Tag: fighting fantasy

The puzzle storybook I made

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(I’m honestly quite terrified that my gift recipient will think to ask me how my FYP progress is going and I’ll have to make up some excuse about not giving out my URL until after mid-September is over, but I need to log my progress and I need to balance that with the pressing need to keep this surprise a surprise.)

I based the design of my book on the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, except I set my type in Baskerville because it just goes well with abandoned houses and Sherlockian mysteries. The inner margins are large because I’m using Japanese stab binding.

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This is the TextEdit document where I wrote out the entire puzzle in chronological order and scrambled the numbers once I had it scripted out. It isn’t the best way to do this, especially not when you get beyond 50 paragraphs, and the prospect of creating a similar puzzle at a larger scale terrifies me beyond words.

Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks

Another old and fun thing I stumbled upon over the summer was my old stash of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, which gave me hours of enjoyment in my early teen years (even though I never actually bothered with the battle mechanics and usually cheated because c’mon, nobody really has that much free time to play fair and be honest about the items that you actually have).

I spent the past two weeks engineering my own gamebook based on the FF formula as a birthday surprise for someone (yes, I do have that much free time) partly because I wanted to craft a good puzzle and partly because I also wanted to work through an FYP idea that could still be a viable and giftable project. I wrote 50 paragraphs worth of adventuring in an abandoned house and packed the book with ciphers, and almost lost my head ensuring that all paragraphs led to each other and that the entire adventure ran properly. Then I went over all of my typography, and proceeded to spend an hour ensuring that everything was paginated properly and that all paragraphs looked good.

In this little sub-project I am planning to build a compartment into the back of the book (as I did with my dictionary) for a thumb drive that’s an important part of the storyline within the book. I think this is just my way of building on the FF formula – while I love how immersive FF books are, I want to add another layer of complexity to my project with items that are significant in the storyline being available to the reader in a kit accompanying the book/built into a compartment in the book. These artefacts are probably a step up from what I did for my Gemini project last semester (forging one newspaper page) and I think I really enjoy doing immersive storybook-type things as a way to reconcile the separate universes of fact and fiction.

I’m probably going to continue down this line in my research as it offers the most promise and the richest possible outcome. I don’t think I exactly want to make a gamebook for my FYP but the influence of fictional bands and immersive worlds (that are ventured to with the power of the mind and not the power of your computer’s graphics card) is tugging me, and it might be a good way for me to run the Castor/Pollux storyline too.

I’ll share pictures of my gamebook in a bit, and cross my fingers that my gift recipient has forgotten my FYP blog URL.