u/__flatpat__

Hi fellow gamebook enthusiasts-- I need your help. I am a lifelong fan of Fighting Fantasy, CYOA, and adjacent stuff and about 5 years ago I wrote a FF style gamebook with a friend of mine who is a pretty well accomplished writer in other genres. I asked him to write it with me because he is a good writer with several published works, plus I knew he would actually do it and I felt like if I had an accountability partner that I would actually finish on my end as well. He wasn't familiar with the genre so I had him read some staples like Deathtrap Dungeon, Creature of Havoc, and the first Sorcery! installment. I had read somewhere that Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone had written a few books together, splitting the narrative into two halves and then joining the stories together for the final draft, so I figured we would do that.

Anywho, the way I set it up is that our hero pretty early on has to make a choice of what path he has to follow to reach his final destination. My buddy wrote the swamp path and I did one through a forest/town and we split duties on writing the beginning and end of the story. We both did our parts but basically ended up with two very different types of stories. His path was written really lean with a pretty consistent tone, but not a whole lot happening and narrow variety of encounter types. Mine was pretty much the opposite - maximalist, over the top, with as many ideas as I could possibly shoehorn into my passage count. If you took his path, your adventure could be quick and easy while mine had the potential to be overly complicated.

Another major issue was the ruleset I developed pretty closely emulated FF but I came up with what I believed to be a clever twist of an additional "power/skill" for the PC that would affect the narrative in various ways. There were multiple options for this "power" so the one you ended up with would affect your path and required additional passages to be written to reflect this. I told my buddy about this (obviously) but he barely implemented it in his path to the point to where you could play through his fine without these additional rules. I don't think he wasn't trying to implement them, I just don't think he was looking at it from a game standpoint and just viewing it from the book side if that makes sense. My path on the other hand made full use of the optional powers in the way that obviously I intended. Needless to say, this made the two paths even more incongruous.

Another issue was art– I talked to a few artists who seemed interested and like a good fit, but was never able to get anything solid going with them (yes, I was offering money). Eventually, I gave up and started drawing the illustrations myself. The problem was that I could do a decent job, but draw pretty slow, so it was kind of a long process where I lost patience with myself and just shelved it for the time being.

Here it is a few years later and I feel bad for having something that is like 80% done but still unpublished. I know not everyone publishes their stuff, but I had that as a goal from day one so I still feel bad about it. Plus I told my buddy we would publish when I started the project with him. He doesn’t ask me about it anymore, but I still feel like I dropped the ball. Another thing is I know the market has become way more saturated in the last few years (partially due to AI) so I’m wondering if it is even worthwhile. As someone who has put out music for years for a pretty small audience, I’m not expecting to make bank or even recoup my investment in the project, but I would just hope that some people would read and enjoy the finished project. I think about how much my life was changed by finding some used copies of Sorcery! At my local resale store when I was a kid and I would just hope to make someone else feel the way those books made me feel. The story we wrote I feel was pretty unique although obviously still derivative of FF books.

I guess I’m just looking for advice on how y’all would tackle this or if you even think the project is worth my time to save and get published. I’m attaching the images I drew for the book, though ideally I would want to do 20 more illustrations at minimum for a published version.