May's Game: Guilty Pleasures Chapter One

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, my plan for this month was to take the first chapter from the book Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton and rework it into a text based game. My hope was to enable the player to play as though they are Anita Blake, yet keep the energy the original author put into it. I think I managed to do this.

Guilty Pleasures Chapter 1 Text based game

The basics of the game are pretty self explanatory. You simply read the text and click on a link at the bottom. Some pages have more than one option. Some will give you some background information to the story and world, others will allow you to skip past the detail. Those of you who have read the actual book will notice that I've added a few things to the story. Hopefully these don't detract from it.

If enough people like this chapter, I might do another from a different book next month. I'm hesitant to do any further chapters from Guilty Pleasures as I don't want to run afoul of Fair Use laws nor do I want to detract from Ms Hamilton's hard work. So if you like what I've done, I strongly recommend that you purchase the book and support this wonderful author.

To play the game, simply click on this link, download the html file and double click on it. It should open in your web browser.

My Next Game Project

As most of you who read this blog will know, I am attempting the One Game a Month Challenge. My first four games were all different games done with different engines and/or different programming languages.

Starting this month (May), each month's project will be part of a larger project. The next eight "games" will be based on chapters from the book "Guilty Pleasures" by Laurell K. Hamilton. Obviously, this is a fan project and all of the respective copyrights (characters, storyline etc) belong to Ms. Hamilton and as such, it will not be sold. Ever.

Why do a project that I will never be able to sell? There are a few reasons. First, I'm neither a game designer nor an author and as such could never make anything like this on my own. Second, I'm a huge fan of Laurell K. Hamilton and her Anita Blake series and thought it would neat to try to make a visual/interactive game based on one of the books.

Saying all this, I'm still not certain how to approach this project. Do I turn it into a storyline based RPG type similar to Elder Scrolls (but in 2D) where the player chooses conversation lines? Or do I give it more of a "bookish" feel where the player basically watches the story unfold and is only given control to do things like click various items for back story/more detail and battles?

Each approach has its pros and cons. An RPG would give the player more freedom, but they wouldn't get the detail and back story depth that an interactive "book" game would give.

Also, I'm not certain how I should make the game itself. Do I make it in C++ or should I use a game engine like Construct2? I have no idea how to use graphics in C++, but I would be able to type the code itself fairly easily. While with Construct2, using graphics is as easy as double clicking on the screen, but I find the code itself a bit difficult to use - especially with complex ideas. Ah, if only there was a game engine that handles graphics as easily as Construct2 does and uses C++ as well! The closest I know of is Unity, but that uses C# and is for 3D games/graphics.