Random Elements and Gameplay/Story Balance

Hello out there gamebook fans! It's been a crazy month since publishing Greek Winter Media's second gamebook, Spire Ablaze, on Amazon and shipping out numerous copies to the wonderful Kickstarter backers that believed in the project enough to buy not one, but two (or even three!) books in advance. To all who have purchased the book: A heartfelt thank you! Your support is what makes all of this possible! Now, on to the meat of the blog.

Gamebooks and combat, stats, and the will to survive

There are several distinct factions in the world of gamebooks and interactive fiction:

• Those who prefer the old school Fighting Fantasy style books with randomized stats, die-rolling battles, and death lurking around every corner. 
• Those who enjoy the absence of combat, stats, and random elements entirely in the vein of Choose Your Own Adventure or modern classics such as James Schannep's Click Your Poison Books
• Those who follow stat-based gameplay with no dice. This group is exemplified by the hundreds of available Choice of Games apps as well as classics such as Dave Morris's Heart of Ice. This type of interactive fiction often uses keywords

Most gamebooks fit into one of these three factions or are a slight hybridization of them. Fans have their preferred style, although most seem quite willing to venture outside of their comfort zone on occasion for a particularly good read. So, if you're writing a gamebook, which do you choose? Today's article is about stats and dice, with posts about the other styles to follow.

Die-rollers

For that true single-player Dungeons and Dragons experience, nothing is better than rolling up your stats and diving into a dungeon to slay monsters. One of the reasons that the Fighting Fantasy series and its fandom has endured so long is, to me, that it distils down that visceral random feel of old-school D&D combat into bite-sized chunks for the reader, and that death is always a very real possibility. These books are often as much puzzles to solve as they are narratives: Find the proper sequence of rooms, map out the corridors, minimize your risk and find the key objects that will allow you to ultimately succeed.

This style of books has a special need to balance narrative with exploration and most especially combat. Often, the narrative exists mainly to push the player into a series of progressively more difficult challenges. Dave Morris and Jamie Thompson's Fabled Lands is a classic example of this. Fabled Lands is often likened to a world where you are dropped in and make your own story; a kind of open-world gamebook MMO. The books and challenges get progressively more and more difficult and grow with the player as he or she travels  from book to book through the open world.

There are, of course, exceptions to this story-light style of dice-based gamebook. The Lone Wolf and Way of the Tiger books masterfully manage a happy medium between combat and narrative, as do their more modern contemporaries such as Will Fincher's Maelorum. It was these books in particular which inspired the structure and style of Greek Winter's Westward Dystopia.

When I first started writing Westward, it was in the style of an old school Fighting Fantasy book. You were a gunslinger on the run from mercenaries in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The story was light, the combat fast and furious. But the more time I spent in my post-apocalyptic world, the more I wanted to expand the whys, whens, and hows of the story. I wasn't content with a bare-bones framework any more so I compromised, making combat less frequent and sections longer and full of exposition.

So how should an aspiring gamebook writer choose to use the random element of dice? The two most common ways are combat and skill checks.

Skill checks

Fighting Fantasy called it 'Testing Your Luck', other books like Tin Man Games' 'Gamebook Adventures' series have you testing a skill level to overcome challenges. No matter what you call it, these checks allow a gamebook author to inject a little randomness into the narrative structure. The player rolls a die, and on a certain result achieves success or fails, turning to different sections based on the result. The most important thing about these checks is not to overuse them! While adding the random element of chance to the narrative can be fun every so often both for the player and author, it also takes away direct control from the player. Over-used, it can irritate more than excite players so use caution!

Combat, Bloody Combat

There are almost infinite ways to accomplish combat in a gamebook. One could emulate the classic FF style or even eschew 6-sided dice altogether for the larger grab bag die pouches of D&D fame. Westward Dystopia and Spire Ablaze utilize a system similar to a standard gamebook model with a slight twist. Both you and your opponent each roll 1 six-sided die , add combat modifiers, subtract defense, and deal that damage simultaneously. I chose this mechanic rather than the more standard turn-based system primarily due to how I imagined the combat in my head as I was writing it. Combat is fast and furious, and unless you get the drop on your enemy, it's unlikely you're going to get out unscathed unless you are a far superior fighter.

The combat style you choose for your book will need to be closely linked to your protagonist's stats. If you want to try a style like mine where damage is dealt simultaneously, you'll need to adjust the character's base HP upwards to compensate for all those battles where he or she might have gotten a flawless victory under other systems. Healing items become more important as well.

Another popular decision is to add gear that the player can collect that will slowly better their stats over time. Armor can increase defense and mitigate damage. New weapons and weapon mods can be added to the game and found by players to provide a sense of progression.

One thing that I did in my second book, Spire Ablaze, was to offer up an early decision between three weapons. Depending on which one you choose, your game play will be slightly different and require the player to think differently about how they approach or attempt to avoid combat. Spire is not a combat heavy book, which makes the occasional combats even more important. You can choose a more bulky weapon with great damage output but not be able to use medical kits during battle. You could choose a small compact weapon that you'll be able to hide on your person. It deals less damage but could possibly be concealed. This option comes with additional medical supplies to compensate the player.

Balance: Gameplay VS Story

I was reminded recently in a discussion with an early reader of Spire Ablaze that gameplay/story balance is very important to a player. You can have the best story ever written, but if it's a gamebook you'll need to remember to engage the player every few pages with a meaningful choice and the occasional combat. Spire, being a prequel to Westward Dystopia, has quite a lot of story I wanted to tell, and thus even though it has the same number of pages as Westward, Spire has 305 sections as opposed to Westward's 475. Both books abound with meaningful choices that change the story around you, but Spire's sections trend longer, including an important scene several pages long right before the climax of the story begins.What works best in the end will vary from reader to reader and I will continue to experiment with gameplay/story balance in Book 3: The Lords of Benaeron, a hub-based gamebook where you'll find an open city to explore, recruit fighters and factions for your cause, and eventually overthrow the corrupt leaders of the largest city in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. I'm expecting 'Lords' to come in at over 600 sections by the end, so it's going to be a wild ride!

Never stop experimenting!

So, what are your opinions on die-chucking and gameplay/story balance? Let me know in the comments below and I'll see you next time!

Westward Dystopia can be purchased on Amazon.com or greekwinter.com for softcover copies!

Spire Ablaze: The Shamans

Greetings out there gamebook fans! My post on gamebook mechanics is coming along soon, but tonight I wanted to share an awesome new piece of art for Spire Ablaze from series artist David White.

The mutant shamans inhabiting the post-apocalyptic fortress of Spire worship and carry out the bidding of a mechanical being that calls itself 'The Oracle'. Clashes between these religious zealots and the Shaper monarch have become increasingly common and could herald the beginning of a civil war pitting mutant against mutant! 

Spire's shamans adorn themselves with frayed bits of electrical wire and cords, believing them to be a spiritual conduit to their mechanical god. Find out more when Spire Ablaze releases this week on Amazon and www.greekwinter.com!

For more of David's work, check out the Facebook page for his upcoming graphic novel this Way to Hell here: https://www.facebook.com/This.Way.To.Hell.Comic

Anatomy of Gamebook Flow

Greetings yet again, and welcome to the Greek Winter blog! Today I'll be talking a bit about gamebook anatomy and design. The archetypal design of a basic dungeon crawl adventure is fairly straightforward: Opening text -> First room -> Choice of directions -> Next room. But when you start adding elements such as companion characters who can die or turn on you depending on your actions, large branching pathways that eventually merge, and conflicts that can be taken on in multiple ways, you need a way to keep what the player has been up to straight in the game. Referencing an event that the player never experienced is, in my opinion, one of a gamebook's greatest possible sins. How do you keep everything straight when you're weaving a web as complicated as this (click to see full-size):

Complete working map of Book 1: Westward Dystopia

Remembering what has happened:

There are several ways to avoid bad references, the first and most common of which is keeping the text intentionally vague. This works well in dungeon crawlers such as Fighting Fantasy which are often more of a puzzle and fighting game. If you want the reader to engage in the world and its occupants on a meaningful level, however, vague description can only get you so far.

The two most popular ways to govern these references are functionally identical: Keywords and asking the player a question before the choice. Did you kill the evil vizier? If Yes, turn to page 65, if not, turn to 102. Do you have Keyword Slain? If yes, turn to page 65... Keywords are used in several popular gamebook series such as Dave Morris and Jamie Thompson's Fabled Lands as well as the Critical If series, including the venerable classic Heart of Ice from which I drew a great deal of inspiration when designing my own gamebooks.

Westward Dystopia was written using the question and answer branching style rather than the keyword method. Due to this, I often found it difficult to expect the player to keep track of numerous actions they may have taken over several sessions of reading. I kept interactions fairly simple as well as their consequences. Did you kill this character? Did you side with the mutants? Simple things that are easy for the player to remember even if they put the book down for a few weeks between sessions. This kept things flowing nicely, and worked in a book featuring a lone wanderer. But how could I get that to work in a book with more complex human interactions?

In my second gamebook, Spire Ablaze, I decided to implement a keyword system. This allowed the addition of companion characters whose opinions of you can change depending on your actions. One companion character had as many as five keywords governing his reactions to the player and the player's reactions to him. This allows an attempt at realistic character interactions in a gamebook without delving into the realms of infinitely splitting paths and redundant text. In the main entries, you can keep it vague, and then continue with a branching path depending on the relevant keywords. It's not all that dissimilar to the question method I used in Westward, but it allows the player to write down a key word and not necessarily need to remember every bit of minutia that they may have experienced in the game before this point. Not all of Spire's companion characters change their opinions of you all that much over time, but for the ones that do, two in particular, this method is a godsend to the design and writing process.

Designing the Flow:

When I sit down and design a gamebook, one of the most important elements is the flow of the narrative. Is it completely open-ended like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where each play through may be completely different where characters and even the location change completely from play to play? Or is the story more carefully defined and regulated? You don't want to box the player in too much, destroying the illusion of freedom, but you also can only give so much free reign. Personally, I like to find a happy medium between the two extremes. As you can see in the above chart, players in Westward Dystopia start at the top and travel generally downward as they go. Near the beginning the player is presented with three major areas to visit. They can be taken in any order. The choices to the left and right return to the hub when they are finished, ultimately allowing the player to take the inevitable route down the middle when they choose to. Even this middle route features several of its own branches before reaching the choke point.

Choke points are inevitable in any gamebook with a singular narrative structure. Sooner or later the player will NEED to be presented with a certain bit of text, and all points must converge in order to deliver it. These choke points are crucial. They need to deliver important information or bring the player to a certain place, all while being vague enough to encompass the player's experiences, no matter which paths have been previously chosen. You need to leave the specifics for later when things start branching out again.

The bottom half of Westward encompasses a somewhat free-form jaunt through an area occupied by enemies. When mapping this section out in my graphing software I differentiated the nodes using color to keep track of which paragraphs go with which at a glance. This was very useful when designing the flow of what would otherwise be a very chaotic area. Inevitably, the player is drawn to the upper right of the second half and travels down the right edge to the final areas in green. At the end, the choices that you have made should have some weight. Branching paths are often locked to you depending on what you did earlier in the game. Who did you help? Who did you kill or ally with? Your choices will bring you to one of six major endings.

Next entry I'll be discussing design choices related to combat systems, character stats, as well as the dice or no dice controversy. Fans of my material know that I'm fond of the dice as a combat mechanism, but there are convincing cases for not using them such as the aforementioned Critical If books as well as newer series such as Marc Wilson's Dangerous Worlds. See you then!

Gamebook viewpoint characters: Style and Immersion

Warning: this entry contains some thematic spoilers for Westward Dystopia

There are several different ways to write a gamebook, and readers have their preferences. One vitally important element that often remains untalked about in the gamebook community is the nature of the book's protagonist. Will 'You' remain voiceless and opinion-less in such a way that the reader can project themselves into the character? Or will 'You' have stated opinions, dialogue, and thoughts that may potentially run counter to the thoughts of the reader?

The old school method trends toward the former style, where 'You' remain more or less silent. This works for dungeon crawlers and the simple plot lines of Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure books very well and many gamebook readers prefer it. This method does, however, leave the author more or less trapped in a very basic narrative space with little to no room for growth, personal discovery, or dialogue.

When I began outlining Westward Dystopia, I originally plotted it out in the style of the classic Fighting Fantasy books. 'You' were a blank slate, on the run for unspecified reasons in search of wealth and adventure in the wasteland. Needlessly to say, I ultimately found that this left the story feeling rather lifeless, and so I began adding some minor details to 'Your' back story. Mindful of how some players don't like to be told how they feel or what they would say, I kept the story to a minimum at first and stuck with the lone wanderer trope for the majority of the book. A part of me wanted to throw the concept of 'You' away entirely--to give the character a name and exact thoughts, to have the reader roleplay my character rather than project themselves into the setting, but somehow it just didn't feel right at the time.

Midway through writing the rough draft of initial adventure, I was feeling stuck in a rut and opened up a blank document to brainstorm ideas. Eventually, I came up with this essential bit of dialogue as presented to the player at the climax of the story, which has since formed the crux of the entire series:

"Typically you are presented with a small number of viable options, giving the illusion of free will and choice. It’s how we train the brains of our operatives to accept commands on their early missions. Have you ever felt as though your choices through life have been limited? Almost arbitrarily? Well there is a reason for that. Every eventuality that you survived would lead you to this outcome."

This resulted in a major breakthrough in both theme and narrative for Westward Dystopia: Control and exploration of the nature of gamebooks as a storytelling medium. Suddenly the entire nature of 'You' was thrown into question. If the story was about the reader experiencing and influencing the life of another person, seeing through their eyes as they read, then perhaps the character could have a voice of their own, could have their own thoughts and feelings while still remaining 'You'. Thus the meta-plot of the series was created, where the player is told from the opening pages that they are experiencing the memories of a mysterious 'Traveler' and reconstructing experiences from a fractured psyche. This particular framing device is only visited at the beginning and end of the book, leaving readers to become immersed in the world of the wasteland before the climax and ending pulls them out with a jerk as the readers realize and remember who the real viewpoint character is: themselves.

In order to give this framework more clarity, the opening sequences of Westward Dystopia and Spire Ablaze are written in third person, only shifting to the second person 'You' when the reader is immersed into the mind of our main perspective character and plays through the adventure.

The response from the gamebook community has been overwhelmingly positive thus far, and I hope to keep readers guessing as I further deconstruct gamebook perspective and explore the metaplot of Westward Dystopia through the next several books I have planend in the series!

Westward Dystopia is available now on Amazon and greekwinter.com.

Book 2: Spire Ablaze will be available by mid-October!

Spire Ablaze: Covers and Design

Lo, I have reached the top of the mountain, and from these dizzying heights Spire Ablaze is ready to be unleashed upon the world at large! This past week has been filled with the scramble of formatting, graphic design, and final playtesting. I find this portion of the publication process refreshing in as many ways as it is nerve-racking: It's a different way to vent my creative energies than writing, but it's also very important that everything goes perfectly! Formatting and design give potential readers a first impression, and in a growing pool of gamebook competition, I want my presentation to be top notch!

The eminently talented Tony Hough (Fighting Fantasy, Warhammer) provided me with a gorgeous digital painting to work with for the cover as you'll see below. I decided to go a bit out of my comfort zone on the design, especially on the back cover for this one. My designing tends to trend toward darker things: blacks and grays. Lately, as the Internet gets brighter and brighter, I've found that kicking old habits to the curb and using bright colors can really let the whole thing breathe. Besides, the cover art for book 3 is downright black, so Spire was my chance to let the light shine in!

Preliminary Spire Ablaze jacket

This one went through quite a few revisions, many of which tried to capitalize on the oranges and yellows of the fire, even to the point of setting the title itself ablaze. Over-all it just came out too harsh and garish no matter how it was done, so I decided on a light blue to fit in with Tony's sweeping sky and cloudscape. The mighty mutant king was enlarged and set in the bottom left, the clouds behind his stone throne weaving their way up into a blue-white gradient for the introductory text to rest upon.

I settled on the whipmaster's head for the spine. Something about his aloof and disapproving stare and tattooed head just works perfectly for me. I decided to feature headshots on the spines of all the Road Less Traveled books back on Westward which sported Tony's bright blue mutant staring out at readers from the spine. I also decided to add the Greek Winter logo which was conspicuously absent from Book 1. Ah well, live and learn eh?

Spire Ablaze will be shipping to my Kickstarter backers in October and will be available for purchase on Amazon and greekwinter.com in November! I'm also working on an Android version which should arrive on the Google Play store sometime in November or December as well!

Of Gamebooks and Guns

I've noticed throughout the years that guns of any traditional type are very rarely used in gamebooks. This could have to do with the fact that the majority of these books are spent in fantasy-based environments or sci-fi settings where if guns are used during gameplay they take the form of laser pistols and plasma rifles.

When working on Westward Dystopia I had a vision of the main character: A grizzled vet of many harsh wasteland battles, scouring the sands of the post-apocalyptic environment and duelling mutants, bandits, and gunslingers with a pair of revolvers. I wanted western meets post-apocalyptic and I stayed within those lines for the most part, although I decided to skew sci-fi in the end at what may have been the expense of some western bits. Point is though, I wanted those revolvers. They were key. When I discussed the design of the cover for Westward with illustrator Tony Hough, those crossed revolvers were right out in front. Tony came up with a fantasy twist on a revolver design that I found quite visually appealing and I never thought twice about how such weapons would function in real life.

Then I started writing and I realized that I didn't know the first thing about guns. Although I grew up in the US before immigrating to Canada, I have never owned a gun, although my father has always been a big fan of the old romanticized westerns, so as I grew up I learned about Hollywood's take on the days of the 'Wild West'. I bluffed my way through it and for the most part I think it was a success (at least nobody who purchased the book ever wrote in to correct me on anything!) I've been fortunate that the combat in gamebooks tends to be told through the rolling of the dice rather than exposition and the player only hears what happens after defeat or victory. I kept the revolvers vague, more as an extension of the main character than an object in the inventory: they were important, but their function was left to the player's imagination.

Writing Spire Ablaze changed things a bit. This second book begins in the Technomancer city of Root, where guns are far more common than out in the wastes where technology is a relative unknown. In Spire, the player has an option of three weapons to choose from after the opening sequence. This led to the need to be even more vague in the text afterwards--referring to the weapon as 'your firearm' or 'your weapon'. Due to the necessary generalizing later on, I wanted to offer the player a good look at their companion weapon in the form of text and imagery in the item selection paragraphs. I wrote up descriptions to the best of my knowledge, drew some companion art, and moved on to write the rest of the book.

Midway through the draft I happened upon an episode of Brandon Sanderson's 'Writing Excuses' on Youtube which centered on 'Guns in Fiction'.

It's quite an interesting video if you're a writer or heavy reader (as are most of Brandon's Writing Excuses episodes) and it made me think twice about how I was portraying guns in my gamebooks. While I ultimately decided to keep the descriptions basic and gamebooky, I made sure to take the time to research each type of weapon and catch myself in what would have been some rather glaring errors. I spent an entire afternoon reading up on miniguns for an optional sequence near the end of the book, getting sucked into the history of the forms of weaponry that descended from the original designs of Richard Gatling during the American Civil War. I even added a few tidbits to the sequence based on my research.

Future books in the series will focus more on the protagonist's electrical powers, with Book 3: The Lords of Benaeron falling more into the classification of low-fantasy dystopia than post-apocalyptic western, but guns will still play a part. Their influence is spreading slowly but surely across the wasteland and not even the might of the Technomancers can fit the technological genie back into its bottle now!