Happy Easter Monday!

I’m writing this transmission on my phone; enjoying a rare snippet of quiet while Lucas is out with his mom, grandma and aunt to explore a nearby park.

Classic FM Easter 300 countdown is playing. Just finished my coffee.

I’m pleased to report that on Saturday Rain iOS was submitted to the App Store. SchwadLabs IS a business, but so far we haven’t really given the world anything businessy where we can compete for folks’ hard-earned capital.

I have a LOT unreleased that COULD, but I also have finite time. I also subscribe to Derek Sivers’ “Hell Yeah or No” philosophy for this company so you will never see anything that isn’t a “Hell Yeah”. That means a lot of half completed unreleased work that could be picked up.

I also thoroughly enjoy my projects making public data accessible to people, that will never monetize.

The app may or may not make it through apple’s process. But it’s been a JOY to play on test flight. It has full haptics for all events which makes it feel like a real game. Behind the scenes I’ve also been making endless improvements to micro bugs and smoothness and snappiness and speed and resiliency.

If you haven’t played in a while

Dalton Lake

Some may remember the CYOA series from the 70s-90s. My school library was full of them. There were others, differing genres. Ha! Goosebumps had choose your own adventure too!

For the uninitiated. The books have multiple endings (3-40). Some good, some bad. You make decisions on certain pages. “To eat the apple, go to page 47. To throw it away, go to page 99.”

How lovely

They are written in the second person- as you!

I researched this. There are formulae for different CYOA books. Number of endings, outcome ratios, average story lengths, graphs, trees.

So I built a CYOA book writer. I won’t make this public. But it allowed me to write my own. My first book is “Dalton Lake”. I wish to finish it in June.

It’s a nifty app. Traditional markdown authoring. You decide whether a page is an ending or if it has more branching nodes. Add 2+ options. You can visualize the story tree. You can read and play it in the browser. You can generate a usable PDF. Beautiful typesetting. I love it.

When creating a new story; you can scaffold your tree from four different options based on typical structure patterns in the various CYOA genres. The scaffolds still have an element of randomness too. This means you can fill in the pages if you wish without worrying that you have a fun playable layout.

The best bit is the JSON story export.

This I will feed into Scarpe for my finished product. A downloadable desktop application to read the book. I’ll sell it in my store. You will be able to buy my book! And enjoy it on your computer in a Ruby written desktop application.

If anyone is really into handheld books, or for myself…. I’m also investigating high end bespoke book printing. You know, where the book looks and feels like it was published in 1890. Hard back. May cost up to £100 per book. But I don’t care, even if I’m just printing one copy for myself and my son to enjoy. Maybe I’ll write more after!

If anyone has any experience in book printing to help navigate the vendors and lingo I would be very interested. As a test I might print a copy of _why’s book “CLOSURE”.

In the meantime it’s very pleasing knowing I can open my laptop, fire up the app, and write my book. An interesting book. A playable book.

until next time,

schwad