As much as I would love to see a project like The Unnamed come to fruition, interactive fantasy fiction is very much a niche market and probably always will be. I don't think anyone is going to get rich developing such apps and that is probably the reason why we don't see much of these kind of apps. They are just not mainstream enough to justify putting all that time, not to mention money, into producing such titles, especially for a small, indie developer.
Agreed. It's interesting though that Choose Your Own Adventure did so well back in the 80s. Maybe just because it was novel back then (heh, no pun intended).
Yeah, this is pretty much the position I'm in right now. I grew up with these kinds of games and love them, I would love to write one someday, but it takes a tremendous amount of work--6 to 8 months at least, I would bet. If there were better development tools and you did not have to do all the coding, that would dramatically cut the investment of time in half, but right now there's nothing out there available. I wrote the Unnamed just to test the waters, and it turns out more work than I realized. Still, I haven't ruled it out... You'll probably see some interactive fiction published on the iPad and iphones in the near future. There's an effort being made to bring it back to the mainstream, in particular for iOS devices. So I'll be watching to see how all that shakes out. If I write an IF game it'll be different from plain text games, and contain a lot of graphics, auto-mapping, and unique features which will make it more palatable to a modern audience. I'll still try to clean up The Unnamed and make it available to try out on 'Frotz', sooner or later. Right now our top priority is finishing the conversion of Necronomicon, which I hope to have more to say about soon. Thanks!
Yeah, I considered that, most of the games available on Frotz are short interactive fiction games written by single authors, and the old Infocom ones, of course. So it would work fine as an interpreter to play that sort of game on these devices. Frotz's latest update includes some enhancements I requested the author to add while I was working on The Unnamed, which deals with automapping and displaying graphics on Frotz, which most text adventures don't utilize. If I write an interactive fiction game I'll have to decide whether I want to publish it in the app store---or try to sell it outside the ecosystem of the App Store. The one advantage to that is I could do anything I wanted, and not be subject to censoring by Apple. Anyone with Frotz could purchase and download the game outside the app store, and play it on their device. But it's still up in the air as to when and if that'll happen...
So close... iPod/iPhone, Retina and iPad versions - everything ready. Dustin said you have great celebrations nearest weekend, I wish you all to have fun time with it : ) We don't have such in Ukraine, so I'll work hard on these days to test the game and polish details. I really believe, after the celebrations we will submit all versions to appstore - tested, polished, on the new engine, and android version will be submitted in short time after iOS as well!
Wow! That's great news. I feared this game would be completely forgotten. As far as our "celebrations," that would likely refer to our Independence Day holiday (July 4). Feel free to submit the updates before then!
necro : ) I can, but Dustin leading and I believe he will not submit it before final careful testings by himself on all types of devices ; ) The game will be never forgotten, it was hard time to porting projects to new game engine, but now it turns out very well, and maybe the producer will decide also publish the game on official web page - now its possible to play the game even from web-page ; ) I don't know is palm os version is interesting for someone, but its also possible with the new engine.. and wii.. who knows.. : ) what about 3d fps adventure game based on LoveCraft's stories? will someone be interested to play such?
GREAT news! And I will always be interested in anything based on H.P. Lovecraft's work, to be honest. That includes games, movies, fiction, merchandise or whatever.
Both Big Blue Bubble and Tin Man Games have excellent Gamebook engines put together for iOS, perhaps a collaboration with one of them might make the process easier... (Not that I'd have any problems playing the adventure in Frotz... )
(offtop: hi, the9quad, I'll try to do my best to optimize it, there are no any viruses for sure, its a plugin installing, like flash, try one of these demos: http://www.stonetrip.com/shiva-3d-engine-technical-demo.html its from official site, if it will cause antivirus scream - then better to disable the antivirus for few minutes - to install plugin and turn on again ; ) (I understand, site requiring plugin installing and kind of loading takes time, but the posibilities are much higher - e.g. you can play iOS games from web site, like I did with zlution http://www.zombilution.com/zombilution.html, and the same game presents on iOS, so the same can be done with necro - maybe Dustin will decide to upload some lite version to the company's site, so its tons of posibilities, even you can play 3d games from web-page and a lot a lot of other things. Once you've installed the plugin - you'll be never asked to do it again and play all stuff done with shiva3d game engine)
necro is really cool! I was walking around dungeon stuff on the forum and this game looks way better. maybe cause more solid i like the idea about 3d, i see more then fourty thousands thread views and believe your propose have sense. but what you can promise as final product?! 5k players sounds a lot (maybe 500 players with 10 friends each or 100 fans with 50 friends each lol) so... maybe you can do some simplest demo to show that you are able to do this like you said in 2-3 months, not 2-3 years?
I just bought this tonight. I haven't really had a chance to do anything but read some of the tutorial as I'm working on an anniversary gift for my wife. I was impressed to see the tutorial is 48 pages long The menu system is outstanding, and it seems like a quality product. In-game it mentions updates. I know updates were mentioned a few weeks back, are they still being worked on?
