The Rocketeer vs. the Third Reich started life as an attempt to learn how to use the game development software, Gdevelop5.  I wanted to create a simple, one level game to learn to use the program and decided to use my favorite movie, The Rocketeer, as the basis for the level. 

The idea initially seemed very simple.  Have Cliff Secord (a.k.a. the Rocketeer) run and fly around a German castle, avoiding or fighting with sentries and enemy rocketmen.  Manage your fuel, health, and ammo, and try to not die while saving your friend and mentor, Peevy.

Gradually, a bit of a backstory started to filter through the code.  How did Cliff end up in Germany anyway?  Why does he need to rescue his friend?  I jotted down notes here and there, thinking that I might include a few intro cut scenes, kind of like how 8 bit NES games back in the 80s used to introduce their stories.

And then the opportunity came to talk with Billy Campbell, the Rocketeer in the 1991 film, for an interview on my weekly podcast.  I thought it might be fun if we did something other than the usual Q and A format that most people use when they talk with guests.  What if we did an interactive story, like an old school Choose Your Own Adventure book?  So I wrote the backstory for the game I described above in skeletal format with a number of choices he could make at certain sections (we ended up playing through the whole thing, and he got "the good ending.")  

After the episode came out, I thought about turning the outline I'd created into an actual story and eventually fleshed it out into a 40,000 word interactive story inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure and TSR Endless Quest books I'd grown up reading as a child.  I used characterizations from both the 1991 Disney movie and the original source material by Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens.  Each step of the way, I tried to think what Dave, Danny Bilson, and Paul DeMeo (the latter two being the screenwriters for the 1991 film) would have made their characters do.  Hopefully, I've done their work some justice with this homage.     

It wasn't until lately, though, that I Iearned about Twine, mostly by accident.  I ended up lifting the sections comprising the various choices from the story into the passages that make up Twine's interactive story format.  After learning some basic html, adding a bit of music, inserting some variables to create additional choices, and fiddling with a few other tweaks, it became more old school interactive text based game than old school interactive story.  Regardless, though, I had a lot of fun making it, and I hope you enjoy playing it!

More about it's creation and release here: https://13thhr.wordpress.com/2024/05/27/the-thirteenth-hour-podcast-459-and-like...

Download it here: https://13thhr.itch.io/the-rocketeer-vs-the-third-reich-text-based-adventure-gam...