Hello. I’m Bob, I’m an old fart and for a few years I’ve been working on a labor of love to old fuzzy memories. Oh I know its as amature an adventure as they come but it is feedback I desire.
Back in 1992 I played the original “Alone in the dark” video game and its introduction to the “lovecraftian tropes” stuck with me ever since. Various attempts to make a quake map based on Derceto and a fan fition failed but I can do fractional stuff and a game book seemed right up my alley. I knew I could do this ‘conversion’ of “alone”. and most importantly I knew I could complete it. So I got cracking at it, most often after 11pm after long days at work.
After I had the framework set out using Advelh 2000 game book creator on my old XP laptop It was suggested that I spice it up more and start making it an original creation. So I rewrote the entire back story, swaped out a lot of monsters, added a ton of paintings to the haunted house, etc etc. Oh a lot can still be identified as coming out of ‘Alone’ but the detail makes a big difference. It makes the video game feel like a cartoon in comparison.
That laptop had no integrated spell checking so it’s still a beast of uncorrected errors but the game is what I desire most to be reviewed. I know a ton of dice rolling needs to be riped out and it feels more like a portable county fair horror ride that fawns over lovecraftian tropes than an auctual haunted house.
Yes this is a game book and not a computer program affair. Pencil, paper, two dice and preferably an E reader. What can I say Im old and the 80’s was my time.
I’m not going to do any spell checking until I have major sections rewritten after constructive feedback from reviewers. So whomever peeks at this thing has to have a strong stomach for bad spelling.
@b1g0leb0b Not going to lie it took a long time to get to go to page to page in the pdf file but the writing made up for it because it was absolutely amazing. 10/10
Ahh, nostalgia. From one old fart Bob to another, welcome to the forum.
I would have to agree with @ToastlessToast that this has great potential but in the current format is a chore to play and simply ruins immersion, which is a tremendous shame. This genre as a whole is also sadly lacking in “modern-style gamebooks” like Choice Games (the main focus of these forums) and for that reason alone I personally think it would make an excellent addition to the Hosted Games stable. Moreover, the bulk of it is already done - it just needs converting to ChoiceScript and then undergo some serious editing for spelling and the like.
Lovecraftian themes are fair game since most of that’s in the public domain now.
If the game contains aspects of Alone in the Dark then it won’t be eligible for Hosted Games, unless you can obtain express permission from the copyright holder. But if you can (or have) strip out what’s identifiably Alone in the Dark then you should be okay.
If you want to show it around to people you really should spell-check it. It’s not fair to make reviewers read through something that you’ve not taken the time to run a spell-checker over. I’m not saying pick over it with a fine tooth comb and fix every single detail, but you’re speaking of a very simple, basic process, that can vastly improve legibility.
I haven’t played Alone in the Dark. I’ve not read your pdf file. Choicescript is great though since you can automate the whole pencil, paper and dice into the game itself. There’s other programmes out there too that let you make gamebooks though.
Updated to html
For some reason google drive does not recognize it as html and only links it as a plain text file
you will need to ‘download and save’ as .htm or .html and re-view with a browser.
There is some “bold face” font issues but that’s due to the converter aspect of Advelh.
