LoneWolf DS - Fire On The Water v1.0 Released

[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".

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 $#@!ty choose your own adventure books, except minus the $#@!ty.

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!