First look at the GameBook Authoring Tool

A slight name change later, and we’re happy to give you a sneak preview of GBAT, the GameBook Authoring Tool! In the screenshot, we have loaded in the start of the Bernie Hobnob adventure. Each section is represented by a white disc, along with its number and a short summary. Each line between these sections represents a choice, a “Turn to page…” cliffhanger. Look! It’s so visual!

Screenshot of the GameBook Authoring Tool (Alpha version)
First screenshot of the GameBook Authoring Tool (Alpha version)

We’re finding this is such a great way to write a Choose-your-own adventure book and can’t wait to share it with you.

We’re hoping to have the first version out within a couple of months. Stay close to BiscuitLand and keep updated!

Here’s how: follow us on twitter, rss or join the mailing list.

You find yourself in the Rose and Stickinsect. An update:

Come, wary traveller, welcome to the Rose and Stickinsect! Come warm yourself by the fire!..What’s that now? It smells of old men and dog sick? Ah, do not concern yourself, my friend! And the barkeeper has no plans to murder you…he does not do that kind of thing these days…Come! Sit, sit!..Just maybe not there, that is Hairy Mary’s chair. She is expected later and likely to rip your head off. There…that is fine. Let me tell you a little of what is happening here:

  1. This is the first official announcement of GBAT, the GameBook Authoring Tool! Have you ever written a branching adventure story and become so lost in your own devious plot twists and puzzles that you found yourself drowning in bits of paper, spreadsheets and databases? Us too! So we’ve created a designer. With this, you’re able to lay out each section of your story, branch off wherever you want and be able to move it around however you want, all the time being able to visualise the pages and their branches. Isn’t it a pain, once your gamebook is written, to jumble up all your sections and try to keep track of them? And then publishing your story is an exercise in copy and pasting to get the formatting just right…yuck! All this is covered in GBat. This first version will be available for Windows and we’re just about to go into beta testing. More information will be soon, with a release expected at the end of this month.
  2. BiscuitLand Legends (The PDF series). We realise not many of you have visited BiscuitLand before, so to ease you in we’re releasing your first adventure: Bernie Hobnob wants a biscuit. In this stirring tale, Bernie has settled down at home after a hard day at work to find he has no biscuits! Chaos and the possible end of the world ensues! This adventure is free and will be out soon in pdf format. It was entirely written in GBAT.
  3. BiscuitLand Adventure. This is our android text adventure game. We have the core engine written (the Harpy engine), it works, it’s dead sexy and around half of the story has been planned. We have some really exciting ideas and hope to bring this out by the end of the year!

    4. That’s all for now. If you could settle my bar tab on the way out, I hope to see you again soon! The next time we speak I shall tell you more of GBAT! I may even show you! Goodbye my friend!

Four Fingers and a Thumb

Or,

Why it’s okay to Cheat at Gamebooks

We all know it’s not fun to keep having to start again. How were you to know that the pretty lady was a vampire, or the left cave led to the dragon’s lair?
As gamers, and game makers, we do not believe that you should be punished for curiosity (even if you’re lucky enough to be a cat). In choose your own adventures, most of the time you wanted to find all the endings anyway, just to see what happened. You didn’t necessarily want your adventure to end there. Likewise, it’s also not fun to roll less than 10 for your skill score. It’s not fun to roll a 1 and be impaled to your ship’s deck by a falling mast (LoneWolf, I’m looking at you here).

It’s fun to find all the endings. It’s fun to peek down the right tunnel before you choose left. If you aren’t having fun then we have failed.

When making an electronic gamebook, it is easy to enforce a game over screen and be strict with the rules. But do we have to? This is your book, this is your game. It really is your adventure. This is why, when you play BiscuitLand Adventure, you will be able to undo any step you don’t like the look of. You will be given the ability to reverse death and unmake terrible decisions!

You can do with this gift whatever you feel. If you want to start again when your character dies, you can! If you would rather choose the less-fancier sounding restaurant, you can go back and do that too. The most important thing is to play how you want to play and have fun while you’re doing it.

What is BiscuitLand?

It is time to introduce BiscuitLand, the crazy world where our first game and downloadable mini-adventure will be set.

BiscuitLand is a place where every fantasy cliché imaginable lives happily alongside a society which, much like our own, is bumbling along. Albeit in mostly terrified and harassed bumbles. People work, play, fall in love, conduct illicit affairs and say silly things – only to a chaotic swirling backdrop of zombies, angels, goblins, mermaids, wizards, dragons, aliens, giant monkeys, werewolves, vampires and dinosaurs. Most of our characters also have an unhealthy obsession with biscuits.

None of our characters can imagine a world where none of this happens. It simply is. Their world is one saturated in fantasy, and day-to-day they have to cope. It is not an easy task, as you will soon find out! Our games will plunge you face-first into BiscuitLand and it’s up to you survive! And eat biscuits!

Be sure to follow us on twitter, rss or join the mailing list so you can find out as soon as our mini-adventure pdf is available for download.

Happy 30th Birthday, Fighting Fantasy Series

We’re taking a quick break from coding, biscuits and writing to wish our favourite evil warlock a very Happy Birthday!

It was 30 years ago today when we first took up our swords and dice and decided to raid Zagor’s mountain. It usually ended up with becoming Ghoul food or having some major organ poked out by a trap (due to using a wrong key.) This was the beginning of a series that spawned 50-something books, with the warlock making a return for book number 50 to torment us in ever more dreadful ways.

These books started a love of reading and choice – an interactive story, fancy that! We’re most likely here because of him.
So Happy 30th birthday Mr. Warlock. Have a biscuit!

Do you
Take the Jaffa cake? Turn to 17
Make the orc eat the digestive? Turn to 46
Attack the adventurer with the hobnob? Turn to 400

Welcome!

A big hello from Crumbly Head Games, and welcome to the site!

Like you, we love games and books, and we fondly remember the Choose your own Adventure and the Fighting Fantasy series. What better way to show our love than to create a game in the style of Choose your own Adventure, but, in this day of e-readers and computers in your pocket, an adventure book for the modern age?

We’re currently working on an engine for the Android platform to run our adventures, the first of which will be called “BiscuitLand Adventure” and will be available very soon. Our philosophy is to keep to the spirit of the original format – it was never uncommon to read those kind of books with your fingers being used as a 5-page bookmark, flipping back and forth after checking if you liked the results or not – while taking advantage of a digital format. This means exciting things such as achievements, mini games and social interaction!

Please show your support by signing up to the mailing list and following us on Twitter. It really does help and your feedback is invaluable to keep us on the right track. We’re also working on a free mini-adventure in PDF format, which will serve as an introduction to BiscuitLand and we’ll give to everyone on our mailing list!