By putting the tools to develop games into the hands of anyone with enough time and gumption to teach themselves coding has given the opportunity for unique and innovate game design to invade the industry over the past few years. Many of these new and innovative ideas are coming from small independent studios or in some cases have even been crafted by one individual. One such developer is the singular mind behind the DS adaptation of the popular “Lone Wolf” game-book franchise. Sitting in a place somewhere in between a traditional pen and paper RPG (By providing a simple dice combat system, inventory management as well as skill checks) and a choose your own adventure novel, I was quite intrigued by the incredibly polished experience that one person could create. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Frédéric Calendini, the mind behind the conceptualization and full development of the DS homebrew game.

1. What was the development of the engine like and how long did it take?

I began to work on the engine in September 2007, but since I didn’t know anything about Nintendo DS development, it took a while to figure out everything and setup an application, which was modular enough for adapting future books of the series. I put a lot of emphasis on the events manager, so it’s easy to add custom events for handling specific cases (and there are many included in the books!

Although not relying on random encounters, simple dice checks are made to make it through scripted encounters.

2. Once development on the engine was complete how long does the development of each book take?

Now that the engine is ready, it basically consists in checking every numbered section and create the various events / conditions for each of them. I suppose that it would require 2 weeks full time for a new book, including the illustrations. The only problem is that it’s a rather tedious and repetitive task, so I do this in my spare time.

3. What inspired you to undertake such a project?

Well, during the summer of 2007, I visited a childhood friend who still had some “Choose your own adventure” books. It brought very good memories back, and since I was looking for a project on the NDS, I thought that adapting an existing adventure book to this platform would be rather cool. First I wanted to use an amateur book (there are web sites dedicated to this), then I stumbled upon the Project Aon site: their staff got the authorization to publish the Lone Wolf series in HTML format. I contacted them and they seemed interested in the project. Lone Wolf books were very good candidates, because they include deeper gameplay elements like Kai Disciplines, so their videogame incarnation might be even more interesting.

With Amazon’s Kindle (their ebook reader) being such a success and the amount of DS’s out in the world, Have you approached any developers and/or book publishers to license your engine for either a normal ebook type experience or the choose your own adventure style that you have created?

In fact I’ve gone pretty far into a possible commercial release of the LoneWolfDS project, since several publishers showed interest in it. But it didn’t reach its final state unfortunately. Some people really believe in the possible success of this game (especially me, after the huge feedback I received from players around the world!), but the videogame industry is currently in a very depressing situation where risks have to be minimal. Since no other similar project has already been released before, publishers didn’t have a way to predict possible sales and decided to give it up. It’s sad because if everybody thinks this way, we won’t see many original concepts in the near future..

While the game is much more then a novel, there is still a lot of reading although combat and narrative choices help keep it at a manageable level.

Once the source code is released or in future development would it be difficult to add puzzle elements: for example if you solve a certain puzzle you could go down one track, if not you have to go down a different one.

Well, everything is possible, but for now I prefer respecting the original work from Joe Dever, which is already quite entertaining in my opinion. And by adding new gameplay elements, I would have to keep everything consistent and preserve the original balance, which can get more complicated than expected.

I have read online that it was difficult for you to find unlicensed source material to work with; what franchise, regardless of licensing, would you like to work with in the future?

For now I think Lone Wolf is still the perfect candidate. Especially since, as stated above, I think that it introduces one of the deepest game mechanics found in a “Choose your own adventure” book. Moreover this series is very long, and has a huge fan base, also due to the fact that a table top RPG, and even other video games based on the Magnamund universe already exist.

With edutainment games having quite a prevalent presence on the DS (Professor Layton, Brain Age, any the millions of other Brain Puzzle Type Games, as well as adventure games like Hotel Dusk), isn’t it a possibility that this could be the next frontier for edutainment? Not necessarily the same format of ‘choose your own adventure’ but having games and puzzles show up during pertinent times in a licensed materials storyline/ or having a brand new IP crated just for such a game?

I’m really sure that this style of game has great potential. It’s really a nice mix between a digital book and a standard adventure game. As said earlier, the feedback I got from players is really impressive; I received hundreds and hundreds of mails from people around the world who really enjoyed it. Now I suppose it’s about finding the right professional partner at the right time, but I would not be surprise to see another publisher release a similar title one day or another…

For now Lone Wolf DS remains a free download, which you can get by visiting his site, and playing through many different commercially available DS flash carts. With the recent announcement of the DSi and it’s support for downloadable games, the prospect of having these titles available for a value price will hopefully become one that a major publisher will pounce on and reward Frédéric Calendini for his amazing effort and time spent developing these titles.

-Eric Wall

Tags: DS, featured, Game Design, Game Industry, homebrew, Interview, Lone Wolf, Nintendo

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