Simple Gamebook consists of two programs, SimpleGB which is used to create Gamebook style (text) Adventures, and SGBRunner which is used to play adventures. The style of both can be termed extreme minimalist! Why is that?

You should read what I said on the Simple IF page for the initial gory details! But after I'd produced that platform I ran out of ideas for the next project to keep me busy. After several months of basically just having fun and doing nothing in particular, it eventually dawned on me that for creating Gamebook style adventures Simple IF just wasn't appropriate. Naturally I wasn't going to throw away everything I'd done in Simple IF so I settled down to produce a platform which would emulate the original paperback game books. Many other choice based platforms seem to be a hybrid of IF style adventures and gamebooks but given the style of Simple IF, I decided it would be more consistent to not produce another hybrid, just a pure gamebook system. So the player sees pretty much what (s)he would have seen in a paperback, but I decided to keep some features of Simple IF that would assist the author whilst being unseen by the player.

Therefore I started hacking away at Simple IF removing bits I thought I wouldn't need. Meanwhile, I came across a deprecated system called Adventure Book which was a hybrid, but not so much as it couldn't be used for inspiration. It also came with a couple of games and a .zip with a couple more Adventure Book games from an old competition.

Eventually it came time to start translating the Adventure Book games. This lead to putting back some of the code I had so carefully chopped out! Anyway, I've done all that now, translated the meagre handful of Asventure Book scripts I could find and here it is......

This slide show shows what the creator looks like...

And this is what the runner looks like...

The kit includes help files for both the creator, Simple GB, and the runner, SGB Runner, in both .chm and .pdf formats. The content is the same in both formats.

Both the generator kit and the runner kit also include two games. One is a very trivial room escape game, Aliens!, which is mainly intended as a starting point for you to write your own game. The other is a complete game, Gnomic, to demonstrate just how much can be done despite the minimalist style.

All the Simple GB files are text files. This makes it very easy to use existing games to learn how things are done as they can be searched by text editors or multi-file text search utilities. So answering simple questions such as "which Tasks use this flag" are trivially easy to answer. Such questions can be surprisingly hard to answer in some of the more advanced platforms!

Mutual back scratching! As I indicated on the Simple IF page, I am not an I.F. author. So to help prevent this project from becoming a glorious waste of time, I really do need some help from you good people in the form of games for free download (see below). And wouldn't you like an extra outlet for your efforts? So can you please consider not just writing new games, but also translating old competition games, as those are less likely to be making heavy use of the advanced features of other platforms which can be tricky to simulate in Simple GB.

So please use the Feedback link to submit games (no gratuitous sex and violence though please!)

The other thing that is not me is running forums. This project could really do with a forum, so if you think you can do that, please get in touch via the feedback link above.

Simple GB Games

Click on a game name to download the game files in a zip. Unzip them to your Simple GB folder

If you need to refresh the distributed games...

Title	Author	Translator	Description
Aliens	Jon Ingold	Me	An exceedingly simple example for you to expand.
Gnomic	Jon Ingold	Me	You've lost your garden gnome and have decided you need to find it.

Other games.

Title	Author	Translator	Description
Caverns of Chaos	Paul Martinez and Alison Castro. Inform conversion by lemonhead	Me	A nasty troll has kidnapped the King and Queen of Pandaris and is holding the country to ransom. Perhaps someone should kill the troll and rescue them?.
Flotsam	Jamie Murray	Me	You are in a bar but think maybe you should leave. The only question is how?
Kingdom Without End	Shannon Cochran	Me	You are an archeologist who thinks he mat have discovered the caverns of the Ancient Ones.

Downloads