GBAT 1.11 fix for Windows XP users

Hi Gamebook creators!

There’s been a Windows XP bug introduced in the last couple of versions that prevented the software from starting up. This has now been fixed and a new 1.11 version has been put up – you only need to get this if you are trying to run the software on XP. The new features will be appearing in 1.12!

Thanks to those who reported this bug – just a reminder that we don’t test on XP machines but we will fix problems if they aren’t impossible to fix. It is getting more difficult to keep a build working for XP – as we upgrade our tools these drop their XP support, so we won’t have an XP build forever. But for now, we do!

Download GBAT 1.11 (WinXP fix)

GBAT 1.11 is Released!

Hi Gamebookineers,

Today sees the release of The Gamebook Authoring Tool version 1.11!

This is a minor update but a couple of really disgusting bugs have been fixed, so it is a recommended update. Saying that, there’s a couple of really nice features:

Choice ordering

There are now up and down arrows to change the ordering of your gamebook choices. This affects how the choices appear in your exported gamebooks.

Follow that choice

A follow button has been added to the choices. Clicking this will follow the choice and make its destination the active section.

Bugs Fixed

Closing GBAT doesn’t notify about unsaved files (FIXED)
Shuffle icon isn’t enabled when book is loaded (FIXED)
Undoing multiple deleted choices puts them back in a random order (FIXED)

Download The GameBook Authoring Tool 1.11!

GBAT 1.10 is Released!

Greeting Gamebookers,

Today, Crumbly Head Games proudly announce the release of The Gamebook Authoring Tool version 1.10! This release has been focussed on big gamebooks.

gbat-1-10-full

There have been a lot of changes under the hood, so you should see some real performance benefits when your gamebooks run into hundreds of sections.
But that’s boring. Let’s look at real life things:

New improved flowcharts

GBAT 1.10 Flowchart
GBAT 1.10 Flowchart

These now look much nicer and we’re able to pack them in more efficiently, which again is nice when you have loads of sections.
To aid you in your gamebook navigation, the outline and the flowchart panes have been hooked up together -selecting a section in the linear outline will show you where it is on the flowchart, and vice versa.

Section text area gets a promotion

New section text
New section text

You no longer “open up” a section node to get to the section text. The main body of text is key to your book so it now lives in a separate area from the map, giving you the opportunity to have your book text and the flowchart on different monitors, for example.

New and improved output formats

Everyone always asks about hyperlinks and why we don’t have them. The HTML output format now has them. Consuming your gamebook is now easier than before!
For those of you who are developers and may be developing a gamebook engine there is a new output option – XML format. The details of this will be announced shortly but for now it is there if you want to pick it up and go.

Bugs murdered

A few annoying little buglets were cornered in our deepest darkest dungeon and throttled:

  • Outline view used to lose selection on shuffle
  • Missing select alls in some dialogs

That’s the gist of it – hope that you enjoy this release and enjoy the many things that are to come!
As always, you can leave your thoughts below or email us and we’ll add your ideas that fit. Let’s make this the best gamebook authoring tool ever.

Download The GameBook Authoring Tool 1.10!

Gamebook News, 23rd April

Hola gamebook creators and consumers! I hope your imps and pixies have been behaving. This one has been a busy gamebook week, and here are just some of the highlights:

Tin Man Humble Bundle

Tin Man Games have teamed up with Humble Bundle and are offering up a big chunk of their gamebooks on Android devices. For a limited time, pay what you want to bolster your collection! Ten are up for grabs, with more on the way.

Humble Bundle have been doing this for ages now, and it’s exciting that gamebooks have finally gotten under their radar. Tin Man Games produce stylish gamebooks – old school dragged kicking and screaming into the mobile age. Their gamebook apps have page numbers and you roll digital dice and scribble on digital pages. All you need are digital fingers to unwind all those terrible choices you make!

There’s a few classic Fighting Fantasy in there, as well as some new titles, such as the brilliant Trial of the Clones, and the Shakesperean mashup gamebook To be or not to be. I bet Shakespeare could have done with the Gamebook Authoring Tool.

Growing Arborell

The Arborell chronicles continues to expand with Honour Amongst Thieves, Wayne Densley’s meticulously sculptured universe. This one is a short novel to accompany the Windhammer gamebook series. Wayne is the gamebook indie hero who brings the community together every year with the Windhammer Prize. You can download his latest work and support him on www.arborell.com/.

April A-Z

Stuart Lloyd’s April A-Z interview series continues to be brilliant, with nice surprises this week with interviews with Dave Morris and Emily Short. Emily is a giant in Interactive Fiction – she has contributed lots but I particularly enjoyed Counterfeit Monkey/. What I liked about this interview was when she gave her choice IF pieces. There’s something in there for everyone – strong entry points into the genre or exciting works left to discover.
Emily was also one of the driving forces behind the genre smashing Versu, the new world of interactive story telling. I’m not quite sure on the status of this project as there seems to have been some conflict with the publisher, which is a shame for everyone.

Whatever you decide

An intriguing essay on the Choose your own Adventure series as a spritual plaything has emerged on religiondispatches.org. In it, Daniel Silliman writes that CYOA developer R.A. Montgomery described his books as stories that teach a moral lesson – “What are you doing and why are you making these choices?” Montomgery says, “Implicit in the choice is an ethical or moral approach or decision…But that’s never spelled out and it’s never told. Whatever you decide is what you decide.”

This philosophy was later lost as CYOA paved the way for Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, the plot of each basically being a hack n’ slash bloodbath!

Serpents, Time Travel and Inkle

Inkle have today released Sorcery 3, so if humble bundle, arborell, interactive fiction and CYOA haven’t yet gamebooked you out then off you go and play with some serpents!

GBAT 1-10 Preview – New Flowcharts

Hi GBAT fans!

Image of the new flowchart
1-10 Flowchart

Here’s hoping you rolled a high stamina score this morning, for we are going to start previewing the latest features you can find in the next version of the Gamebook Authoring Tool!

The flowchart

The flowchart drawing engine has been rebuilt from scratch. It’s smarter looking and should feel more responsive. Section nodes are drawn a little tighter, meaning less wasted space, and we think the overall look is sexier than a tarted up swamp ogre on a Friday night.

The flowchart itself has moved away from the central area of GBAT. It now lives in a customisable panel allowing you to resize it, move off to the side, onto a second monitor or hide completely if you want to. Now just using the software is like playing a built in choose your own adventure!

There’s better integration between where you are in the flowchart and the rest of the software – doubleclicking an item in the outline view will now centralise your view around the corresponding node in the flowchart. This should prevent you from getting lost in your own gamebook, another victim of your own devious plot devices!

GBAT 1.10 is out later this month

April Update

Hello Gamebook Authors!

How are things in your dungeon? Over here we have bloated imps lounging in various degrees of distress, gorged ragged on chocolate and shame. Not to worry though! We’ll soon have them whipped back into shape and working feverishly on the next edition of the Gamebook Authoring Tool. A couple of nice changes in the new version: we have ramped up the beautification of the flowchart and will have a few new export options for you also. The outline panel is now better integrated into your workflow and empty sections are now handled better. Wanna use empty section 23 for this killer paragraph where your protagonist hits the orc nudist beach? Yeah, now you can that. Just don’t forget your sun cream (and bleach to clean your eyeballs after the hideous images you burn into them).

Sorcery 3
Sorcery 3

Good things happening in the gamebook community right now. We have Stuart Lloyd doing the April A-Z, an exciting collection of interviews with some of the most interesting gamebook authors writing at the moment. We also have interviews with illustrators, reviewers and software developers.

On the release horizon this month is Sorcery 3 for iPad and Android, the one with all those snake things to kill. As I remember it, it’s also probably one of the most difficult gamebooks in the universe. That appears on April 23rd, St George’s day, so if you tire of slaying dragons go and ruin some serpents instead.


The Gamebook Authoring Tool 1.10 will be out later this month.

GBAT 1.9 is released!

Dearest adventurers,

We hope you have survived your latest encounter because there is a new version of GBAT out!

In addition to a few minor fixes, you can now browse your book linearly using the new section outline view:

GBAT 1.9
GBAT 1.9

A massive benefit of this is you can easily see where the gaps are in your book:

The new view shows the your book in a linear layout
Section Outline view – notice the empty section

Future updates are going to improve on this, and next we’re going to improve the UI for section and choice editing.

Download The GameBook Authoring Tool 1.9!

See you next time!

Windhammer 2014 Review – The Sacrifice

The Sacrifice by Paul Struth

Download The Sacrifice

Warning! Review may contain spoilers!

Paul Struth is back after last year’s Windhammer entry – the brilliant Out of Time. This year, we have The Sacrifice, a wartime gamebook set amongst the upper classes. With zombies.

You play Peter Joyce, a young man tasked to see his old friend who has been acting a little erratically following his return from the Great War. And so begins a detective story of sorts, where you piece together the horrors of a war and the horrors that return.

There is a banging at the door as many fists hammer on the heavy oak timbers. Glass shatters somewhere down below and then we can hear the clatter of furniture being overturned. The dead are in the house.

Paul Struth is clever and this is really well written. I enjoyed the story and its characters, and the game part is woven into it nicely. There seems to be at least three good routes through the gamebook. You get to define your character’s motivation early on, which can go some way to driving you to certain choices. There are also a couple of love interests to have a go at along the way. Upon completion of the gamebook, you are able to score yourself depending on what you did and how you did it. This is nice because you can still see the end without being punished too much for not taking the author’s optimal path.

There are some clunky pieces. Combat is rare but happens – the rules for it are interesting but the dice rolling seems to intrude over the narrative. The zombie invasion doesn’t quite have the intensity or the impact on people you’d expect. But I am nitpicking. It deserves to be read because it’s very good.

Windhammer 2014 Review – Path of Heresy

Path of Heresy by Ivailo Daskalov

Download Path of Heresy

Warning! Review may contain spoilers!

Path of Heresy is an entry in the 2014 Windhammer competition. It is a fantasy adventure in which you play a priest of the Light looking to solve a ghoul mystery. There’s also a girl to wiggle our best bits at. Yep! There’s a dating sim thrown in here too.

Compared to some of the heavy content in this year’s entries – complex rules/emotional content/epic dice rolling/being trolled – this could be described as a light gamebook because there’s none of that here. The rules are simple, the content isn’t complicated, but most of all I found I actually enjoyed it. The sentences are a bit clunky, and it’s hard to feel anything for the girl we’re trying to woo, but the book tells us we’re supposed to woo her so that’s what we’ll have to do.

“Do you think we are heading in the right direction?” You turn your head and smell the sweet odour of Sister Ulmia. Her emerald almond-shaped eyes sparkle in the light of the street lamp. She looks stunning even in twilight.

You play a priest of the Light who starts the game with a favour of 10 – this means we can invoke 10 miracles before our soul pops out and we die. This was a pretty nice mechanic. You always feel like you want to take the good option but you have to weigh it up. Do you really want to use a precious favour point to heal that sickly child? Or should you be stockpiling them to smite ghouls? Or are you going to play this completely selfishly – will you instead burn up a favour point to heal a small cut on your potential girlfriend in order to get her to like you more? The gamebook doesn’t fully exploit this level of choices and poking of your moral fibre, but it’s getting there.

It is a fun, likeable and light-hearted gamebook, but there are strong and better entries this year. The writing isn’t brilliant and the ending, where all of your friends appear out of the shadows to help you in the endgame, is a little silly. Saying all this though, there is something about this gamebook that is quite endearing. This was a good effort from Ivailo, I hope he comes back because he is on the right track and with a little more refinement he can do well.