Everyday I take ten minutes or so out of my time to scan the interwebz to see who is chatting about Gamebook Adventures. It’s a great way to uncover blog or forum posts and reviews that have gone under the radar. So when I saw a Pocket Gamer article pop up with us mentioned on it, I was curious and clicked through thinking it was perhaps a link to an old article they had covered about us that was somehow linked elsewhere.

The next thing I see is a list of 10 nominees for the Best Handheld Adventure/RPG Game of 2012 and Temple of the Spider God was included! Not only that, but we were one of only 4 iOS titles to be included next to the likes of Machinarium and Sid Meier’s Pirates. Great titles certainly and a privilege to have been chosen out of so many great iOS RPGs, but then with a closer look I saw Pokemon, Dead Space and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on 3DS, arguable one of the finest adventure games ever!! Err… what? Surely not! I was sat in a coffee shop at the time when this tidal wave of news crashed over me and I spat my coffee out on to my iPhone.

I have a bit of an affinity with Ocarina as, along with Mario Kart, was one of the main conversations I had with my Wife on one of our early dates 10 years ago. She used to play it a lot with her housemates back in her University days and had a cute way of saying “Hey, Listen”. I’d never played it (shameful I know) so bought an N64 with a copy and proceeded to fall in love with it too. Anyway, to get around to my point, it is an absolute honour to be included in this list as every single one of those games is amazing.

Incredibly humbling.

- Neil

Link to Pocket Gamer Awards 2012 page

Link to Pocket Gamer’s review of Temple of the Spider God (Silver Award)

P.S. A huge congrats too to the wonderful author of Temple of the Spider God, Jonathan Green. It wouldn’t exist without his amazing story!

AN UPDATE ON GA8

It was a full-on January for us last month both personally and professionally! Needless to say Gamebook Adventures has been motoring ahead and we’re currently about a week away from submission of our 8th GA title, Infinite Universe. Not only is GA8:IU our forst foray into the genre of science-fiction, but it is also the first time that we’ll be releasing a GA title for free on the app store. You’ll be able to read the first chapter of the adventure (300 sections!) for absolutely nothing and if you feel you want to continue the experience, you’ll be offered options to either buy individual chapters or all the chapters at once at a reduced price. It’s an interesting pricing structure for us but one we feel should appeal to not only our current fans, but also any new readers that try us out because it is free.

From a design point of view, GA8:IU also makes full use of our new engine that debuted in Temple of the Spider God and will include a host of new skills that can be earned throughout the adventure. We’re not going to reveal just yet how those skills are built up, but rest assured it’s certainly a unique way to “create a character” that has been cunningly devised by Andrew Drage (Brewin’).

RECENT INTERVIEWS

Beyond GA8:IU, we’ve had quite a lot of great coverage lately across the interwebz. Alongside some cracking reviews, we’ve also been interviewed three times (or more correctly Neil has) about Tin Man Games and Gamebook Adventures. The great thing about all three interviews is that each one covers very different topics and each serves a very different reading demographic. As an indie, being able to reach out to as many people as possible is super important, so we’re thrilled with these:

GameTaco – Tin Man Tactics – Interview by popular Aussie gaming site that concentrates on our marketing and what we’ve done to try and build our indie business.

Trollish Delver – The digital adventurer – Trollish Delver is a full-on RPG site mainly dealing with table-top gaming.  This interview concentrates on the gamebook revival and our history within that. It also delves into what the future holds in store and licensing Judge Dredd.

Cubed Gamers – An interview with Neil Rennison – Cubed Gamers is a gaming news site and interviewed Neil a lot about the perception of gamebooks to youngsters and whether digital books are “killing off the book”.

On top of that both Ben and Neil (as well as our new Melbourne based TMG pairing of Clinton and Ariel) were filmed for a documentary on building apps which will go into schools at some point in the future. Having your living room and home office turned into a mini TV studio is quite an experience! This is the second time we’ve been asked to do this and have to say it was tons of fun.

2ND BEST DICE GAME APP EVER

We were so bloody close! Sadly though all the Twitter and Facebook pimping in the world didn’t enable Temple of the Spider God to win the 2011 Best Dice Game Award. We did proudly come second though, which is a big step up from 2010, when An Assassin in Orlandes didn’t even make the last three. Next year…. NEXT BLOODY YEAR!

At least the guys at Halfbrick managed to win the grand title of Best App Ever with Jetpack Joyride. Go Aussies!!!

AWESOME REVIEWS

It’s amazing that 2 years after it’s release, An Assassin in Orlandes is still being picked by review sites to be featured. Two our our best reviews for GA1 have come in the last couple of months:

The Middle-Aged Geek Guy – “An Assassin In Orlandes has successfully established Tin Man as masters of the gamebook genre – from cover to cover.” – 9 out of 10!

Game Marketing by Mary Kurek – “I caught my mouth dropping and my eyebrow raising! I agree with my lead reviewer on the art and the overall impact of the gamebook. It’s amazing.” (We were also featured in Mary’s Marketing Niches Mobile Developers Might Not Know feature too)

Temple of the Spider God has also been bringing in some great coverage too:

Suicide Girls Blog – “I snatched up three immediately under the assumption that if I loved playing Dungeons and Dragons I would enjoy these. I was right!”

Play This Thing! – Not an overly positive review, but they did say ” The designer does an excellent job of making you feel like a swashbuckling adventurer in a grand heroic quest. TOTSG is a fun adventure, just be ready for some grinding.”

The Fiction Engine – “Tin Man has not only managed to give me nostalgic sustenance from a game genre of my childhood, they’ve succeeded making the adventure game book genre more fun that it’s ever been.” WE LOVE THIS REVIEW!

…FINALLY SOME OTHER AWESOME COVERAGE ON KOTAKU!

While we were at GCAP at the back end of 2011, both Neil and Ben were interviewed by Tracey Lien from Kotaku Australia. We had almost forgotten about it when up popped The Indie Handbook That Doesn’t Exist, a fantastic article written by Tracey which highlights indie game development in Australia and explains that there are no hard and fast rules to success as an indie game developer. A large portion of the article is dedicated to Tin Man Games and includes Ben’s classic quote:

“The reality is that you can spend one year or five years or ten years making a really awesome game and no one will buy it because no one knows about it. Games are meant to be played. If you make a game and no one plays it, is it still a game? It’s one of those tree falls in a wood kind of things, and I think that was the hardest thing for me to learn.”

More recently we were alerted to another Kotaku Australia article written by Mark Serrels called Plugging The Gaps: The Government’s Role In Reviving The Australian Games Industry, in which we were mentioned. The article was all about government funding and as we’ve been funded by Film Victoria, we were included. What put huge grins on our face however was the esteemed company we were placed with:

If you know where to look, and you know how to apply, funding is available. Morgan Jaffit is proof of that. As is Firemint, Iron Monkey, Tin Man Games and almost every other success story you care to name. These studios have become leading lights, at least in part, as a result of government funding.

To be called a “leading light” alongside two of the most successful studios in Melbourne over recent years (EA aquisitions at that!) was, and is a complete honour! A very, very good start to 2012.

It’s all go, go, go at the moment for us at Tin Man Games and for once we’re not talking adventure gamebooks. Ben went and got himself hitched to his beautiful wife, Leoni in Melbourne a few weekends ago and now I have the following news…

Exciting times for the growing Tin Family. 2012 isn’t just the Year of Gamebooks it seems!

- Neil

Had a bit of a nasty wakeup this morning. I checked my emails and it seems that sometime in the last month or so both the Tin Blog and the Gamebooks site got hacked. The nastyware seems to have been fairly dormant until last night where it seems one of our twitter followers got some crazy stuff happening after visiting our site.

It looked like the work of some spambots just trying to find hosts for their dodgy wares, and not some malicious hackers trying to bring us down.

I just finished cleaning the Tin Blog and now I am in the process of scouring the Gamebooks site as well. I pulled them both down the minute I found out about the problem.

In order to get rid of this malware I basically just deleted the entire wordpress directory from the web servers and then rebuilt it by hand from known good files.

I started from a fresh wordpress install from the wordpress guys. Then I loaded the most recent backup to my local machine and deleted every single file that could be found elsewhere, so stuff like plugins and themes etc. This left only the various PNGs and other files we have uploaded over the years and I went through those one by one to make sure that none of them had been altered. I did this for both the Tin Man Site and the Gamebook Adventures site.

None of the files I looked through had any issues, so my guess is that it was hiding either in the main wordpress install somewhere, or in one of the plugins or themes. I dont have enough malware experience points to really figure out where and how it got in, I just took the ‘nuke it from space’ approach and then rebuilt with known good files.

That said, I do know that whatever was on our site was quite clever. When I was trying to figure out what was going on, loading the site from all of my mac-based browsers showed nothing at all suspicious. It was only once I changed my firefox user agent to pretend it was a version of Internet Explorer did the badware rear it’s head and attempt to install a nasty windows virus onto my mac.

It was interesting to me that it didn’t even attempt to dump it’s payload on me when i was pretending to be a windows version of Chrome or Firefox, (or any mac browsers of any flavor). It only sprang into action when it thought that it was being browsed by IE.

This clever beastie also managed to sneak past google’s web tools malware detector. However, I did manage to get a warning from Sucuri that there was something amiss, tho it didn’t give enough detail to really track it down. (which is why I just went with the scorched earth method of fixing it)

It seems that this sort of thing is sadly inevitable these days. We have strong passwords and I keep the wordpress installs generally up to date. However, we are game developers and not web security experts, despite our best efforts, badness sometimes gets in. Many apologies to anyone who may have been affected. If you see anything dodgy at all with tinmangames.com.au or gamebookadventures.com, please dont hesitate to let us know vie email, twitter or whatever.

Cheers!
-Ben

UPDATE: Gamebook Adventures is all cleaned and back up and running again now as well.

Gamebook Adventures’ first science-fiction digital interactive gamebook is on its way to an iOS platform of your choice in February 2012. Watch this blog for more info over the coming weeks!

Happy New Year to all our blog followers! 2011 was an amazing year for us and set many foundations down for the future and now that we’re well and truly plonked in 2012 it’s natural that we look towards the next twelve months. Whatever happens this year around the world (we’re hoping those pesky Mayans did their mathematics wrong), one thing is for certain, 2012 is The Year of the Gamebook! Why such a bold statement? Well basically there is such a positive buzz around interactive fiction at the moment that hasn’t been seen since the 1980s and early 90s when CYOA and Fighting Fantasy books were scattered across the bookshelves in many book shops and libraries. While there will be an increase in the printed form this year, it is the rise of electronic handheld reading devices in the shape of smart phones and tablets that is really building this renaissance. It is now the perfect time for interactive storytelling to shine!

Here’s 10 reasons why we think 2012 is The Year of the Gamebook:

1) Gamebook Adventures is coming to Android

We had to start with ourselves surely! We are very excited to bring Gamebook Adventures series to Android phones and tablets this year. iOS has been a great platform for us, but we’ve been aware for a while of the amount of Android users there are, especially as we get many emails and tweets asking about it. It became very apparent to us at both PAX events in 2011 when half of the people we were talking to couldn’t read/play our gamebook series because they owned Android. This will be fixed in 2012 and Ben is currently beavering away on this! Expect some news over the coming months.

2) Fighting Fantasy 30th Anniversary

It’s hard to believe that Warlock of Firetop Mountain was first published in August 1982 – makes us feel so old! It still sells well, especially having a recent iOS resurgence and as all gamebook know-it-alls will tell you, it went on to spawn the epic Fighting Fantasy series by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. It’s safe to make the claim that Fighting Fantasy is the grand-daddy of fantasy gamebooks especially when it comes to the addition of D&D style RPG elements such as character creation and dice rolling, with classics such as Deathtrap Dungeon, Forest of Doom and House of Hell (as well as seven great titles written by our very own Jonathan Green no less!). With 2012 being the 30th anniversary of publication of Warlock, Ian Livingstone decided to pick up his pen again and write a brand new adventure, which will be released in August, exactly 30 years on! No-one quite knows what the adventure entails and no beans were spilled when Neil was lucky enough to meet Ian at Dragonmeet in November last year. Whatever the adventure holds, we’re sure it will be a great read and exactly what you’d expect from a classic FF gamebook!

As an extra note, James Wallis hosted a great interview with Ian Livingstone at Dragonmeet, which can be heard here. Ian even namedrops us at one point which obviously made us feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

 3) Dredd

If you’ve been following our Tin Man antics you’ll be well aware that we were very excited to snag the license to create gamebooks based on Judge Dredd and 2000AD. 2012 is a huge year for Judge Dredd with some high profile comic stories coming out as well as the movie later this year starring Eomer (LOTR) and Bones (Star Trek) actor, Karl Urban. We really do believe that this year is the perfect time to bring Dredd to the gamebook format and the app is currently in full developement. All those perps in Mega-City One better keep their eyes peeled as YOU will be playing as the famous futuristic lawman in an epic storyline! We’ll slowly start revealing more information about our Judge Dredd gamebook over the next couple of months. Be ready for an awesome ride on the Lawmaster!

4) The rise of gamebook blogs

There are some amazing a passionate gamebook folk out there. During 2011 there was a definite increase in gamebook discussion had on public blogs. About 3 years ago most gamebook fans had to resort to joining Yahoo groups for their gamebook fix, but now it seems many people want to share their hobby out in the open. One of the biggest champions in this area is Stuart Lloyd, who is constantly blogging and contributing to online community – a top bloke! Recently he joined forces with our very own GA writer, Andrew Wright, to create the excellent Lone Tiger Gamebook Reviews blog. To anyone out there blogging about gamebooks, we’re going to compile our very own blog post later this year with them all on, so please let us know if you’re not on our radar – although we probably know most of you now!

 5) Gary Chalk illustrating gamebooks again

Lone Wolf is one of the other printed fantasy gamebook brands from the 80s and 90s that has been popular around the world. It was originally designed by Joe Dever and Gary Chalk, with Gary creating all the illustrations for the first set of books. Gary has been away from the gamebook scene for a while, but we’re honoured to have him work with Greywood Publishing and ourselves on a new series called Gun Dogs! Gary has a very distinctive art style and brings back many nostalgic gamebook memories for us.

6) Gamebooks on other digital platforms

Speaking of Lone Wolf, it was announced earlier this year that a PC version of the Lone Wolf is currently in development. It’s slated for a 2013 release, but we’re sure there will be a fair bit of promotion for this over the next year. Also rumoured to be iOS and Android versions in the works too, which is fine by us – it’s good to have healthy competition and it’s heartening to feel that GA is sitting alongside classics like Lone Wolf!

Fighting Fantasy will also be making further appearances on Kindle (and I also see that Worldweaver have been working on Lone Wolf too) and the awesome Laughing Jackal team will be bringing Warlock of Firetop Mountain to PSP and PSN after their successful debut with Talisman of Death!

It’s also worth noting here that we’ll be bringing Gamebook Adventures to PC and Mac desktop users this year too!

7) Jonathan Green writing more Gamebook Adventures

After writing the amazing Temple of the Spider God, which was critically acclaimed, we just had to snap Jon up for some more Gamebook Adventures! We have two massive projects lined up with him this year. The first of which is an idea that Jon actually proposed to us, which we instantly fell in love with. The best way to describe it would be a cross between Indiana Jones, Metal gear Solid and perhaps a smidgeon of Thunderbirds thrown in for good measure. We can’t say too much more about it at the moment, but rest assured we’ll be jibbering about it on this blog before long!

The second project we have going is more long-term and a return to our Orlandes fantasy setting (or should that be Drymar? Hint, hint…) for a very different take on a fantasy gamebook. What would happen if we produced a fantasy gamebook aimed solely at an older audience – a story that was more about political intrigue and diplomacy rather than running around dungeons fighting giant rats and reanimated skeletons? From our initial discussions it all has potential to be something pretty amazing and a could be a modern landmark for the fantasy gamebook genre. Let’s just say, we are VERY excited about this. We’ll reveal more as we have it. (Jon Green’s blog)

 8) Fighting Fantazine

In a very short time, this online gamebook magazine has quickly become THE magazine to read regarding gamebooks. It is focused mainly on Fighting Fantasy (hence the name), but the editor, Alexander Ballingall has been very keen to include other gamebooks outside the FF space. We’ve been lucky enough to have had Gamebook Adventures featured a few times! With issue 8 coming out soon, the production quality is getting better and better, with some awesome articles to geek out on. Long may it’s rise continue! (Titan – Fighting Fantazine blog)

9) Supernatural Romance hots up!

It’s been a general rule in gamebooks that they need to be testosterone heavy with action and blood splattering death and we feel it’s about time to take Gamebook Adventures into a whole new genre – romance! The team over at Choice of Games have released some great interactive romance-based books over the last year or two (we’re big fans of these guys – check them out) and from chatting to people at events like PAX, there is a genuine want for this kind of interactive fiction. We’ve had a crack team of writers over in the States led by Miellyn Fitzwater-Barrows busy putting together a series which we will be debuting this year! Expect vampires, changelings, magic and more than enough steamy romance to get you all hot under the collar!

10) Stuff that can’t be mentioned

This is a bit of a cop-out I know, but there is so many other exciting things happening in the wings, not just with Tin Man Games but I’m sure with many of the other digital gamebook developers, print writers and brand license holders. From the rumours we hear and the emails we receive, there is so much interest in gamebooks right now it’s unreal. There will be lots of very exciting announcements this year which will launch, not just us, but the interactive gamebook medium well and truly into 2013! (Mayan prophecies non-withstanding )

A very happy and prosperous New Year to you all from the Tin Man Games team! Now turn to 400…

Today I want to lift the veil and go behind the scenes here at the Tin HQ. I have been a bit quiet on the blog in the past few months. This is because we have been working on some really cool tools to help us make gamebooks better for our readers. (not to mention the new books that are coming up, the Android/Mac/PC port, and a whole slew of other goodies I can’t mention!)

First off I wanted to give a shout out to Ariel and Clinton (@elephantish and @foolhardygames on the twitters, follow them!) who have come on to help us out. Ariel is working on a new Orlandes based gamebook and Clinton is building a really cool automated testing tool, which is what I wanted to talk about today.

You may or may not know but we have an editor program that we built from the ground up (twice actually) that is specifically geared towards writing gamebooks. It makes the creation of the links and the inventory items and the combats and the dice rolling all really easy and it has a built-in game sim that allows the authors and editors to basically play the game as they are editing it. This has increased our productivity to be able to create quality gamebook content dramatically.

However there is still room for error.

If you have ever tried to write a gamebook then you know that one or the biggest problems is making sure that all of your choices are internally consistent.

This means that if you have a choice like:

If you have the Stabby Knife, turn to 35.

Or if you have the Choppy Axe of Chopping, turn to 273.

This is fine unless there is some path through your book where you could end up in this section without either the Stabby Knife or the Choppy Axe of Chopping. In this case the player will get stuck.

We never want the players to get stuck. A player getting stuck is the equivalent of a crashing bug in my mind. It is supremely frustrating so we want to try an make sure that never happens.

And one thing that we love about our gamebooks is that we can have a great deal of complexity going on behind the scenes to make the adventures more immersive. There are dozens and dozens of hidden items that you pick up as you move through the books (in addition to the regular items) and each one of those items informs the links in the later sections of the books. So you can imagine that keeping track of all that gets mighty complicated.

So how do we do this now?

First off: the author writes the book and they do their best to keep everything logically consistent. Then we have a technical editor (like Ariel) go through every section and make sure all of the links work properly and the narrative flows in each path. Finally we have a copy editor run through the whole book looking for any missed grammar and typo errors, and they also try to keep an eye out for inconsistencies.

Then we start doing internal builds where the Tin Crew gets the game on device and we all play through it a few dozen times. Once we have found all of the big glaring errors, we then do a limited beta release and let our beta testers run through the book. And we repeat the internal/external betas until we cant find any more issues.

All of this testing usually uncovers dozens and dozens of game logic bugs that we can fix before it ever hits the shelves.

So finally after we are happy that the book is in the best shape we can get it we release it to the masses.

Trust me when I tell you that collectively the Tin Team reads through each adventure hundreds if not thousands of times before it gets to the app store.

But inevitably we miss one or two and our faithful readers let us know where they are so that we can fix them in a patch.

So why is it so hard to find all of the bugs?

Lets have a quick look at the first 12 sections of Gamebook 1 (spoilers!.. not really). If we discount the fitness checks and combat for a moment and just focus on unique paths I can come up with a whole bunch:

1-45-91-64-49
1-45-91-64-412
1-45-91-73-49
1-45-91-73-412
1-45-52-31-412
1-45-52-31-5
1-17-45-91-64-49
1-17-45-91-64-412
1-17-45-91-73-49
1-17-45-91-73-412
1-17-45-52-31-412
1-17-45-52-31-5
1-25-45-91-64-49
1-25-45-91-64-412
1-25-45-91-73-49
1-25-45-91-73-412
1-25-45-52-31-412
1-25-45-52-31-5

So there are 18 unique paths through those 12 sections. Just to give you a quick idea of how big GA1 is here is the whole book: (with the first 12 sections in light green)

Now, some links are dependant on your Fitness level and your Vitality, so we need to test each path with min/max for fitness and vitality so that gives us 4 times as many unique paths:

min VIT, min FIT -> 18 paths
min VIT, max FIT -> 18 paths
max VIT, min FIT -> 18 paths
max VIT, max FIT -> 18 paths

so in the first 12 sections of a book that has about 520 sections we already have to test 72 unique paths.

This sounds like the perfect problem for a computer!

So: Clinton has been tasked with creating an automated gamebook playing program, called GAP (Gamebook Auto Player). He has been working away on this for a few weeks now and has created an amazing bit of code. It will test every single possible path through a gamebook with every single possible roll of the dice, combat resolution, and skill check.

As you can imagine, this is no small task, and it takes a looooong time to test every single path through one of our gamebooks.

So this week we put it to the ultimate test, we set Gappy up playing Gamebook 1 on one of the spare laptops and just let it go.

We ran it for 60 hours before I killed it because the data output file had grown to 26 gigs and the laptop was running out of disk space.

Some interesting stats:
In the 60 hours it ran:

it traversed 2,252,184 unique paths from start to an ending.
it picked up 76,602,977 items
it visited 248,890,218 sections
and it saw 25,926,696 illustrations

(note these run-throughs did not simulate every combat nor every fitness roll, so there isnt a unique path for every possible combat result, just one for a win and one for a lose etc.)

Since it never finished, these arent totals, or probably even close, but we can make some interesting stats from them:

An average playthrough of GA1 is:
110 sections long
unlocks 12 images
and picks up 34 items

Now, as I mentioned it never finished. Since the gamebook structure isn’t a proper binary tree and the dice rolling adds to the complexity quite a bit, it is hard to calculate just exactly how many total unique paths exist in gamebook 1, but I have a hunch that it is much bigger than 2 million. (our best back of the envelope estimates were somewhere between 14 and 500 million, but we could be totally wrong about that)

However, for the average gamebook reader, the vast majority of those unique playthroughs are functionally identical. So the next step is to use the GAP to figure out how to collapse most of those 2 million playthroughs into meaningful data. This is the next step of the project! (that and to make it multi-threaded so it has a chance of completing in our lifetimes

In any case, it is an exciting time here! And hopefully we will be able to use some of this tech soon to help keep our gamebook fans happy!

Cheers!
-Ben

We’ve had such a great 2011 being involved with a bunch of conferences and expos that we wanted to continue that trend into 2012 and can confirm that we will be attending both PAX East in Boston (April 6th-8th), as well as the UK Games Expo in Birmingham (May 25th-27th)!

PAX East was a bit of a no-brainer to be honest as we exhibited there last year and had a really great response by the attendees, plus Neil fell in love with American diner breakfasts (all that lovely bacon)! We’ve secured a great spot for 2012 near some of the biggest indie devs (*ahem* The Behemoth *ahem*), so we’re hoping for a lot more foot traffic. Ben sadly won’t be coming along this time as he will be busy finishing off the Android versions of Gamebook Adventures in Melbourne *whipcrack*, but Neil will be joined by GA writer, Miellyn Fitzwater Barrows and GA illustrator, Dan Maxwell. Miellyn will be announcing her new GA book series that she is working on in secret with two other American based authors and there may just be a certain Judge thatwill need some attention!

While the UK Games Expo is new to us, we’re really excited to be attending as it is the UK’s largest gaming exhibition and like Dragonmeet, GA will fit well with the visiting demographic. By then, we’ll hopefully have an Android and desktop Mac version that we can show off too! We’ve secured a good spot near the main entrance so fingers crossed it will be a great event for us. We’ll let you know nearer the time who will be joining Neil at the event.

Talking of events, Neil attended Adventure-X on Saturday, a small gathering of point & click adventure games enthusiasts, where he gave a talk about Gamebook Adventures. Discworld Noir designer, Chris Bateman also gave an insightful talk into the his time working with Terry Pratchett on the Discworld games as well as delving into some games philosophy, trying to find a reasoning why traditional adventure games are less popular than they once were.  Both talks went down really well and there was a lot of great questions and discussion afterwards. If you’re partial to some games design philosophy then check out Chris’ blog.

It’s that time of year again and 148Apps are running their Best App Ever Awards for 2011. We’re going to try and get Temple of the Spider God recognised this year in the following categories: Best Dice Game, Best RPG Game and Best E-reader App. If you enjoyed Temple of the Spider God we would love it if you could nominate Spider God for us. The more nominations and support, the more opportunities we have at entering the competition!

Nominate Gamebook Adventures: Temple of… for Best Dice Game

Nominate Gamebook Adventures: Temple of… for Best Role Playing Game

Nominate Gamebook Adventures: Temple of… for Best E-Reader App

 Thank you in advance!!!