Games
Hi Gamebookers
Just in time for your vampire themed gamebooks, we’re releasing GBAT 1.16! We’ve implemented a much requested feature: Shuffle Smarts.
Shuffle Smarts
Our shuffle algorithm has traditionally been very primitive. It loops through all of the section numbers in your book, unhooks all the sections that aren’t marked as fixed position, shuffles all those numbers and then assigns them to the empty slots. This is surprisingly effective, but you can get into some situations where the shuffling has put your sections and choice destinations next to each other.
Here’s an excerpt from Jeff the Country Singer Vampire Slayer:
3
You accidentally awaken the vampire, and he now has his horrible hands around your neck!
- Sing the vampire one of your greatest hits - 4
- Hit the vampire with your guitar - 15
4
You try to sing the popular "I wanna whip your cow" but the vampire's grip has crushed your delicate vocal chords. You are unable to serenade the vampire with the beauty of your voice!
Your adventure ends here.
The shuffling has placed your section and one of its choices next to each other. This isn’t want we want! We want surprises and the choices to mean something.
The new shuffle algorithm now shuffles your book multiple times, each time calculating the shuffle score, which is how much a book is shuffled. The shuffle which has the greatest shuffle score will then be applied, and this should mean your book should feel more mixed up.
Calculating the shuffle score can be surprisingly complex! First we find the section number and all the choice destination numbers. With this set of numbers, we find the average difference between each of them. This gives us an indication of how distributed a section and its choices are. If we loop through all the sections performing this calculation we have an indication of how mixed the book is.
It seems to work fairly well, please send us your feedback! It will be more effective as your gamebook gets bigger.
Export Graph Bug
This has been fixed, thanks for reporting this!
There is still a known issue where if you change the zoom level the canvas size doesn’t export with the zoomed size, but that will be fixed next version.
Hi Gamebook Gang!
Some of our lovely users have reported issues with our latest installer. There was a problem with the dependencies not all being installed. These are hopefully now fixed.
If you’ve been having problems installing, please try our updated version:
Really sorry if this has affected you, but many thanks to those of you who reported it. Your bug reports have been super useful in tracking this down.
As always, please let us know about bugs you find and features you want so we can get around to them.
Hi Gamebook Gang!
Here’s a nice new version of the Gamebook Authoring Tool today. We have implemented a much-requested feature: choice templating!
You can find this new option under Gamebook Properties. You are no longer stuck with the hideous dashes in your choice output. You can use one of the new predefined templates:
dashes
If you preferred the old way – 7
parenthesis
You decide to choose your own adventure (17)
turn to
If Fighting Fantasy was more your thing, turn to 37
squares
You decide to beat the wizard to death with your square bracket [400]
Don’t like any of these? Add your own! Choose the custom option and write your own template. Use the special tags {{text}} and {{destination}} as placeholders for your choice string.
Like this:
{{text}}, wiggle to {{destination}}
If you eat a bit more of the apple, wiggle to 75
Hope this makes sense! Enjoy!