Anyone made a "gamebook" game or think it could work?
eXtraTurnGames
Member Posts: 70
I've always been a huge fan of gamebooks. Choose Your Own Adventure, Lone Wolf and more. A company called Gamebook Games has been cranking out gamebooks on the itunes store, and since they keep making new ones, they must have an audience. I've always wanted to make one and was wondering how Gamesalad might work for creating it.
Possible pitfalls I can think of:
1. How would Gamesalad's text behaviors work with it? Can you resize text dynamically? Can you change text colors?
2. Different pages might result in a large number of scenes, which I think can potentially slow a game down?
3. What if I want a cool "page turning" animation or something. Can gamesalad's text and graphical behaviors do that?
Possible pitfalls I can think of:
1. How would Gamesalad's text behaviors work with it? Can you resize text dynamically? Can you change text colors?
2. Different pages might result in a large number of scenes, which I think can potentially slow a game down?
3. What if I want a cool "page turning" animation or something. Can gamesalad's text and graphical behaviors do that?
Comments
2. I'm not familiar with game books (apart from the Goosebumps choose your ending book I had as a kid), but it wouldn't be impossible to do a full book or chapter on one scene... A pain, yes, but not impossible. There are games I have made with over 100 levels that a whole lot faster than a lot of games I've seen on here with a handful of scenes. Optimisation is your friend
3. You cannot have a full page turning but can fake it. DBA made a template (http://www.deepblueapps.com/Deep_Blue_Ideas_Ltd./Bargains.html) but I haven't looked at the video so not sure what it's like but will be worth a look.
Ace
•••1. How would Gamesalad's text behaviors work with it? Can you resize text dynamically? Can you change text colors?
You cannot control the actual text size "attribute" - but you can easily dynamically (controlled by whatever you want) resize the actor the text sits on, so effectively, yes, you can resize text dynamically.
Yes you can change text colours - and do so dynamically.
•••2. Different pages might result in a large number of scenes, which I think can potentially slow a game down?
You can work around this, there are tricks to keep the whole thing ticking along smoothly - it's not complex.
•••3. What if I want a cool "page turning" animation or something.
There is no such thing a 'cool' page turning effect, all page turning effects look like bad video effects from 1991. : ) - but seriously, yes, you can throw something like that together if you can animate.
"1. Kind of. You can change text colours and resize text, yes. But... The Display Text behaviour leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn't move words on to the next line if it doesn't fit, it just moves on to a different line mid-sentence which could become REALLY frustrating with a big book."
The text anti-aliasing, kerning and leading are so awful in GS that if you want to produce a nice looking book I would recommend you make up your text in Photoshop and bring it in as an image.
Ace
also . . . . with regard to line breaks . . . can't you just use the .."\n"... command to break the line ?
Regardless, I agree that the text behaviour is a bit crappy, certainly for doing a whole book, I would definitely generated lovely anti-aliased and nicely laid out text in Photoshop first and just use that !
I took a look at that DBA book template (link above) - and it contains a warning . . .
"Note II: Due to GameSaladâ™s excessive Memory leak issues. This template does not run smooth when compiled to run in the iPad. The template is a case study only."
. . . so my question, what is the GS memory leak issue and should I be concerned about it ?
Cheers
?
The memory leak was in the creator, not the compiled apps, although in the last 2 builds, it seems to me like there may be a slight memory leak back, but regardless of that it doesn't affect the builds. I think they mean that with GS's poor performance and RAM management it won't run too well. That template was made a while back though and GS have made significant performance upgrades since then, and more to come in the next update so I would imagine it's a lot better now.
Ace
I see what you mean, yep, it's nightmare for long passages - I have tried generating text in a text editor (TextEdit) but when you cut and paste from the text editor to GS you lose all the spaces between the words !!
Best avoided for book stuff (which is what I am working on).
Cheers for the info on the memory leak - not sure I understand quite what a memory leak is but I won't let that worry me ! (much).
Text might look a little stretched once you try it on different devices though... and I couldn't let people write up their own character name if I were using pictures, since only text can change a value that shows up in the text on the fly. And I feel like being able to do that would be an important part of creating a good game book.
Is there any way to have gamesalad change where the line break occurs on its own based on different values, or do you always have to tell it to do a line break manually?
(I also made a comic book with GameSalad, but I also removed that from the iTunes App Store.)
I think the best way to make the book with GameSalad is to make it more graphical... using artwork and pseudo 3D effects... and with lots of scenes. Replace the text with voice narration. In such a scenario, GameSalad would be exceptional. There is one problem though... no universal binary support.
My textbook just returned to the "What's Hot" list in the books section of iPhone apps... and it's been on the store for about a year. I think releasing it as a universal binary is part of the reason why it's been so successful.
According to this video, multiple fonts and text wrapping is supported in gamesalad?
Not sure why you would need 3 fonts size for each device, but I don't really know too much above gamebooks, so I will leave that question for someone else.
•••"Text might look a little stretched once you try it on different devices though... "
No more or no less than if you were to use GS generated text.
•••" . . and I couldn't let people write up their own character name if I were using pictures, since only text can change a value that shows up in the text on the fly."
I am sure you could come up with some creative way of solving that.
•••"Is there any way to have gamesalad change where the line break occurs on its own based on different values"
There is an attribute called 'text' - you can do a lot of tricks with that, changing the line breaks seems possible (just tried it) but a little fiddly.
Yes, there are 14 fonts and you can wrap.
Once again, GameSalad is just so close from being to do awesome things. Heh, sometimes I think about the disturbing similarities to GameSalad and Guild Wars... two communities waiting years for cool things to happen.