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Adventure Gamebooks - My History

My history with adventure gamebooks stretches back to the early 1980's when my parents bought me the Fighting Fantasy gamebook House of Hell. For a young boy already interested in games and horror it was pretty much the perfect gift. Other Fighting Fantasy books followed like Talisman of Death, Rebel Planet and Sword of the Samurai. From there I jumped to the Avenger (Ninjas were a bit of an obsession) and Falcon series (I bought five of the books but sadly just missed out on the very rare final one!).

As I got older I lost interest in playing gamebooks and spent a good couple of decades experimenting with video and photography. The rigours of raising a family meant my focus changed again and web design, linux programming and hacking various games consoles for retrogaming took up a lot of my free time.

But books and writing were always at the back of my mind. I still devoured many books and random snippets and ideas for stories would frequently pop into my head unbidden and I would scramble to write them down before they vanished into the ether.

After some fairly major upheavals in my life recently, I now find I'm at the point where I can think relatively clearly without panicking about the world caving in and gamebooks have once again entered my life. I had a few vague ideas floating around in my head that slowly coalesced to form the basics of a book. After some experimentation I discovered to my delight that I was quite enjoying the mechanics of putting a gamebook together and even though some of the work can be tedious, the end results of finishing each task gave me a sense of achievement.

As a bonus, I find that lots of the little story ideas I have squirrelled away over the years would also make perfect material for conversion or use in a gamebook.

I will write more in future about the methods of creating and authoring an adventure gamebook but so far this has been my experience -

1) Have an idea! (Obvious really but you have to start somewhere!)

2) Decide what type of book it's going to be (Game systems etc - this may change as you go along)

3) Research! Lots of research on your subjects and also artwork etc

4) Start sketching out ideas for flowcharts and maps

5) Refine these into proper final versions (May take many revisions)

6) Software or not? (If you are just writing for print you could write it out on a word processor and use cards to shuffle the entries. As I am aiming for print and ebooks I use Twine and GordianBook which let me create fully linked entries that I can import into other software)

7) Write the damn thing! (I split each 'level' into separate documents)

8) Author in Twine, test and convert

9) Create your book (I use Vellum and create two separate workflows for print and ebook)

10) Add artwork, test again (Spellchecks too)

11) Publish!

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