You have survived... for now.

The "One Game a Month" challenge permits a little bit of slack at the end of the month to polish things up. I'm going to avail myself of that leeway - I've written all the story that I'm going to write, and I intend to revisit the code I wrote to turn the Twine file into an EPUB file to make it a little bit more presentable.

I'm not especially proud of the writing; towards the end, I was definitely just getting stuff down to wrap things up.

• page count:  38
• ending count:  12
• dangle count:  0
• word count:  3642

Interesting that I got to around a 33% ending/page ratio, which is pretty consistent with the CYOA books that I had looked at.

One thing that I gained from this particular experiment was the appreciation for people who can tell a good story. In this project, I struggled to tell a branching narrative of some twelve (or more?) interlocking tales. Perhaps I could have pulled it off if I had focused on it more consistently, but I knew that April was going to be a rough month to find time to work on this project anyway.

I'll be uploading the Twine source code, which feels like a technical completion of the challenge, and then I'll polish it a little bit more and upload the EPUB in a few days.

You can almost see the end of the month...

I've been dragging my feet on my branching path story "game" for April. Here it is, almost the end of the month; I really need to get some more written, and actually format it into a completed document.

So far, I have:

• 29 pages
• 4 endings
• 318 lines of text
• 7 dangling links
• 2261 words

I'm really not going for quality at this point, just trying to get the storylines to have endings. Not good endings or bad endings, or even good writing - I'm just trying to wrap up the stories.

Most of the endings are bad endings (though coming up with distinct ways for the reader to die has been a challenge). One of the good endings is almost a trap; you get into exploring a wrecked ship, and nothing you can do can help but get you rescued. Aesthetically, I don't care for that so much; if the player is given a choice, there ought to be a difference between the outcomes. Getting rescued one way versus being rescued a different way isn't good enough.

Since I've been writing this at different times, the feel of different passages is different, and that's OK - one part of it is more brooding and introspective, and I like that.

I was hoping to get 60 pages written and 20 endings, and I don't know that I have that much in me. If each of my existing dangling links is one more choice and two endings, that's 21 more pages and 14 more endings, that's 50 pages with 18 endings - pretty close to my target. I think I can do that.

A little more progress:

• 22 pages
• 2 endings
• A little bit of storyline merging
• 1669 words

The script I'm using to analyze the graph says that I've got 28 dangling links, which seems totally wrong. I told myself that I wouldn't be debugging code as much with this project, and yet here I am, debugging code. What's in the spooky cave? Only what you bring with you.

Working on the Branching Path Game Book Project

Inspired by "A Conversation with Ophion" by gnustoboz as well as the Car Wars Adventure Gamebooks, "Ring of Thieves" by S. John Ross, and, of course, the  Choose Your Own Adventure books, I've decided to make a branching-path gamebook for my One Game a Month game for April.

I've already done some work to take a text file and turn it into an .EPUB file, which is going to be my delivery format. There remains a little bit of work to do there (shuffling pages, making sure linkages work), but the majority of the work that remains is to actually write the story.

Again, taking a page from gnustoboz, I'm using Twine to manage my text. I could write it all in any text editor, but having a little bit of feedback about what pages link to other pages is appealing to me.

So far, I've created:

• 15 pages
• 20 dangling links to pages I haven't created yet
• 1042 words of (non-link) text
• 1 ending (where the character falls, trips, and is eaten. Be careful!)

I think I want somewhere between 64 and 100 pages, and somewhere around 10-16 endings. This isn't going to be a big book; in comparison, the old CYOA books had around 120 pages, with something like 30-40 endings. Perhaps I should scale down the number of pages I'm targeting - perhaps 60 pages with 20 endings is reasonable.

Sometimes, I feel like I'm writing a text adventure game, but then I remind myself not to give the reader/player any reason to want to backtrack as they explore the world. Then, I lurch into more narrative mode, and I have to remind myself to give the player meaningful choices every few paragraphs.

Perhaps, if I'm pleased with the outcome, I'll end up formatting a print copy that is available on Lulu. Perhaps some Creative Commons licensed clip art could be pressed into service to make it feel more like a real book.

It'd be kind of funny, kind of strange, if the first money I make from this One Game a Month project comes from a book.

Trying to take it easy in April, so I'm only working on two game projects

I need to focus on work this month (again), so I'm deliberately trying to take on a small project. Unfortunately, I've got two small-ish projects, and I haven't yet chosen, meaning I'm sort of working on them both.

Maybe I'll get one done early, and then defer the other one for May.

Idea 1: Crystal Golf

For my first idea, I'm thinking of a puzzle game where the player is shown a maze (a little like a sokoban configuration), with walls on a rectangular grid. Also on the grid are several crystals, and a ball. The player has a fixed number of "swings" to putt the ball around the level and collect all the crystals.

Nothing too challenging there code-wise. A handful of square images for the level, a few images for crystals and the ball, maybe some particle special effects when a crystal is collected.

Today, I did a first pass of generating a grass square, a grey stone square, a ball, and a crystal. Not much, but it's a start.

Idea 2: Branching Adventure Game Book

I've been toying with the idea of making one of those branching-path books that I read over and over again as a kid. You know, the one where you make choices at the bottom of the page, which would direct you to turn to page 31 if you wanted to explore the spooky cave, or page 63 if you wanted to check out the abandoned amusement park.

My idea is that this might take less code to do, especially if I use a tool like Twine / Twee. I saw somebody do a similar thing in March, which wasn't the origin of my idea, but it gave me encouragement.

One idea that I had, to make it portable and useful to people who might want to play this on tablets, was to make my book as an EPUB file, which I figured could make it easy to read - if I could figure out how to get links to work.

I spent a fair amount of today tinkering with the tutorial code from python-epub-builder and opening it up in Okular, the app that seems to want to handle .epub files on my Fedora Linux box. I've been getting weird behavior with the links, where sometimes they'll be underlined, and sometimes they won't be, and sometimes they change the cursor on hover, and sometimes they don't, and sometimes they react to clicks, and sometimes they don't.

I teased out some of the reasons for some of the weird behavior, but I still have behavior that I can't explain. I opened up my test book on FBreader on my tablet, and Aldiko, and to my surprise / relief / consternation, things seem to work fine over there.

Just now, I installed FBReader on my desktop machine, and it works OK here. So, maybe I'll work on getting an .epub book working in April - I'll still end up doing a little bit of programming, including getting a little bit of styling working, but presumably not as much work as if I were making a real game.

The working title that I've got for now is "Escape from Puzzle Island", which I'll probably abandon - or, rather, I'll probably keep that title for a different project (much) later, where the player will actually have to solve puzzles to progress.

The first book of this kind that I read as a kid was the Choose Your Own Adventure book "Space and Beyond", which boasted 44 different endings. Maybe I can get a dozen endings and call it good.