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Underground > Creation >

Pick-a-path author wanted

10:28 / 25.04.03

You are in a room. It is lit from above by a strip light, which casts a harsh glare on everything, hurting your eyes. Someone wanders over - it is your boss. He gives you grief about something trivial, just to make himself feel like a man.

Work is stifling your creativity worse than school ever did. Something has to give.

You decide to:

(a) put up with the crap, because it pays the bills
(b) tell your boss to go to Hell, and walk out into an uncertain future
(c) start up your own electronic book publishing company to try and put some good books out there.

Not having the nerve to to b, I did c (while still doing a) and I thought it would be fun to resurrect the pick-a-path adventure games I enjoyed as a kid, but put some fresh twists on them.

Myself and my creative partner (who has played/mapped all the FF books) have got plenty of ideas, but no time to flesh them out. We need someone to take our ideas and turn them into fully realised books.

Does anyone here fancy it?

Feel free to PM me, email me thru my site here or to my hotmail account (which can be found on my profile).

Whisky Priestess

13:25 / 25.04.03

Dammit, I used to love those things! Especially the first 10 or so in the Jackon/Livingstone series, City of Thieves and so forth.

I'd be well up for it.

15:22 / 25.04.03

Whisky,

I agree - the first 10 or so really rocked - especially House of Hell - where the whole map was a maze, which made it very difficult... And the Seven Serpents linked books were simply excellent. It is that standard we are starting at.

Okay, some background on what we have in mind:

As this is the first stab I am sticking to what I know - fairly standard 'fantasy' adventure, for which we have 'physical' maps - i.e. the layout of the dungeon and the surrounding land. The subsequent books go in VERY different directions. But for right now, I figured it was easier to get it right if I worked from a theme I knew well.

What I need is someone to take those maps and transform them into the paragraph structure - the links between encounters and rooms etc. I have detailed notes on all of this - which, I can send to you (is the address on your profile okay?).

The world is more fully realised than your average fantasy land - I have a glyph based language worked out for it, and common vernacular that most of the NPCs will use in conversation etc.

Should be good fun.

14:51 / 27.04.03

I would love to have a go at this but currently have somewhere near 10,000 projects whirling around my mind already. Beta testing?
BTW, for a mighty adult version of a pick-a-path you should get a copy of Life's Lottery by Kim Newman. It's a brilliantly vindictive take set in the real world, expanding outwards the more lives you play.

Whisky Priestess

00:50 / 28.04.03

Re my profile address - no, it's dead now. Yahoo reclaimed it. queenofkingsx@yahoo.co.uk is still good though. Sounds great, and paragraphs are just the thing for my currently fragmented attention span.

*

19:53 / 28.04.03

I've been thinking about those books lately, since ideas about more interactive and involving forms of entertainment have been occupying much of my time (I've got a project on burners right now that might answer the question of "just what is an interactive graphic novel and how would it work?"). I'd love to help. I'm PMing you my e-mail address. I don't know how many people you need for this thing, but count me in if you need me.

ONLY NICE THINGS

22:54 / 28.04.03

Dogpile on the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks - right now the Book and Comic Exchange in Notting Hill has about thirty of them sitting in the basement for 10p each. Gladiators, you will go on my second whistle.

Meanwhile, does nobody remember the Quill?

You are in a quandary. You see no obvious exits.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

09:13 / 29.04.03

There was some sort of ever-growing pulsating choose your own adventure out there on the interweb which users could add to, although I think it got a bit bollocksed when the people that started got bored and people who got involved later started insisting on turning the main character into a pregnant centaur living on Mars in the year 3002...

*

00:52 / 06.07.03

Lullaboozler iff'n you're out there, get in touch with me via entitything@goth.net or kcovener@arcanology.org. Trouble with my mail server and my operating system have lost me your e-mail address. Thanks very much.

18:07 / 08.07.03

This is one of my pet project ideas as well. I think it's fucking brilliant? Can I say fucking on this board? Fuck, I hope so.

If you're into this idea and haven't checked out {fray}, then you damn well should, 'cause it's cool. The stories are a bit lame, but the graphics/story concept is cool, and done quite well on many of the pieces there.

http://www.fray.com/

I'd love to talk more about this idea with anyone, just throw around concepts about how it can be done, how the market would take to it, etc. bla bla.