Game books

[bear]

Hi all,

as an aspiring author and games designer and long time fan of FF and Lone Wolf I have an aspiration to one day produce some of my own material which is how I came across your forum whilst surfing though it does seem to be primarily aimed at those looking to create adventures online - is this right?

Thanks in advance for your time,


Bear

[Zaphod Beeblbrox]

Hi Bear

You are correct indeed - online gamebook creation is the aim of fightingfantasy.org, but this does not exclude the use of the online editor for downloadable copies of your adventure.

At the moment it is possible to create an adventure online and download your creation as a zip archive to your own HDD. The only drawback being that if you are hoping to print out your own adventure any ABML tags that you have created will be present in the texts. Note though that the editor does not create any tags of its own so if you created an untagged adventure it would be perfectly printable when you download it (though not playable online).

I cannot stress enough the importance of using the download backup facility at regular intervals when creating your adventure.

You may be interested in some future development plans for adventure creation, namely:

1) Expanding the zip archive function to:
- download each adventure as one large file
- convert download adventures from ABML format to HTML anchor tags only
- convert download adventures from ABML format to non-tagged format

2) Generate adventure path tree graph in SVGZ format allowing you to see exactly where all the paths of your adventure lead and locate any unlinked or 'orphaned' references (to see exactly what I mean some manually created graphs of printed material are viewable here: homepage.ntlworld.com/outspaced/ )

If there are any tools or facilities that are not implemented or mentioned which would be of use to you in your writing please let me know so I may add them to my ever growing 'to-do' list.

I hope that the existing system may be of some use to you in your endeavours and that the long term plans are enticing enough to keep you interested :-)

Zaphod

[bear]

Cheers for this Zaphod - I'll look in from time to time but in the meantime wish you all the very best with your own endeavours!