We know that the blog by now it’s almost a useless area of the blogphere or whatever you want to call it, and only people who are probably lost pass through here. But I wanted to leave some mark, on this special birthday.
Fifteen years ago, it was summer and I was on a bench behind the main square in Trieste, writing the first paragraphs of an interactive story with Lovecraftian cues. I completed it in a mini notebook in my terrible handwriting. One hundred paragraphs and the various schemes, all traced and erased and rewritten in pen. An absurd effort.
So I threw myself in search of a tool suitable for this task and on the internet of that time I found little or nothing, apart from an old French software. Like any real developer, if I can’t find something, I’ll do it myself, so I took the same notebook and started jotting down ideas.
A few weeks later the black and green screen of the very first version of Libro Game Creator appeared on my monitor, which immediately found the enthusiastic support of the fantastic community of the Librogame’s Land site. There I came into contact with shady figures of the narrative underground such as Francesco Di Lazzaro, Mauro Longo, Alberto Orsini, who in the following years became great writers of interactive fiction, obviously thanks to LGC3!
In 2014, after a few years of silence, I resumed the project and rewrote everything from scratch, using the Java language, which allowed me to create a program that ran on Windows as well as MacOS systems.
In 2020 I was contacted by Antonio Ferrara to collaborate on his boardgame project Tales of Evil, creating a “spin-off” of LGC, called Evil Tales Creator, thanks to which both projects benefited from various new features including the very useful installer.
In these 15 years, the greatest satisfaction has been and still is discovering that the tool is used to give life to many new stories. On the site you could find a page with a partial list of gamebooks written with LGC3. But there was also Tambu’s bookgame design course, a thesis on interactive writing, the Coding and Computational Thinking course in the Urbino Library and much more, which involved LGC.
Furthermore, in the intense “gamebook renaissance” that we are experiencing in Italy, I’m often contacted by publishers and writers about LGC (sometimes even for a bug, but that’s part of the challenge), which give meaning to the work done in these years.
So I just have to remind you that LGC3 can be downloaded for free, that it is a donationware software and wish you, as always,
good writing!
LibroGameCreator 
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