If you’ve been following us on our Twitter account @TinManGames, which is maintained by Neil, you will have seen him teasing recently about some Fighting Fantasy news that we have. We thought it was about time we let you all into our little plans for our future Fighting Fantasy apps as things have changed quite a bit since we announced our line of FF apps in the Twelve Days of Gamebooks back in December 2012. We have some big news about two new FF titles that we will be developing this year as well as some important updates about The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and some of the other early classics. First up it’s time to venture into Titan City with….

APPOINTMENT WITH F.E.A.R.

It’s no secret that our next release is Steve Jackson’s classic superhero gamebook and there are big changes in store for the production of this app. While The Forest of Doom was very faithful to the original story and game design (which on the whole was well received for that decision), we felt that we needed something more visual for AWF as being a comic-book story it lends itself more naturally to visual game design cues rather than traditional RPG systems that suit fantasy stories. Therefore we’ve made a pretty bold decision (well bold for us) to get rid of the DICE! Yup, you heard it, we’re ditching the very game mechanic that we’ve building our digital gamebook apps around over these last three or four years. We’re not going to reveal how that will work just yet, but it will be more skill based with the difficulty determined by your SKILL and LUCK scores. We’ve created a working prototype and so far it’s feeling pretty great!

Anyone familiar with Jackson’s original story will know that you assumed the identity of Jean Lafayette, better known as The Silver Crusader. Our second major change is that we’re saying goodbye to Jean and the Crusader and are currently developing a character creation system in which YOU can create your own hero (see what we did there? ;)). At the start of the gamebook you will not only choose your superpower but you will also be able to choose to be a superhero or a superheroine, design the colours of your costume and give yourself a snazzy super name. Making these design choices will dictate the starting stats of your character (STAMINA,SKILL and LUCK), which again negate the need for dice-rolling. We’re hoping that people will have fun determining the combinations of powers and costume design to max out their character.

We have some other plans too including making much more of the Hero Points that get doled out during the adventure. We’ll make it easier to gain and lose these points and will include a leaderboard connected to Game Center so players can compete to become the greatest hero or heroine of Titan City!

We’re hoping to release AWF sometime around October assuming the Federation of Euro-American Rebels (F.E.A.R.) doesn’t take over the world in the meantime. Hot on the heels of that we have some news about the original classics…

WARLOCK, DEATHTRAP DUNGEON & FRIENDS



Games development is a quickly evolving beast and as a small company we need to be able to be as agile as possible to cope with market changes and other shifts in player’s expectations and wants. Therefore we’re quite happy to say that the recent release of Sorcery! was a bit of a game-changer within our digital gamebook niche and the guys at Inkle deserve all the plaudits for bringing the first part of Steve’s four-part epic to life in a unique and new way. This obviously got us thinking (not to mention Ian and Steve) and we’ve decided to go (slightly) back to the drawing board for the original FF classics: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos, Deathtrap Dungeon, City of Thieves and Creature of Havoc.

In a happy coincedence if you’ve been following our antics, you will have read about this. We’ve been working really hard behind the scenes over the last few months to try and secure some extra funding and were over the moon the be successful with the Screen Australia fund! Having some extra money means that we can be a bit more flexible in our approach to developing gamebook apps and advance our gamebook engine so that we can do things that we’ve prevously been unable to do because of cost.

Obviously this spills over into our plans for the Fighting Fantasy series of apps and we have some pretty major changes outlined for a revamp of those five gamebooks in particular. We’re not going to reveal too much more at the moment about this but fans can be rest assured that we’ll still maintain our core nostalgic approach to the series, while introducing a lot of new visual features to bring the locations and denizens of Firetop Mountain, The Trial of the Champions, Port Blacksand and the rest to life!

STARSHIP TRAVELLER & ISLAND OF THE LIZARD KING

We wanted to keep the Fighting Fantasy release schedule on track while we tinker with the engine and so have decided to develop two of the other classics from Steve and Ian: Starship Traveller and Island of the Lizard King. Both of these will most likely take a similar approach as we did with The Forest of Doom, with the first of these due for release later this year after Apointment with F.E.A.R.

If you’re not familiar with either of these two then here’s a quick synopsis for each of them:

Island of the Lizard King

Kidnapped by a vicious race of Lizard Men from Fire Island, the young men of Oyster Bay face a grim future of slavery, starvation and a lingering death. Their new master is the mad and dangerous Lizard King, who holds sway over his land of mutants by the eerie powers of black magic and voodoo. YOU are the only one who can hope to rescue the suffering prisoners, but do you have the courage to risk this dangerous mission?

Starship Traveller

Sucked through the nightmare of the Seltsian Void, the starship Traveller emerges at the other side of the black hole into an unknown universe.YOU are the captain of the Traveller and her fate depends on YOU! Will you be able to discover the way back to Earth from the alien peoples and planets you encounter, or will the starship be doomed to roam uncharted space forever?

No doubt we’ll start spilling some information on the blog regarding both of these over the next few months – so stay tuned!

IN CONCLUSION…

We’re really excited about the future of our gamebook engine and what we’ll be bringing to the Fighting Fantasy series over the next twelve months, and most importantly we hope you are too! Features that we include will no doubt appear in other future titles and onwards towards a potential major future project that is some way off. Fun times ahead and Fighting Fantasy is in good hands!