Immersive books on your phone

In The Story is a gamebook app for readers and authors. I usually prefer to read in print myself. I can navigate the text better than on a Kindle, but it does mean that every room in my house is lined with bookshelves and there are overspill boxes in the loft. Where gamebooks are concerned, though, there's a lot to be said for an app that keeps track of keywords and stats and that means you don't have to keep flipping back and forth through the pages. That's why Down Among the Dead Men is available in digital form on the Storm Weavers store and you can read my interactive version of Frankenstein in multiple languages.

If you're an author, it looks like you can assemble your gamebook in a browser and then publish on the ITS platform. And the technology gives you access to all sorts of gameplay features such as tracking the passage of time, which is very fiddly in print gamebooks, as players of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective will know. A new medium opens up new opportunities, so although it will be nice to see some classic gamebooks like Way of the Tiger on the In The Story platform, it's the all-new content I'm looking forward to.

X marks the spot

Recently I've been working with Paweł Dziemski, co-author of Whispers Beyond The Stars, on an app version of my 1990s Tudor pirates gamebook Down Among the Dead Men. 

Paweł said it would be nice to have background images appearing behind the text panels that would indicate the prevailing location. So when you're escaping across the ocean in an open boat at the start, you get an image that distills the atmosphere of desperation and precarious survival. Later, there are images for the islands you might stop off at, and later still for the ports you stop off at and the various ships you might sail aboard.

Great idea. The snag was that I needed to find which sections correspond to which locations, which is not easy given that the whole adventure is randomized. So it was off to the loft to search through stacks of boxes until I found the original flowchart. (Yes, I still have it. What do you mean, hoarding? It was just as well I hung onto it these thirty years as it turns out.) Along with the flowchart I found the sketch above, the very genesis of the adventure.

I only realized after digging out the flowchart (written out on sheets of paper, incidentally -- no Twine in those days) that I didn't need it after all. I could just feed the book to NotebookLM and ask questions like, "Give me the section numbers for when the player leaves Port Leshand". Although Claude is my main AI assistant/coworker, producing helpful aids like the updated flowchart below, I'm continually impressed by what NotebookLM can do. It's moved far beyond simply being an intelligent index, which was how I first encountered it, and I can now set it to doing logic markup or helping me navigate old gamebooks.

My evangelism for AI aside, the Down Among the Dead Men app was coded the old-fashioned way (by Paweł) and you can get it from the Storm Weavers online shop in both English and Polish. I particularly like the atmospheric sound effects that Paweł has added. The creak of timbers, the cry of gulls, the lapping of waves, all add immeasurably to the sense of immersion. I know that most gamebook readers prefer a physical book, but this digital version is a lot more than just the text on a screen. If you try it out, let us know what you think.

How our new gamebook came to be

My Whispers Beyond The Stars co-creator Paweł Dziemski sat down with podcast host Riccardo Scaringi recently for an in-depth discussion of the print gamebook, the app, the story, and the Storm Weavers online shop where you can buy it and other gamebooks. I found their discussion amazingly informative -- and I was one of the authors!