Choose Your Own Adventure and Dungeons & Dragons inspired text adventures

Playing Dungeons & Dragons and reading Choose Your Own Adventure books shaped my life growing up. So much so that I because a full time game developer.

Today as I watch my kids grow up, I see most kids almost exclusively consuming and missing out on the joy of creating. That makes me sad.

I mean, I love games and love playing them, but when I watched one of my sons type "Be the dungeon master for a game of Dungeons & Dragons with 3 players" into an AI bot, my heart sank.

Delegating world creation to an AI instead of imagination?

We discussed what he was doing and I soon realised that, while he loves playing games, the idea of creating whole "worlds" seems too daunting to him. But, he would like to create text adventure stories and share them with his friends who could then do the same back. I see this as a step for them on the way to creating worlds as a GM or writer.

That crossed over with something I'd been wanting to make for ages, a decision tree based writing app – for creating my own Dungeons & Dragons Modules.

The idea for ImperilUs was born.

Dungeons & Dragons like most Role Playing games works with a repeated 3 step process:

• The Game Master (GM) presents players with a scenario.
• The players decide what to do.
• The GM determine the outcome, ofen helped by dice rolls.

By taking the premise of Choose Your Own Adventure books and adding in complexity, with randomness, skills, and mini battles, I could sketch out modules, and my sons and their friends could create stories for each other to play. It seemed like a win all round.

I have the basics done, and will soon be at a stage where I let my kids, and their friends, loose on the web app. As things develop, and there are things to show, I'll be sharing them here. Or you can sign up for email updates.