Game 4: Release

Here at last a completed version of my text adventure. It's more an artwork than a game, and more a writing project than a technical one but I'm satisfied with it.

A play through only takes a few minutes so have a look at it: Finding Yourself

Game 4: A Sample

I've made the web version of the software work and have put it up on elementalsystems.

Here is a demo of the system showing off the new on-line system and the layout and fonts that I intend to use for Finding Yourself. The text in this sample is drawn from a friend's micro fiction from a few years ago.

I'm happy with the simple look and think it will work well for my purposes in the longer project.

Game 4: Finding Yourself

For March I'm going to write a 'choose your own adventure' game inspired by the books of my youth. The game will be text only and fairly short with the minimum of interface - the idea I have in mind is more an interactive narrative work than a game, it is supposed to be interesting and perhaps amusing to wander through the story various ways as opposed to being winnable in any sense.

From  a technical perspective I have already have most of the pieces in place with a long term project called Narranet that I have been working on for some months: Narranet is a java-based generic tool for storing and handling narrative-like interactions expressed as a graph of nodes - in English this means it does things a lot like a 'choose your own adventure' with some added benefits. I have a narrative editor for this system and a desktop player that are quite functional. I mostly have a web-server based version of the player that can efficiently maintain a large number of simultaneous games back-ended by a database - but it doesn't do a few major things it needs to.

You can see an example of Narranet in action on my business site where it is used to simulate an interview with a client.

Game 3 - Deadly Dungeon Dash

A few weeks after the game jam and our team has continued to put some work into our board game. Additional play testing; a new pretty set of the game (thanks to JL) and also a play test with strangers went really well.

I wanted to share some photos from our design time during the jam, we had some large bits  of paper and coloured pens, just like real designers:

By the end of the weekend we had progressed to basic designs for cards and tiles tiles, the first semi-digital versions looked something like this:

Here is a photo of us testing our earliest sticky based versions:

A couple of weeks later we played on our first carefully constructed set with pretty coloured cards and plastic covered tiles: