LoneWolf DS - Fire On The Water v1.0 Released

[wraggster]

news via tehsken (http://www.tehskeen.com/)

Michoko has released a very anticipated follow up to his original remake of the Lone Wolf adventure book. These books contain a battle system that were originally played using dice and paper - much like old school D&D, but not as complex. One can make their way through this book and the outcome and path would be different depending on the choices and battles you fight/make.

This new book is the second of the LoneWolf series and if you liked the original LoneWolfDS - Flight from the Dark you'll enjoy this one. These homebrew are some of the best to hit the Nintendo DS and should not be overlooked.


quote
2008/07/12 : v1.0
- Fixed merchants items in section #181
- Added a note in the equipment section explaining you can't own more than 50 crowns at once
- Fixed a bug which allowed to pick 3 items as your starting equipment instead of 2
- Fixed a bug in section #91 where you could pick an infinite number of meals
- If you had lost your backpack from previous book, it is now again available (your King is a generous
man)
- If you load a saved game from book I, your endurance is now fully restored.
- Now you get the correct amount of gold when starting from a previous save.
- Fixed section #12 and the handling of the Sixth Sense bonus, which was incorrect.
- Added a "loading" message at launch, some people thought the game had crashed while it was just initializing.

Download Here --> http://www.projectaon.org/staff/frederic/index.php

[DSmanic!]

wtf? I get 'Loading please wait' and it stays on it. I got a Evo.

[Michoko]

DSmanic,

I'm developping LoneWolfDS on a Cyclo DS Evolution, so I'm sure it works on it :P

What kind of SD card are you using?

Thanks
Michoko

Edit: do you also use a SLOT 2 linker in addition to the CycloDS ?

[Markzilla]

Hey Michoko, did you see my notes in the GBADev topic?

[kennyk]

Excellent job, it plays perfectly on my M3 Real. Thanks for all the hard work.

[DSmanic!]

DSmanic,

I'm developping LoneWolfDS on a Cyclo DS Evolution, so I'm sure it works on it :P

What kind of SD card are you using?

Thanks
Michoko

Edit: do you also use a SLOT 2 linker in addition to the CycloDS ?

I got a EZ Flash 5 and a SanDisk 8G SD,
Incidently, Ideas wont play it either.
Funny, I had no problems with Flight from the dark.

[Michoko]

I got a EZ Flash 5 and a SanDisk 8G SD,
Incidently, Ideas wont play it either.
Funny, I had no problems with Flight from the dark.

DSmanic, can you please try to launch it without the SLOT 2 expansion inserted then? It may be related to a bug in the latest EFSlib version. If if works, I'll try to release a fixed version soon.


@MarkZilla: thank you for your report, I'll have a look at it! :)

Michoko

[DSmanic!]

DSmanic, can you please try to launch it without the SLOT 2 expansion inserted then? It may be related to a bug in the latest EFSlib version. If if works, I'll try to release a fixed version soon.


@MarkZilla: thank you for your report, I'll have a look at it! :)

Michoko

Yep, took the EZ Flash out and it worked! Looking forward to that fix!

Also have you considered doing any other fantasy role player books like Deathtrap Dungeon? The Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series were my all time favourites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathtrap_Dungeon

[Michoko]

Ok thanks for the report!

About Deathtrap Dungeon, I'm afraid it's the same problem as with other books, all this material is copyrighted... Only the LW books are currently available for free on the web.

[TechRat]

Ok thanks for the report!

About Deathtrap Dungeon, I'm afraid it's the same problem as with other books, all this material is copyrighted... Only the LW books are currently available for free on the web.

I know there are some fan-created Fighting Fantasy books out there. This site has some:

http://www.ffproject.com/

Perhaps you could talk to those authors about adapting their stories. Of course, I'm sure you're very busy (there are plenty of Lone Wolf books left if you're planning to adapt more), which leads to my next question. Have you given any thought to creating an editor of some kind so that users can adapt their own stories?

Edit: Speaking of Fighting Fantasy, I've noticed that the books are being republished and sold today. There are even new ones coming out! But.....they won't sell them to US residents! :(

Edit of the Edit: I just remembered that Home of the Underdogs has a gamebook page too.
http://www.the-underdogs.info/gamebook.php
There are a few free ones out there, and some of the others may be public domain now. I'm not trying to pressure you or anything. I just want to offer some ideas. ;) After all, even if you stopped making these after Fire on the Water, we'd still be left with two of the best DS games available, homebrew OR commercial!

[Michoko]

I admit that a generic gamebook engine might be cool, but believe me, it would be a lot of work! Because even with fixed rules like in LoneWolfDS, there are many specific cases to handle everywhere.

So allowing authors to add many subtleties in their own books to make the adventure enjoyable would require a very powerful and flexible engine.

Even if I made my engine with flexibility in mind, a generic engine is another step ahead. So for now, I'm afraid I'll stick to LW. ;)

[DSmanic!]

Any idea how long the fix will take? I just finished Flight from the dark and im eager to continue, taking out my EZ flash all the time to play it is gonna be a pain..

[Michoko]

When it's done. Noda has to first fix his own library before I can do anything myself.

[DSmanic!]

OK.

btw your engine rocks! One advantage over books is you can't cheat! :)

[TechRat]

OK.

btw your engine rocks! One advantage over books is you can't cheat! :)

I'm not sure if I would call that an "advantage". :rolleyes:

Those books are hard. Of all the ones I read I only tried to play one correctly once. I didn't get past the second encounter.

[cutterjohn]

Ok thanks for the report!

About Deathtrap Dungeon, I'm afraid it's the same problem as with other books, all this material is copyrighted... Only the LW books are currently available for free on the web.Nice job on the Lone Wolf books -> DS "game" conversion. I'll have to admit that I haven't taken the time yet to play through them, but playing these along with the Fighting Fantasy and other such books is something that I'd like to do this late summer/fall.

Deathtrap Dungeon: Those are still being sold by Flying Buffalo IIRC (may be mixing up my books/publishers here). Actually AFAIK all of the Tunnels and Trolls solo stuff is still being sold by Flying Buffalo, including the old DOS computer game. Some of the stuff is out of stock though, and I kind of suspect that they'll not be re-printed any time soon if ever, and IIRC they may have released one or two of the modules to the public domain. (I bought copies of Tunnel & Trolls and all of their solo stuff plus some other modules a number of years ago, or at least those that were still in stock...)

Fighting Fantasy/Steve Jackson books: Some (all?) of those were re-published recently by some fairly obscure (to me) publisher. I can't really recall offhand if it was just the FF books, the later SJ Sorcery (IIRC) books or both series. They were fairly expensive too, although now that I'm thinking of it it may just have been the FF books as I seem to recall that they had a decent deal to get ALL of the books re-published for one price. No idea if the re-prints are any good/worth it as I haven't seen one yet...

[Grey Acumen]

Okay, I really enjoyed these. It's just like the shitty choose your own adventure books, except minus the shitty.

1.) no more page turning! I click the link and it takes me straight to the page I want. No more accidentally reading ahead.

2.) The game keeps track of all the stats for you, calculates everything for you, and supplies the random numbers for you. This makes it harder to cheat, but not impossible, you just have to work for it.

3.) Normally, if you hit a place where you can make a choice, and then you go down a path, pick up some stuff, and then die, you'd have to figure out all the specific things that happened between the point at which you died and when you made your choice to get your stats and inventory back how it should be. With save points, this is no longer an issue.

I really liked the first book. I think I got through it on my first try (9 for attack and 7 for HP, plus I chose healing and 6th sense. It was all but impossible to lose a fight) but I'm going back through to see if I missed anything important. I found the sapphire pendant the first time through, but then when I went back through a different route, I got a silver key which I only just figured out what to do with it, so for all intents and purposes, my first playthrough was nigh perfect..

Where the first book felt almost too open(there were a few areas that I was able to follow a loop and just wander back and forth in), the 2nd book actually feels a little too linear. Many of the choices only added an extra page and then brought you right back into the main thread.
What bugged me a little more than that was that there were essentially 4 parts to the story, and there were only 2 ways to survive the 3rd part. Either by picking up an item I never even ran across that was back in part 2, or by having taken an ability that I never even bothered with. Either one pretty much required I start completely over.
Either way, these are faults within the book, not with anything to do with the port quality.



There was one minor issue that I noted in the first book, and that was that it was impossible to use the L or R buttons during your character creation. Which meant that I either had to turn the whole game off or then get all the way through character creation if I wanted to start over.
The second book allows you to use the L or R buttons during character creation to start over, which made the whole process much less of a hassle.

Also, is there any way i can offer my help out with this project for future books? I'd really like to help get these books converted to NDS format, as it really gives a huge booster shot to the entire genre.

[pehther]

i can't wait to try this out. next to grailquest this was my biggest gaming addiction back then.

thankee!