After almost a full year of development, my first non-contract commercial project has been released! The game is called Eternal Equinox, and is selling on its website (http://www.ee.misoftstudios.com) right now for $7.99 [USD]. But there's a catch... and I'm sure you'll think I'm crazy, as most people do... but Eternal Equinox is... I hope you're sitting down... a text adventure! In Eternal Equinox, you play the role of a villager asked by the Village Elder to save your island from a horrific tsunami that is lying in wait just off the coast. Normally, such natural disasters aren't troublesome to the people of Equinox, as they have a magic artifact, called the Hoto, which can thwart them. But you're quick to learn that this mystical Hoto has been stolen, and now, your people are counting on you to recover the Hoto and save the island before it's too late. Along the way you'll need to explore a massive island with three towns and a number of other locations, solving puzzles and performing quests along the way for the people you encounter. Get a job working in mines or building ships (amongst others), or simply play some "21" in the local tavern to earn a few coins that might help you along the way. Read through hundreds of pages of elaborately-detailed text and enjoy the rich culture and deep history of the island as you work to complete your quest and save everyone and everything you've ever known. It really isn't fair to call this game a "text adventure." It really is a digital novel, with lengthy stretches of text to read through and take notes on. The game features a simple input system (no complicated parser or long list of commands to learn) where you read a group of options and then enter your selection on the keyboard, made simple so you can focus on the story and not the controls. The game has an amazing soundtrack and uses an extremely simple GUI that won't steal your attention away from the tasks at hand. And my favorite feature of them all is that this is only the first game in a trilogy of adventures, and the character you create now will be with you until the end of the trilogy, learning new skills and adopting new traits depending on how you beat this game. Even some of your inventory items will carry over into EE2 when it's released in 2008... pretty cool I think. I already know what most of you are thinking... a wide majority of the people who know about EE think it isn't going to sell, mainly because it's a text adventure. But in the past several years, there hasn't been a single example of anyone who has made a legitimate effort toward selling and properly marketing a text adventure. This is mostly just a chance to try something new, and the game itself has been getting quite a bit of praise so far amongst the people who've played it, so I have a decent feeling about the game's future. EE isn't being marketed towards gamers, but I'm telling people about it here because most proper "Readers" probably won't be well-schooled in the ways of games, and might not recognize bugs as well as gamers and game developers probably would. So please feel free to weigh in with your comments and suggestions... just try to keep things constructive :).

I don't think it is a bad idea.

Have you looked into supporting cell phones/palm pilots/etc.?

That market might be interested, I could see someone reading one on the bus.

That's a brilliant idea! It had never even occured to me to make this game mobile, I'll look into conversion tools this afternoon and see what I can dig up. Thank you!

I've looked into it, and it seems that porting to mobile won't be as easy as I thought it would be. Finding genuinely cheap tools to port the software won't be easy. Also, the way the text is formatted, we'd need to re-work the entire engine from scratch. But it's definitely something I'm considering heavily, I think it would be awesome to see people riding the subway playing Eternal Equinox on their phones and PDA's!