Hi all! New update in regards to the gamebook.
Currently I have the majority of the narrative beats completed and now I am starting to build up the chapters to be really meaty sections.
This project is going to turn into a really big book with immense amounts of replay value.
I've been trying my hand at a number of gamebooks, some old and some new thanks to the power of Kickstarter.
Something I always come across though, especially in core gamebooks is that the writer tends to enjoy really punishing the player. The inevitable page turn of...well, death.
A goal I have always been slightly laughed at for is that of re-imagining the fail state for readers who end up dying mid adventure.
One way of going about this is by giving enemy counters action events dependent on the health of either you, or the monster.
Another way is by having death traps actually lead you down more unique narrative branches that still eventually take you to the core scenarios.
For example and in no way connected to this book's narrative if we pretend you are fighting in a mecha.
In the fight the choices generally would be to fight and do skill checks until you win, or lose. Options before this encounter may allow you to find a path around it but if it is a required fight, you aren't getting many choices.
One of my ideas is to have scripted mid fight events happen, such as if a specific amount of health is lost then you might lose an arm in a very descriptive way and this means you are branched into fighting part of that story with one robot appendage until you get it back.
You'd have to alter parts of the ongoing story to sometimes cater to this but I think that's why these books would end up being bigger than normal ones as it would have more meat instead of linearity.
This isn't to prevent death from happening in the journey as choices should have major consequences. The idea is to not make every fail state be a vat of boiling acid.
