Evaluation

For this module I had to create a choose your own adventure game book. At the start of the task the whole class had a look at already existing books and play through them to understand how they work, to map them out and to get inspiration for our own books. I played a few on a website that had fan made adventure game books on it. I really enjoyed the fantasy setting that some of these books had and I decided to use this theme in my book.

I had this idea for a story that featured two characters; a human and a dragon that had to escape from a dungeon complex owned by an evil wizard. I wanted to create a logical reason why these characters were trapped in the dungeon so I made it that the evil wizard was imprisoning magical beings and artefacts in order to absorb their power and add it to his magical strength. I decided to have the human be a young wizards’ apprentice so that he would fit into the story better. I wanted to have a dragon as the players’ character because dragons are usually an enemy in these books and I wanted to turn that convention on its head.

I thoroughly planned the story using the three act structure that I learned during lectures earlier in the year. I ended up with a narrative that took the player from a dungeon, underground caves and a tower. Next I went on to draw a map in photoshop of all three locations along with encounters and puzzles and alongside that I wrote a word document as a key to the maps so I could be reminded of what my drawings resembled. I was very happy with my maps but I would have liked to have had more varied enemy encounters.

When I started writing the game book I decided to provide a brief description of each numbered entry for play testing purposes and for my reminders of events. I decided to go ahead and write it properly because I thought that it would be better for time if I started writing it then. As I wrote each entry it became apparent that I may not be able to include everything that I set out to accomplish in the time I had left. The amount of entries yet to fill was daunting to me because of the approaching deadline. I decided to remove the caves and tower locations and leave the game on a cliff-hanger but because of my hatred of leaving a story unfulfilled I decided to bring the final boss to the end of the dungeon level. I really liked this decision because it allowed me to complete the game on time and in a satisfactory condition.

Because of my time limits I did not have much time to play test so I decided to use the same numerical stats for each enemy encounter. This does limit variety but I had to go with it because of time restrictions. I did play-test this game with my sister in order to see if the game was playable. The result forced me to amend the rules regarding rolling the same numbers in an encounter and what to do afterwards. At the end of the day I am pleased with the result despite it not being as long as I wanted it to be and as challenging. Time constraints was the real hurdle for me and if I were to do it again I would start writing the adventure book as soon as I have arranged the narrative and mapped it out. I would also decide on a reasonable entry per day ratio in order to reach over 100 entries.