CYA style book online - All Your Magic Are Belong To Us: The Legend of the Green Lake

Hello everyone!

We are two programmers and we developed in our spare time a website where you can play our new interactive novel, Choose Your Own Adventure style.

It’s called “All Your Magic Are Belong To Us: The Legend of Green Lake” and is set in a mountain camping where strange things happens. You are Scott, a kid with a passion for investigation, determined to unveil the mistery of the Hand passed by word of mouth at the campsite.

You can play it for free right now at this link: All Your Magic Are Belong To Us

We built the database and the frontend from scratch, with original drawings, a curated soundtrack to highlight the mood and all the perks coming from having our game working as a website (multiple save files, inventory etc).

We are very proud of our effort and had some nice reviews on the Italian version (we’re from Venice).

We translated it ourself, and is now fully available in english!

We would love to have some feedback on the story, the platform and the translation, and we hope you are going to love it as well.

Thanks to everyone that will try it and let us know what they think!

Marco and Fabio

3 Likes

I really like this! I think more people should check this game out. It’s really polished looking and has the distinct feel of a real gamebook, not just a hyperlink CYOA.

I only have two suggestions… well, more like complaints, honestly.

For one: Why did you decide to name your game after a dead meme? From the title I was expecting a lowbrow comedy game based on poop jokes, memes, and fourth wall breaking, and instead I was pleasantly surprised by a very attractive game with a great atmosphere and excellent writing. I think your title is doing your game a disservice. This is just my opinion, of course.

And two: Why do you allow players the ability to click on options that haven’t happened? Like the part with the piggy-flashlight if I never got the item. Was the intention to work on an honor system like old gamebooks? But the thing is that gamebooks would give you keywords to write down so that you wouldn’t forget if something happened or not. Something as general as “If Ted and Mike stopped you to ask you if you saw Martin?” is really vague. I can’t remember if they asked me that, so I’m unsure whether I’m cheating or not.

Anyway, thank you for making this. I’m enjoying it. :slightly_smiling_face:

Hello Tayruh, thanks for trying out our interactive novel and giving us your feedback.

  1. The name has been in debate for a long time. We chose it because it’s a hint to the underlying narrative of the game, that also might span across more adventures. We didn’t mind it being based on a meme because the book is full of little nerdy nods to the '90 so we thought it could still fit. There were several people that didn’t like it like you, and others that decided to give it a try exactly because of the title, so we decided to keep it this way in the end.

  2. It’s a deliberate choice to give the user the freedom to cheat on what they can do, just like the old gamebooks. One thing we check straying from that are the Faith Points to determine game over states.
    Still there can be many different approach to this, and we’re thinking about locking the choices that user couldn’t take on the first playthrough, and leave them free on a subsequent one to let the reader explore freely what he/she might have missed. Regarding the fact that you might not remember if you did something or if some events happened, the book tells you that they were saved in your inventory/notebook when you come across them, so that is the only source of information you need to check when you’re told you should be able to take a choice based on that.

Those suggestions/complaints are extremely useful for us as we now moved to a more professional hosting and plan to polish the system even further for our next novel. So thank you again!

1 Like

Thank you for taking the time to explain. I wish you luck on your next novel. :slight_smile: