Introducing the Abyssal Gale

Recently I decided, for NaNoWriMo, to take a break from traditional game development and make a Choose Your Own Adventure game in 1 month. I’m going with the name The Abyssal Gale for now, but I get the feeling that’s not original and I read it somewhere, but I can’t place it. A quick Google turns up nothing, so who knows?

Abyssal gale text adventure screenshot

Opening to the Abyssal Gale

I’m nearly done with the editor tooling, which will save me a whole bunch of time linking up story items. I need to be mindful of my desire to add too much functionality. Yes it would save me a little bit of time if I added a quick menu for linking nodes together, sure, but at the same time it’s just going to suck away time from the actual story-writing, which is kind of the whole point of this. Not to mention any bug I introduce now is going to cost even more time in debugging before I can continue crafting the story.

Abyssal gale editor

I do need to add some more nodes though, hopefully they’ll be a pretty painless setup thanks to my existing groundwork. I’m using Microsoft’s Automatic Graph Layout system, which you can fork yourself on github. I’ve made a couple of changes to get it working a bit better with WPF controls (particularly to do implicit support for automatic layout sizing, but I’ve since realized I could do that myself, I think), but it’s been surprisingly easy to get something good-looking out of it. Apparently it’s what Microsoft themselves are using for their new Visual Studio Code Map feature.

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