Return to the Catacombs of the Undercity!

Wow! How long has it been? I'd talk about why it's been a while, but frankly it's just tedious real life nonsense that may be of personal importance but has nothing to do with this blog. It would be good if there was now an improvement in my blogging output, but I start a Masters in August, so there may well be an ongoing struggle between what I want to do, and what I should be doing...

In the meantime, (and how is it my pageview stats have essentially doubled even though I have posted absolutely nothing?) my entry in Tin Man Games "Gamebook Adventures" series, Catacombs of the Undercity, has been accumulating some very promising and awesome reviews (and no, I didn't pay anybody - I'm flat broke!).

Firstly, Tim Harvey gave it 4 out of 5 over at Proxholic, noting:

"In many ways, the gamebook really emphasizes the game aspect, since it's all-in-all a very interactive experience. The book part of the equation is really well-done too, however, with a very well-written story and some interesting and compelling characters."

Tim also notes that the gameplay is:

"An excellent mix of compelling story, branching choices for exploration and replayability, fun RPG elements and lots of random outcomes to keep you on the edge of your seat!"

Secondly, Andy Boxall at iPhoneFreak said that it was the best in the series yet (although Al Sander's The Wizard of Tarnath Tor has since been released to some deservedly fantastic reviews)!

Andy's review went on to say:

"If you’re an experienced role-player, then the thought of battling through dimly lit tunnels will probably appeal, and it certainly did to me!  Thanks to the descriptive writing, it’s easy to lose yourself in the story and even without the help of those excellent illustrations – from the same artist who worked on An Assassin in Orlandes – mentally visualizing your world is easy and very rewarding. 

I’m not going to bury the lead here, Catacombs of the Undercity is the best entry into the Orlandes series I’ve played yet.  It’s exciting, atmospheric and even amusing at times, plus there are plenty more beasties to battle too."

Lastly, Digitally Downloaded gave it 4.5 stars out of 5, saying:

"What makes this gamebook if anything better than Tarnath Tor is the story itself. Within the first passage of the book your character finds himself thrown down a deep, dark well, with no equipment. The goal? To survive and escape. This means the book is a classic dungeon crawl in its truest form, which is incidently a perfect fit for the form.

Given the quality of the story, this is the one of the best gamebooks I’ve ever played."

What can I say, other than I'm really happy that the amount of work I put into planning and writing Catacombs of the Undercity, and all the effort the amazing Tin Man team put into getting it into a publishable format, has been duly recognized!

You can find Catacombs of the Undercity here.

Tales from the Catacombs...

There's slowly been some feedback filtering downwards to my lair concerning Catacombs of the Undercity, my adventure for Tin Man Games' line of Gamebook Adventures for the various iDevices. Firstly, it's got nothing less than 5 star reviews at iTunes! Yay!

Secondly, this awesome review was posted as a comment to the Tin Man website:

This release got me into your games, thanks! I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ve played through to various bad ends more than a few times, and died countless times before even crossing the river… and I’m still finding new things to explore, and there are a few more achievements to pick up. The “roll three ones” one took the sting out of a nasty roll, and it’s been fun seeing which ones I get whilst exploring.

I also bought 2 & 3, which look awesome from the brief time I’ve spent on them. I am very happy with them all, except for the way they’ve filled my iPhone’s gamebooks folder and wrecked my beautiful organisational scheme. I guess I’ll just have to buy the rest when 6 comes out, to tidy things up.

So far, though, 5 (and perhaps the others) are among my favourite classic-style gamebooks. I can’t possibly compare them to Fabled Lands, as it’s a different style of game entirely, and Lone Wolf has the ongoing saga aspect with its pluses and (mostly, to me) minuses, but they’re better than every Fighting Fantasy game I’ve played, and my school used to have a shelf full of them. Keep up the excellent work!

Thirdly, Warren had a bash on the iPod Touch, and said:

I spent a couple of hours of unadulterated pleasure playing this last night, the perfect salve for a cold! I really enjoyed the atmosphere and the gameplay. I usually don't play gamebooks by the rules, but it was strangely liberating being made to, and not being able to flick back to the previous paragraph continuously (helped of course by knowing that you're not the sort of author who kills people for choosing one random option over another).

As for the dice, I loved them. I know it's just random number generation, but having dice on the screen made it seem less random than 'you lose/win'. And it seems to me, although I need to play a lot more to be sure, that the Tin Man system makes the most of random rolls, with players getting more random rolls the higher their stats are, so that the randomness comes down as you get better.

Looking forward to playing more. I have to work out how to power up without losing all my health and money...

Finally, a friend in Bangkok now has it on their iPod Touch, so I'll get to see my own adventure, plus all the hard work that Tin Man Games have put in, when I hang out with them at the pub tomorrow. The Undercity beckons...

[Remember, if you get stuck in the Catacombs and need some spoilers - let me know, and I'll dig out my flowcharts and see if I can help you out!]

Catacombs of the Undercity released on iTunes!

Dare you enter the
Undercity of Orlandes?

Thanks to the guys at Tin Man Games, my Catacombs of the Undercity Gamebook Adventure is now available to download at iTunes! I'm totally stoked - this was huge piece of work - nearly 800 paragraphs by the time Neil Rennison had finished editing it, and I'm thrilled it's finally out in the marketplace.

Better yet, for this week it's available at the knock-down price of $2.99, so if you've got an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, and you like old-school retro-dungeon-crawl gamebook adventures, then you've really got no excuse not to download it and give it a whirl. By all means give me some feedback too!

My only dilemma now is whether to grab a cheap iPad now so I can join in the fun, or instead wait until the new one that was recently unveiled by Steve Jobs is released...

The Future of Gamebooks?

As they do with all their Gamebook Adventure authors, Tin Man Games have just published an interview with me, which you can find here:

An Interview with Andrew Wright

I start off talking about Catacombs of the Undercity, but you could also consider the interview a sort of background on just who is this Fantasy Gamebook character! In particular, with reference to the future of gamebooks, I say: "With the advent of print-on-demand sites like Lulu, we’re also going to get more gamebook content that way, and also as PDF digital releases as well."

Indeed, given more time, this is what I'd love to do, and will certainly post about here in future. Essentially I'd like to create a new series of fantasy gamebooks that I could upload to Lulu as POD products and also distribute as PDFs via RPGnow and Drive Thru RPG. I've already got the bare bones together, but it's going to take time, which is my rarest commodity right now, so progress will be slow. Still, when it happens, you'll here about it here!

Also, getting back to the interview and the future of gamebooks, in terms of digital devices, I note that

with devices like the iPad, the Kindle, and various Android tablets, we’re also going to have a bigger market for gamebook apps, and I think it’s here that we could really see some amazing things happen in the future. Most people enjoy reading and most people enjoy playing games. Gamebooks are an obvious synthesis of the two and the app marketplace has the potential to take interactive fiction in many exciting directions… 



Enter the Undercity of Orlandes!


 Dave Morris (2011) has said, in terms of gamebook apps:

my objection to dice in egamebooks is that it's simply jarring to watch two dice clattering around the screen. What are they supposed to represent? I'm there in the moment, a tense confrontation in a foggy backstreet in Orlandes. And suddenly two big red dice are bouncing around, the result is added to a confusing string of numbers, I'm told "you miss!" and I tap to make the d--ned (little nod to EB there) dice roll again. Every moment I'm doing that is taking me further out of the story. Seems like the dice are only there because the originators of gamebooks in the early '80s happened to own a game store and they liked dice. Fine in a book (well, a necessary evil, I would say!) but kind of dotty on a phone. 

I can see exactly where he’s coming from – one of the things I like about Andy Spruce’s Fighting Fantasy Project website is that combat results are generated instantly which minimizes your timeout from the story. However, I'm not a fan especially of, say, the diceless Choose Your Own Adventure interactive fiction style, and I've come to realise I like dice and combat systems and inventory checks and so on. What I like about egamebooks is that your tablet or device can do all this for you, which, considering an extensive book like one of the Fabled Lands, negates a lot of book-keeping.

What do other people think? Would you prefer dice and game-systems in gamebook apps, or would you prefer the more immersive interactive fiction approach? Let me know?

References

 Morris, D. (2011, February 19). This Tin Man's got heart. Comment posted to http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2011/02/this-tin-mans-got-heart.html#comments

Enter The Catacombs!

Dare you enter the catacombs of Orlandes City?

They're testing the beta version of Catacombs of the Undercity over at Tin Man Games! It's my contribution to their excellent line of Gamebook Adventures for the iPad and iPhone, with wonderfully grotesque cover art by Dan Maxwell and atmospheric internal illustrations by Pirkka Harvala. The screenshots look amazing and I'm seriously thinking about counting up my savings and seeing if I can spend money to buy an iPad, just so I can play this, the Fabled Lands game, and all the other Gamebook Adventure titles. For the record, the previous releases by Tin Man Games are:

• GA1: An Assassin in Orlandes by S. P. Osborne. "Set within Orlandes City, nobles are being systematically murdered by a ruthless assassin no-one seems able to catch. Finding yourself thrust in the middle of a large conspiracy, you must make decisions that may put yourself and one other most precious to you in great danger. Can you locate the Assassin in Orlandes before it is too late?"
• GA2: The Siege of the Necromancer by Neil Rennison. "Set in the coastal town of Myr, you have returned home after a long Summer in the mines of Durath Tor to find your hometown besieged by strange creatures. A dark presence has taken over the town and you are the only one who can rid the stronghold of Erid Buul, the mysterious new Lord and his ghastly cohorts."
• GA3: Slaves of Rema by Gaetano Abbondanza. "Cruelly taken from your homeland of Orlandes, you find yourself in a far off land at the mercy of a gladiatorial arena. Somehow trying to find a way to escape overseas, can you also unravel a potentially dangerous mystery that puts two nations on the brink of war?"
• GA4: Revenant Rising by Kieran Coghlan. "The mighty city of Falavia, the military backbone of Orlandes, is under attack from an army led by a man claiming to be a God. How did this come to pass you ask yourself? You're sure it all started as some innocent adventure in search of treasure but somehow it turned into a nightmare. Also, why are people staring at you strangely? It’s not as if you look like you've recently been brought back from the dead or something. Oh yes, that's right. You remember now... "





Gamebook Adventures are also
available for the iPhone!



It's great to see these gamebooks go digital, in a format where they both look amazing, and take care of all your book-keeping and stat-tracking. No more pencils, erasers, and scraps of paper! Now, I just have to convince my better half that I really need an iPad tablet device...

Below is the promo video for Catacombs of the Undercity, featuring evocative music by Adrian Watkins. I can't wait until it comes out!

Catacombs of the Undercity!




Dare you enter the Undercity of Orlandes?

 

Just a short promo for now, as although I've got lots more posts to write-up, I've been currently transfixed by what's happening in Egypt, as well as having to take my daughter to a fun fair today...

Anyway, Tin Man Games, publisher of the digital Gamebook Adventures line of apps for the iPhone and iPad, have announced the impending release of my own adventure, Catacombs of the Undercity, which is number five in the series:

Captured by one of Orlandes City’s most infamous brotherhoods, the Red Hand Guild, you are thrown to the mercy of the subterranean world deep beneath the streets of the great capital. Wading through the sewers and other dark menacing places, your goal is to reach Undercity, the City beneath the City! Only there can you find the help you need to escape this underground horror and bring down the dark brotherhood from within. 

Catacombs of the Undercity is an old-school dungeon crawl with fantastic internal art by Pirkka Harvala and a great cover by Dan Maxwell. It will hopefully be available to download in March. I certainly had a blast writing it!

There's a video promo here.

And the original PR is here.