Ready Player One meet Wargames in a Choose Your Own Adventure style! Press Start to Play takes the best of the LitRPG genre and lets you play the book like a video game to reach 20+ endings!
The elevator pitch? It's a LitRPG choose-your-own-adventure where you level up, unlock items, and shape your story.
Interested? If you need more, here's some more.
Press Start to Play is a book that I have worked on for a loooong time, and I am so excited to share it with everyone. I have loved Choose Your Own Adventure books since I was a kid, and when I was introduced to the LITRPG genre, it seemed like a match made in heaven.
After doing some brief research, I found that interactive fiction books are rare in the modern world. You go on Steam, and there are dozens of interactive fiction games, but physical books, there's not a huge market. That might be because Choose Your Own Adventure is a copyrighted term, and the average Joe doesn't know that interactive fiction means the same thing.
I wrote my first interactive fiction book last year, Broken Halls. I have had moderate success, especially with in-person sales, and greatly enjoyed it. But the concept of an interactive fiction and LITRPG kept nagging me.
I had done a Kickstarter previously for Arcane Inkblots, a writing guide that I co-authored with Colton Iverson. I've always wanted to do another one, and I thought this would be the perfect project to do it.
So, after a half a dozen rewrites, the book is getting its final editing touches right now, and Press Start to Play is ready to enter the world. Are you ready to join this journey with me?
Press Start to Play begins with you, the reader, waking up in a pixelated world. Everything is a little strange, but you soon find out that the fate of the world is in your hands!
The threat? Nuclear war. What do you expect from the game that trapped you? The game was made in the 80s. What else did they fear?
It is up to you to choose which path you will follow and use your items to fight your way through this 8-bit world!
This book is chock-full of easter eggs, references, and fun achievements for you, the reader, to find! It's your time to make your own journey and save Earth!
This is a special BackerKit edition that will only be available to those who participate in this campaign!
For those newer to interactive fiction stories, at the end of every chapter, there are options for which page you will go to next! You don't read the book from cover to cover.
Something that makes Press Start to Play different is that you can unlock achievements depending on the paths you choose. They give you items that are required to make certain choices throughout the book!
In the back of the book, you get to record all of the achievements and see what is left in the book for you to find.
Basically, if anyone wants to really support this project, I have created a 'High Score Leaderboard' in the back of the book. Every edition of this book will have their name in it, and they will always be remembered for helping Realmbreaker Press and my writing career soar.
We are shooting to send everything out in August! Luckily, most of the tiers already have their products finished; it's just a matter of putting the final touches on the book.
Shipping will be collected post-campaign through backer surveys. Shipping is not included in the original price of your tier.
Regarding shipping costs, here is a quick breakdown for the US.
If you do not live in the United States and want to back this project, we will go on a case by case basis. Shipping will not be cheap, unfortunately, but we will try to make it work!
This isn't my first crowdfunding campaign, but I know from experience that anything can happen in these endeavors. I am a one-man team, under the name of Realmbreaker Press, and I will try my best to get everything shipped on time.
The book is already in the final stages before printing, with early manuscripts already printed and tested for formatting, so there is a low risk of the book being the source of delays.
If the project ends up getting tons of support, that could be the most likely source of delays, with the volume of orders being too much for any help I recruit.
I promise transparency every step of the way, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to [email protected].
Thanks again for looking into this project, and have fun on your adventure!
