Category Archives: Interactive Fiction

My entry for the 2018 solitaire Print-and-Play contest is a 99-section, 14,000-word gamebook, Hero’s Arc: Under the Blood-Red Mountain. You pick the path, and your decisions shape the story. I was inspired to create a modern alternative to the great gamebooks of the 1980s. Unlike those books, Hero’s Arc has story arcs, so losing a battle won’t always result in death, but may result in a setback of a different kind. You’ll need pen and paper and three six-sided dice, each a different color or different size. One will be […]

When my 11-year old wanted to learn to program last spring, I got him a book on writing games in JavaScript. It had the source code for four games, but my son found it difficult. Four games?! A far cry from the 101 BASIC Computer Games that was my go-to (ahem) when I was his age, programming a TRS-80 Model I. So I looked at a number of different BASIC implementations for his iPod Touch, eventually landing on LowRes Coder, which turns an iOS device into an 8-bit microcomputer circa […]