Hi there,

If you're reading this I assume you are one of 3 people, someone from the jam who is going to rate the game (thanks!), someone who has just stumbled across this jam for the first time or someone who has played the game and would like to know why I thought this would be a good idea 😂.

So to begin things, I found the jam a bit late, a couple of days to be precise. I originally planned on creating a text-based "mmo" of sorts. The plan was to have a website where players could create their own weapons and grind for loot using them, kind of enhancing their equipment with their own loot you could say. You'll hear me say enhance a lot throughout this I assume, as that was the theme for this jam. Anyway that was the original idea, it was based on a game I played a few years ago, and I honestly might try it again.

However, I got stuck trying to implement authentication  because I wanted to do it properly using auth0. On my website I use a custom model (made as a school project), which I possibly could have used, but I don't feel comfortable holding people's important information, such as emails / usernames. While trying to implement auth0 I discovered how rusty my php skills turned out to be, I understood very little of the documentation and procrastinated for around 5 days or so.

Eventually I decided to give up and focussed on a new idea. I had just watched a video by goodgis on how he made his own board game and was very much inspired to do something similar myself. I wanted to create a game that would be accessible to everyone (ie downloadable), but not a traditional 2D / 3D video game. I contemplated writing my own engine again, but I couldn't get the idea of making a board game of sorts out of my mind.

Eventually it was too late to make a full fledged game anyway (this was only around the 3 days mark, but with my ideas of the theme enhance, I wouldn't have been able to make a good graphical game in the time left), so I took inspiration from a book I had read when I was younger.

I don't remember much about the book, but it was a choose your own adventure and that's what was important. This was like the non-digital version of a text-based adventure like zork, and I thought, well, maybe it could be gamified further!

Day 1

With that idea in mind I set out to design the game. I started by writing the "How To Play" pages, along with the character sheet that the player can fill in at the start of the game. Although this changed a bit throughout development it set out a good basis for the game. I also wrote the battle system again, never looking back at it so I don't even know if it works! 😂

For the rest of the evening I researched how to implement hyperlinks and page number references in microsoft word. I needed to do these using word's system so that the page numbers would update automatically while I was writing, the hyperlinks also meant that pdf readers wouldn't have too look for each page individually!

Day 2

This was when I began content implementation. First I wrote the game's introduction. This would introduce the player to both the story and the concepts of keeping track of items, and moving between page numbers.

After implementing that, I drew out a content flowchart to show how the player would progress throughout the game. I started from the "introduction" sections (the top 3 boxes on the flowchart). I tried to keep content at a reasonable amount to allow me to create it in the next few days, but as you can see by the 3 red boxes not everything was fully implemented. The game was designed about one main city, "greenroot", which is a city in the fictional area Northern Altrund, a county in the country Quineland. My plan was to implement more cities if I had the chance but I never did.

Cities are a fantastic centre point for an RPG as they allow you to layout quests, shops and much more, all in one central area.  From here I created my first dungeon, the slime cavern at the end of the forest. That would be the end of the work I had completed that day, with the spider boss and final boss still left to implement.

Day 3

On the final day I had work. Yay!

This meant I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to create the final parts of content so they are slightly rushed. Even so I was able to create the boss in the final cave and the surprise at the edge of the cliff (that hints to what created the mist). This boss wraps up the whole story so I wont explain what happens in the fight here so you can play for yourself!

Instead of implementing the spider boss, I decided to stop creating stereotypical rpg monsters and polish the game. I added some images from unsplash.com, filled the item sheet at the end, linked all the page references and continued to polish the game until I believed it was ready to send off.

By that point it was 10:30pm and I had no time to read through the entire game and submit the game. I setup the itch page, uploaded the files and sent it in for the jam to hopefully here what everyone things about this experiment of sorts. If enough people like the idea maybe I'll release a DLC in the future or something, so please let me know what you think!

So that is the story of how I created this "game" out of a book. It's a weird concept but it seems to work quite well I think, feel free to leave a comment or a rating on the itch.io page if you can, would mean the world to hear what people thing! If you want to check out some more typical games checkout the itch page (click the logo below), or if you want a game developing contact me at TobycSmith.com.