Gamebook Creator

Hello everyone, this is Farkran of Divinegames.

We are fond of gamebooks and text adventures like you, and we decided to develop a gamebook creator which is complete, captivating and most importantly easy to use!

How often did you look for a editor and found only incomplete, overcomplicated or extremely limited programs? Our tool will be exactly the opposite: you will be able to use all the common features of a gamebook such as branching paths, but in addition you will be able to add and remove text dynamically through conditions, you will be able to set and use variables (such as character name, attributes, items, currency, experience and much more) and last but not least you will be able to export your book in a cool looking HTML page. All of this without need to know any programming language, because the program does it all by itself.

With your help, this project could come true :slight_smile: support us on indiegogo: indiegogo.com/gamebook-creator?a=834321

If you are interested or if you have any question, contact us at info@divinegames.it

Thank you for your attention!

I do not mean disrespect to your project, but this is a fairly well-explored field.

Could you explain in what ways your plan differs from VaryTale, StoryNexus, Undum, ChoiceScript, Story Explorer, InkleWriter, or the dozen plug-in CYOA libraries for TADS and Inform? You don’t say more than “…they are all either incomplete, very hard to use or extremely limited.”

Will your project be open-source, free to use, or some other model?

You say you’re working in .NET, so your authoring tool will be Windows-only. You may be able to get it working on other platforms using Mono, although I have no personal experience with that so I can’t say it doesn’t suck.

Our tool is meant to be far simpler than those you mentioned, however less limiting for the writer.

For instance, Inform and TABS are kinda nice tools, but they are a bit overcomplicated for a user with next-to-no programming knowledge who just wants to write a good story, be it a simple gamebook or a more complex text adventure.

What we want to do is to offer writers a user friendly tool with all those features such as declaring and calling variables, set dynamic conditions, set choice paths without need to know a programming language.

The demo vid doesn’t show how one could make a “more complicated text adventure”. Is there a chance of a world model happening?

To be honest, what I saw in the video didn’t really explain things that well. Could we have some more detail? From what I could see, there was nothing there I couldn’t do in ADRIFT right now if I wanted to, and you don’t need programming experience for that.

At the risk of sounding like I’m repeating what everyone else said, Quest has a gamebook mode, doesn’t require programming (AFAIK) unless you want to do really complicated stuff, and can be played offline, online, in an iPhone or in Android…

We just posted an update on our campaign site, answering some of the most frequently asked questions.

You can view it here: indiegogo.com/gamebook-creat … 21#update1

Dude, you seriously need to craft your pitch to fit your audience.

Consider that the overwhelming majority of the people here are already capable users of one or several of these platforms; that some of those platforms are mature and full-featured; and that, by contrast, your platform isn’t even in beta yet. That said, you might want to phrase things a little more diplomatically.

Consider, too, that people are likely to look pretty sceptically on the idea of a platform that is ‘complete’ while still being simple and requiring no programming language. For instance, I don’t really think of any platform as being complete unless it has sophisticated, well-documented tools to manipulate lists and strings. That’s going to require programming, no matter how you slice it. A system that avoids the need to know any programming language is going to be limited in some ways – or, at least, claiming otherwise is a pretty extraordinary claim, and needs to be backed up with some solid proof of concept if you want to be taken seriously.

Also bear in mind that the IF community quite regularly sees new people declare that their shiny new platform will fix all of the world’s ills, shortly before they turn out to be all mouth and no trousers (and then, generally, flounce off in a huff when we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of their vision). This credibility problem goes double when you’re asking for money.

This is not to say that the existing platforms cover everything that people want. There are definitely gaps that could be filled. But you need to figure out your niche; and it honestly doesn’t seem as though you’ve scoped out the competition all that well. If you’re making a gamebook/CYOA platform, I7 and TADS are not the things you need to be comparing yourself to. Rather, you need to be thinking about where you fit in vis-a-vis Undum, ChoiceScript, Varytale, StoryNexus, Twine, Inklewriter and perhaps the CYOA-ish side of Quest. (You really shouldn’t describe what you’re doing as ‘text adventure’, by the way; while the term ‘interactive fiction’ gets used in some pretty variable ways, ‘text adventure’ has only ever referred to parsed-input, physical world-model games of a fairly old-fashioned type. A gamebook is not a text adventure.)

It appears to me as though the niche you’re aiming for is somewhere close to Varytale, but (in contrast to Varytale) aims for something RPG-like and with a more literal, paper-gamebook-style choice tree. Or, to put it another way, something like Choicescript with a simple GUI. I think there’s probably room for a platform like that: certainly, I see lots of people trying to make combat RPGs in I7, or tree-branching, character-creation-heavy RPG-like things in Varytale, when those platforms aren’t really designed for that kind of thing.

We posted another update on our campaign site, including screenshots of the basic features.

You can view it here: indiegogo.com/gamebook-creat … 21#update2

How about answering some of the questions raised here, as opposed to simply telling us about updates on your campaign site?

Our updates actually answer questions raised here! Our first update is all about FAQs, some of which were asked here, and our second update provides demonstrative screenshots.