The Twilio powered Adventure Game has been a great success so far but I think I need to add a few elements from the original Fighting Fantasy books to move the game away from a simple path-following story to a more interactive story.

First-up is the introduction of enemies. Warriors, ghouls, werewolves, trolls and fiendish imps. Each one you meet on your travels will need defeating, which means we need to introduce health and a dice roll mechanism, which will probably end up being a simple random number generator to begin with. I’ve yet to work out the precise mechanics but I’m thinking you might earn back half the original health of the enemy you’ve beaten. We’ll need to add in some food and potions along the story too, to build up the health.

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As a child I loved playing/reading the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. (See Amazon) The very fact that I was able to decide how my story went was probably one of the first role playing games I ever played. I remember going through all of them in my local library, then waiting patiently for the new editions to arrive.

As a challenge, my girlfriend and I set about recreating the same sort of thing using PHP. She chose to go down the browser route and I decided to try out the Twilio platform which would allow the user to play via their phone, initially using the touch-tone signals and eventually moving onto SMS based play. I’d previously played with Twilio at a very low level, creating a messaging platform for the radio show, The Games Cast.
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