Adventures are always great, but choosing your own — Priceless. That’s why I’m proud to present my very first blog-based Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story:
I’ve had a soft spot for Choose Your Own Adventure novels since back in the third grade when I was stealing them from the library. At summer camp in fourth grade, when I was supposed to be out dissecting owl pellets or capturing flags, I hid in my cabin in order to go through all the possible iterations of You are a Shark. Last week, as an adventure game design sample, I created this blog post based adventure game based on a supporting character from Return to Labyrinth. The holiday verse is rather contrived, and there’s no way to track your inventory short of an oh-so-passe notepad, but I had fun. Give it a try and let me know what you think. As time allows, I’d like to do more old-school adventure games, whether using a similar WordPress format, or maybe even playing around with AGS.
Of course, fans of choose-your-own-adventure-style storytelling should check out Jason Shiga’s works to see how it’s really done.
PS- I did return the stolen adventure books, anonymously, several years later. By that point, Dragonlance was 100 times cooler.
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I’ve been playing all night,
The rhyming caught in my head.
Poor little Skub, I say with dread,
To live like a Goblin, I’d rather be dead!
I played the whole game, I figured it all out
But there’s an error in the system that makes me pout.
I’m not sure if it’s my computer or a glitch of the site
But when Skub inquires all right
About pepper at the spice shoppe in town.
Something happens to make me both scowl and frown.
It’s the same answer given for asking of chocoballs given down
To him here. An answer mistake, I fear was dropped, my dear.
…Or you’re trying to drive me madder than I already am?
In which case I resent you,
You adorable ham.
Hehe. Just kidding. Anyway, yes, I’m getting a glitch. Either it’s my computer (which has been giving me a hard time lately) or it’s a mistake on the site that when I have Skub ask for peppers he gets the same exact reply as he does for asking for chocoballs. Since I went through every other aspect of the game I can only assume I was supposed to be given the pepper there and I played it out as if I had been. I know that’s cheating but Oh, well. I couldn’t find the pepper any other way and I had gotten everything else and I knew I needed the pepper to wake the torturer to whip my cream (that was kind of obvious since he’s the only one there with a whip- Willy Wonka is SO going to sue The Goblins for that by the way, he patented that way of whipping cream back in the sixties).
Anyway, I love your site. Skub is adorable. Is there any chance you can give us some clues as to what’s going to happen next in the Return to Labyrinth manga?
Oh, and could your next game have more Jareth content? In case you can’t tell from my E-mail address I love him.
Thanks for catching that missing text. And thanks a bunch for the clever and thoughtful feedback! The pepper links are now fixed with proper text.
I plan on doing a Return to Labyrinth 3 progress post soon, as well as presenting some archival stuff from volumes 1 & 2. Hope you’ll enjoy it!
-Jake
Oooh, thank you so much!