We squeaked out a quick update to GBAT 1.8 today.
You only need this update if you are still using Windows XP and are having problems with some controls not displaying. I know, I know, still supporting XP. That makes us better than Microsoft right?
If you don’t use Windows XP, you are better off waiting for GBAT 1.9, which is just around the corner!
Secret imp whisper: GBAT 1.9 will have a book outline and improved navigation.
Adventuring souls,
We are delighted to report that the latest version of GBAT is out!
We’ve fed a couple of bugs to the imps and we’ve also added a much requested feature: Map zooming!
So please enjoy, and let us know how you like it!
The next version is going to make navigating your gamebook a dream, so stay tuned for that!
Greetings hot sweaty sexy Adventurers!
Version 1.7 of the GameBook Authoring Tool is here. The imps have been informed.
You’ll notice the section text view isn’t there anymore. Don’t worry! There’s still a way to write your book!
Hover over one of the section boxes in your section map.
Clicking the expand button will open up a nice text area for you to write in (you can also double click to get here).
Now you have lots more space to write your exciting adventures in!
Download the GameBook Authoring Tool 1.7.
We’re also going back to having more regular updates. A lot of feature requests have come in lately so we’re going to start to tackle those. I know a lot of you are creating HUGE maps and are having some navigation problems so that’s what we’re going to look at next!
Make some beautiful words.
As part of the April A-Z blogging marathon, Stuart Lloyd has recently interviewed Daniel about his favourite gamebooks and the future of the Gamebook Authoring Tool.
Stuart really knows his gamebooks and is a nice guy. Lloyd of Gamebooks is a good read for all gamebook fans and there’s bound to be a lot more interesting articles pop up during his latest quest!
Hello Adventurers!
We’d like to push out one more release before the end of the year, so here is version 1.6 of the GameBook Authoring Tool.
We have better editing support, and now we have the full do/undo stack. This means you can shuffle and edit your book as you feel the need to. If at any point you are not happy you can always undo and revert your changes back to your last happy state.
You can access the undo buttons via the toolbar, the edit menu or the shutcut key ctrl-z (and its inverse, ctrl-y).
Big thanks to everyone who has reported bugs. All known bugs have been fixed in this release. In particular:
Losing Focus while typing
Gamebook map text not sizing correctly when Windows Font size changes
The imps have taken the bugs home as pets, so hopefully they won’t be in the software any more.
Download the GameBook Authoring Tool 1.6.
So that’s it for this year. There’s a ton of new features planned for next year, don’t worry! And please don’t hesitate to let us know your own ideas!
This has been our first full year, so thank you everyone for your kind words, links and support. It really means a lot and we are going to give you the best gamebook authoring software available!
Write well. See you next year!
Happy Halloween!
No tricks, just a treat: here’s a very special choose-your-own zombie adventure…
You awaken with a terrible headache and a sore arm. Rubbing your head, you groan, sit up and wonder why you are sitting on the dank earth. You smell a nasty smell and watch as a piece of your flesh tumbles to the ground.
Oh no! You have become a zombie!
Lose 1 point of flesh.
Your fingers feel a hole where your brain used to be.
Cross your brain off your adventure sheet.
This is probably quite unusual but at least you don’t have to worry about it too much.
You catch a smell of something in the air. Something warm and lifey.
The last thing you seem to remember was going out for a nice walk. It was such a beautiful evening. The air was heavy with the sweet taste of autumn.
And on this walk you saw that man. That shambling, smelly, rotten man. Come to think of it, he may have been a zombie. He did bite you and go “Rawwwwwrrr!” and then that girl went “Oh my god, it’s a zombie!” So yes, there is quite a good chance that you were bitten by a zombie.
Something drops off and you feel tingly.
Cross 1 piece of flesh off of your adventure sheet.
The strangest thing is, you can still smell them both.
You come across a zombie trying to chew a tree.
You see a young girl bathing in the river. She is singing a strange and soulful song. It’s an odd thing to do, especially on a really cold November evening. After she has just watched you being mauled by a zombie.
You find your brain is still there. Phew!
In fact you don’t feel too bad at all. You’re not a zombie afterall! You’ve just woken up from a really bad hangover.
That was a close one!
You try to get your thoughts together.
What day is it? Thursday? You watch the sun come up. Friday. The sun goes down again. You’re not sure. Your brain hurts. Do you even have a brain anymore?
You reach up and feel the top of your head.
“Running” is a slightly generous statement. You meander to your feet as quickly as possible, kicking a couple of toes off in the process.
Cross 2 toes and 2 points of flesh from your adventure sheet.
You then begin shuffling towards the bright lights of the city. Your motor skills are awkward and obtuse. This is going to take ages.
You see a man in a truck. Lettering adorning the van reads “Bob the Zombie Hunter”. A dead zombie hangs out the back of this truck.
Bob looks at you with suspicion.
You grit your teeth hard, causing a lot of them to fall out.
Roll 5 dice, and cross that many teeth off your adventure sheet.
One week later, you arrive at the science lab in the city. A scientist is working on his latest project. It’s probably a zombie cure.
His brain smells delicious.
You manage to get a good bite of Bob, before he smashes your decaying body to bits.
He tastes of a very bland chicken, and you’re mildly disappointed.
“Excuse me, young miss, but I appear to be in a bit of a predicament,” you try to say, but it comes out more like “Rarrrrrg! Arrrrgh! Braaiiiiiiiiiiinsss!”
The girl screams and whacks you hard in the side of the face with her broomstick. Your head drops off and rolls under a bush.
“Rarrrg arrrg!” you ask Bob.
Bob pulls out a big gun and fires it at you. You flop to the ground in glorious peace (and many pieces).
Swimming is really difficult in your new, decaying body. You feel parts of you dropping off as you swim against the water resistance.
Cross your arms and legs off your adventure sheet.
By the time you get to where the girl was bathing, you realise she left several hours ago. With disappointment, you gently bob out to sea.
“Rarrg!”
“Arrrg!”
“Ra!”
“Rarr.”
That entire exchange took about 6 hours. You think about saying goodbye but think better of it, so you shuffle rudely away.
A new day dawns and you’re still a zombie. I guess you’re just going to have to get on with it now.
You find yourself munching on a tree bark.
It’s not very nice, but at least it’s something to do. This is how you spend your remaining days.
You pounce on the scientist and eat him. The vial of zombie cure rolls off the table and smashes into a million pieces.
Don’t care. Had brains.
Fourteen books read, played and reviewed, and well done to all of this year’s Windhammer Prize entries! (If I somehow missed your entry, then please yell at me and this will be fixed.)
So! Let’s review the experience.
Firstly, a massive thank you to all of this year’s authors. Writing a gamebook is tough – I know (this is why the gamebook authoring tool exists). But not just technically, it’s also a massive creative challenge. So if you managed to get an entry out then this is a fantastic achievement. Please carry on writing for us, because you’re great.
Next, my opinion counts for nothing (apart from the three votes I get to cast later). Please don’t be upset if I reviewed unfavourably or over-enthustiastically. I tend to enjoy stories, words and puzzles over dice rolls, treasure hunts and clever rules. This is partly due to the true magic of gamebooks – not only are the genres endless but so are the mechanics. With so many variables, what appeals to one person won’t appeal to the next. So again, whatever people say, write more.
Let’s take the time to give a small applause to http://www.arborell.com/ and its sponsors, without whom we would have nothing to talk about right now. The site has been running the Windhammer competition for six years now and the prizes are getting better each year. The gamebook revival is due in part to lovely movements like this.
Finally, a message for you, gentle reader. Gamebooks are back, and there is no better time to be a consumer of the gamebook. We have kickstarters to revive the old books we love, and several companies producing gamebooks in formats we never thought possible. I have a small computer in my pocket and on it I can find infinite worlds.
So support and make noises about the authors you discover and the books you find! Read the Windhammer entries and get your votes in before the 30th of October.
Now I have the terribly difficult task of choosing just three entries to nominate for this year’s prize…
Warning! Review may contain spoilers!
Tipping Point is an old-school action packed entry for the Windhammer Prize 2013. You play an adventurer who has dreamed of the modern day, and, troubled by the dream, sets out to discover the future.
The book opens with your character going up to the nearest castle and knocking on the front door. As soon as people realise who you are (you will play no newbie here) you are granted an audience with the king. And here you are given your first mission: to collect tax from the peasantry! I eagerly cram on my new uniform and set out to meet the locals.
The writing in Tipping Point is as good as anything in the competition this year, but the disappointment is that there isn’t much in the way of a plot. This is why I class it as something from the 80’s, where you get from point A to point B by whichever illogical way possible, picking up items along the way and hoping that they are the right ones. There are many choices along the way, but there’s never any clue to which might be the correct choice. Do I want to be a tax collector? Yes! No! I don’t know! What was that dream all about? Can I have a clue?
She sighs. “Do you recall so little? The future is never chiselled into the monolith of the world. It is
like an ocean, turning, flowing. You have seen one of the images it will carve in the cliff-face, if its
flow continues in a certain direction. But the flow is always shifting, and each of us is a part of it. It
may turn another way, or it may not turn at all.”
It’s also combat heavy but the rules are very simple. You just roll a dice and subtract this from the health of whoever you’re fighting. Then, they have a go. (Repeat). It’s a simple but unbalanced system. My first play through I got mauled by a pack of zombies, so I cheated and went a different route (this is allowed because nobody saw). I lasted a little longer until I got bashed up by an iron elemental. The combat is unforgiving, with a couple of bad rolls and it’s all over.
The gamebook is tough but intriguing. There are even rules for army battles, which I never got to experience. The story could do with a bit of direction and the combat could do with tweaking, but if you like a gamey gamebook this might be your thing.
Download The Thing That Crawls
Warning! Review may contain spoilers!
The Thing That Crawls is a hack n slash gamebook entry for the Windhammer Prize 2013. It’s combat heavy and story light, and in it our character descends into a mine to discover the fate of a missing guard.
“Now, please understand that we had the site verified by one Brother Verdant Llyme, one of the
finest sages money can buy, that the site has had no mature magical activity in at least thirty
millennium, so we are not expecting anything severe. What we desire from you is simple.”
A lot of entries have been light on the game part this year, but this one tries to make up for all of them. We begin with picking a character. Here we have the action rpg canon of wizard, warrior and rogue. It’s not really much of a choice, so I create Boris Furryhands, the fantastic and sexy wizard. After reading the combat rules, I became a bit confused by how spells work, so I decided to retire Boris and call for his cousin instead. Barry Angryhands the warrior was now the chosen one. Would this make combat slightly easier to understand? Well no, I’m also confused by how combat works. It’s like rock, paper, scissors but without any of the elegance of that system so there’s a chart we can refer to at the start of the book quite a lot.
Halfway through the book you come to the end of the rules and the adventure begins. I’m immediately attacked by a plant. I then walk down a corridor and I’m attacked by the plant…again. And then the book breaks and I am stuck (one choice leads to the paragraph I’m already at, and the other two are missing). So I’ll go back in a time a bit and choose the other corridor. I’m attacked by the same plant…again, and then we meet a troll. We’re given the option to trade with him, or to fight him. As I have nothing cool apart from my hammer of rage (which I want to keep) I attack the troll. Unfortunately the book is broken again and this takes me the paragraph where I successfully trade with him. This was too much for me so Barry decided to end his life by sticking his face in a plant.
This one is difficult to enjoy. It’s a dungeon crawl with a complex combat system and random encounters. It’s also completely broken. It’s an ambitious effort to turn a computer rpg into a gamebook but the problems with the game system make it unplayable.
Warning! Review may contain spoilers!
The Scarlet Thief is a cyberpunk crime and mystery adventure set in a colourful world, and an entry for the Windhammer Prize 2013. You play Jacques Leblanc and are accused of stealing a valuable sceptre in a case of unfortunate mistaken identity.
The book opens with the police bashing down the door, just after you settle down with your tea and toast to read the morning newspaper. As it is with these things, the front page headline you have just read is now going to affect you in an immediate way. A quick escape later, and we’re exploring the streets of Eos. Here you find yourself dropped into a slightly familiar setting. It feels like a France in a parallel universe, with robots and airships common sights.
The plot is actually quite interesting, if slightly predictable (although I didn’t get too far into it – more on that later – but I felt like I knew where it was heading). The writing is mostly good but occasionally not so good.
You shuffle to your feet to open the curtains of your tiny apartment. Sunlight floods in, revealing the beautiful city of Eos, its towering spires and elaborate architecture a sure-fire way of bringing you awake with cheer. In the streets people, mechanical automata and shimmering aetherforms are already setting about their tasks of the day, while airships ply the sky, rising towards the great Flying Château overhead.
Later…
“You fellows are right stinkers you know,” Sarah says,
“Yes.” You agree, “You are.”
These were my final words before being clubbed to death by a thug with a cricket bat. And this is what is wrong with the gamebook: it is hard. You need prior knowledge to complete it successfully, otherwise, like me, you will die instantly because you’ve missed some vital object 20 paragraphs ago. I feel this is a big gamebook sin, and the reader should at least have a chance to play the book by choosing sensibly (not randomly). I’ve played enough gamebooks to know you are supposed to rifle through drawers and explore every room when your life is in mortal danger, but the Windhammer Prize is about moving the genre on and we shouldn’t be expected to do random things these days.
It is a shame because I think there’s a good gamebook inside waiting to get out. The storyline and world are all impressive and would be good to explore further. It is just a pity it does not award careful and sensible play. I should give it a second playthrough, and it is interesting enough for that.