text based adventure

Instantly recognizable, right? Those are the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, one of the original gamebook series.

For Click Your Poison, several readers have suggested that my covers should have a similar “connected” look. Or, at the very least, something on the cover that lets you know it’s “Interactive Fiction” or a “Text-based Adventure.”

I must say, it makes sense. I love my covers for INFECTED and MURDERED, but they don’t really look connected to one another in any way. I could still keep the images, but maybe in a different design scheme.

One fan suggested a design reference to the old InfoCom games, a callback to when all video games were essentially text-based adventures. The original company is defunct, but they certainly had that “connected” feel. And there it is, all the info you need, right on the cover.

I think a call-back to old games could work pretty well. Maybe not something exactly like this, but a “cartridge” design might not be a bad look for a “gamebook.”