DestinyQuest Infinite 2.0 is here

Hi all,

We’ve been working on DQI 2.0, a collection of new updates for fans. While most of these updates are under the hood, we’ve also added a few design tweaks you might like.

tl; dr: All of the DQI 2.0 updates are now live, so your DQI game will have them now!

Here are 2:

1. Hover tips

As I wrote in my post in the post I imagined in my head but never physically wrote on games and memorization, I really dislike when a game “challenges” you by giving you an easy task but hiding the info you need to make a decision. In contrast, I really like games where you can see all the facts you need to make your next move, and the tough part is choosing that move.
In the spirit of that, we’ve added a number of hover tips to most of the icons in the game:

While those who already played DestinyQuest or Fighting Fantasy will probably know what speed is (probably thanks to some painful lessons), for beginners this is a way to keep that game info close at hand.

Something even more useful for players of every level are our new special ability hints.

While you can view all of your abilities by clicking on the abilities icon, it’s a bit inconvenient to go cycling back and forth between actions and looking things up. (Until now, it was like the modern-day equivalent of constantly looking at your character sheet.*) With this new system, though, we’re removing the last bit of friction between a fast-paced fight and a well-informed one.

* No, of course we still play P&P! John runs a campaign, and Chris is joining one. (Well, Chris’s might be on roll20, but, um, don’t tell anyone…)

2. Adaptive text

Although DestinyQuest Infinite includes the verbatim text of the 672 page print Legion of Shadow, we recognized that were are certain text features we could add without taking away from the original text. Item descriptions and the occasional bit of in-combat flavor were some of our early additions.

This battle is not quite so dramatic when I roll into it with a Speed 12 Pyromancer, but let’s just pretend to be excited anyways.

One thing that is pretty much entirely an artifact of paper, though, is repetition.

(OK, some classic JRPGs seem to have the same problem…)

(OK, some new RPGs seem to have the same problem…)

Michael Ward has, to his great credit, included some areas that change on the second visit, most notably the town of [spoilers], but doing this for every section would turn a 672 page book into a 1392 page one, and we’re not sure book spines come in that size.

Computer memory, however, can hold billions of pages, and so we’ve started toying with adaptive text. In a few select sections, you’ll see different text based on when you visit and whether you’ve been there before.

Right now, we’ve only making a handful of very subtle changes.

By the way, if you write gamebooks, you can add changing text to your own games through our gamebook writing tool, StoryLab. Stay tuned for updates about StoryLab on our newsletter!

And more!

There are many other changes we’ve made, so go to our forum for the full list of changes, to beg our exhausted team for mobile, and to hear more about Act 3.

For now, I’ve been writing this whole blog in a notebook, and my hand is sore. So time to go…

Happy adventuring!

– Chris

DestinyQuest

DestinyQuest Infinite is the first in the QuestForge Games, a new line of gamebooks.