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Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

Shame they didn't map some of the Fighting Fantasy books ( http://www.fightingfantasy.com/ ) or Steve Jackson's Sorcery Series ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery! - now made into a series of mobile apps http://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/ ). Jackson & Livingstone really pushed this format far more than the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.

Most of all I remember "Creature of Havoc" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc ) as being amazing and extremely hard. Instead of being an adventurer you play a monster with limited IQ forced to unravel the mystery of your own existence. It employed various techniques that prevented cheating like "If you have the key, add the number written on the key to this page number to open the door". One of those puzzles still has people discussing it http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/creatureofhavoc.html ( contains spoilers ). At 13 years old it took me and a friend 2-3 months to finally crack it.

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> you play a monster with limited IQ forced to unravel the mystery of your own existence

But surely the whole point of Fighting Fantasy books is for me to experience something different to my everyday life?

It employed various techniques that prevented cheating like "If you have the key, add the number written on the key to this page number to open the door".

In computer science terms, that would be an "indirect jump" or "computed goto"; and somewhat relatedly, indirect jumps/calls are for the same reason a little trickier to deal with when reverse-engineering --- without keeping track of other state, it's hard to determine where one will go.

The biggest one I ever was was the (planned) 12-book Fabled Lands series (of which 5 were published), where you'd be directed to pages in other volumes as you roamed the land, and you had to keep track of code words (i.e., boolean flags) as you did things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands

Related, here's the flowchart for the first fabled lands book, contrast it with the CYOA ones in the article: http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2011/12/shape-of-universe.ht...

Or the adventures of Lone Wolf

Those were awesome.

The other day, I found out that those are freely available nowadays. Somebody even made them into an android app (also free).

Project Aon has all the Lone Wolf books in a variety of formats, including a machine readable format, which they have used to produce similar diagrams of the books' structures. Joe Dever have them permission to distribute the books for free some years ago (you can also now buy them as ebooks, I think). They're all at https://www.projectaon.org/

FYI Project Aon have mapped their structures, for example: https://www.projectaon.org/en/svg/lw/01fftd.svgz

The differences are interesting, like which are more linear and which are more branching; some have relatively early choices that fork into two long separate branches.

SVG flowcharts of many gamebooks including FF and Lone Wolf: http://outspaced.fightingfantasy.net/SVG_Flowcharts/main.htm...

I made .svg diagrams for the Fighting Fantasy books Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Deathtrap dungeon a while back on my old blog: https://daveman.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/how-to-create-svg-l...

You have it marked as private

Should be fixed now.

I am convinced there was an erroneous dead end in Creature of Havoc - even with cheating it was impossible to win!

SPOILER WARNING

There was (potentially) a typo in the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc#Reference_21...

> It employed various techniques that prevented cheating ...

Now I wonder if Third Planet from Altair did that. As a kid, I was frustrated to never get to the best ending, so tried to backtrack the references. I was stumped to find that no page seemed to take you there.

One of my GrailQuest books had an error that prevented you from continuing. I carefully determined the correct page number and edited the book to fix the issue. I can only assume that dead-ends like these arise regularly during development, but most are eliminated by editing and playtesting.

oh my god, Creature of Havoc was insane. Never felt like I got close to completing it.

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