A Dark and Deadly Path - v1.05.01 - December 31st, 2006

[mouser]

A Dark and Deadly Path v1.05.01 - December 31st, 2006
A super tiny little audio game engine



ADDP (A Dark And Deadly Path) is a tiny little interactive story game engine.

It works like the old Dragon's Lair LaserDisc game [1], or like those "choose your own adventure games [2], but is audio only and involves no graphics.

Basically an ADDP story/game is an audio story where the reader/play must choices along the way by pressing a key on the keyboard. The chioces may have to be made rapidly in quick succession within a narrow  time window which can add an element of panic to the story - and make it a particular appropriate device for for suspense stories.

Audio files are normal .mp3 files that an author records with standard software.  The game script is an .xml file with a format to be described in a separate file.

DOWNLOAD: Here.

READ:

• ReadMe
• AuthorManual

Special thanks to Della for creating a test game/story for it!

[Veign]

Very interesting.  Can we assume you are going to build a sample game for it?

[Veign]

Can it be adapted to videos like MPEG to create a Dragon's Lair type game?  Or maybe something that uses still images to progress through where quick reactions flip to another image.

Either way I see this as pretty interesting since it could be used for other things besides games - not sure what but it seems like it could.

[mouser]

actually you could use it for videos by adding only a few lines of code..

just harder to make videos so i thought it might be a fun audio only project (i was inspired by the accessibility game contest).

[Arjen]

Cool, you did it! 

[mouser]

It's ready for upload now but i'm trying to get della or josh to make a sample game first so people will have something to actually play

[Deozaan]

Mouser? You're that dude from DonationCoder?

Haha this is fun!

[mouser]

ps. Della says i got some of the death audio clips in the wrong places.
ps2. The intention was for this to be an online playable flash thing - which I'm happy to implement if anyone ever actually makes a realy story/game with it.

[wraith808]

Do you know that this was going to be my entry into the coding contest if I had gotten off my butt and coded it... good work!  I guess that great minds do think alike... 

[rgjordan]

Great idea.  I'm going to try this out with my kids. If you have a future release, I would suggest an option for allowing the author to make some choices have a random outcome.

Rob

[mouser]

that's a nice idea about random branches.

i'm afraid that a poor decision was made in the design of this program to organize based on the idea of one long audio file with time points along it that choices get made. 

a much simpler approach in terms of designing a game would have been to use a sequence of separate short mp3 files that play to completion. 

i should modify it to be able to work like this if there is ever any hope of people using it.

[mouser]

I have been contacted one or two times since releasing A Dark and Deadly Path in 2006 by people who were thinking of using it, but i've never seen anyone make a game using it.

That makes me a bit sad; re-reading the author's guide now, it really seems like it could be a fun system and it's a shame it's never actually been used even once in 4 years to make a game.

If it ever got some real use it would make sense to add features and port it to Flash for online play, etc.  Are there really no site-impaired people who might be interested in this?  

[anne19]

Lol cool, do you still do these? I'd like to participate