The Tome of All Tales

There is a game that contains every story ever.

The Tome of All Tales is a minimalist old-school shooter that offers a new story every day. Feel free to visit the website or the Discord, and to download the free demo story you'll find at the bottom of this page.

Latest version is early access 0.400 (06/16/2024) - Changelog
(if you've already purchased the game, you can download new versions freely from your Itch.io game library)

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Features

A new story each day!
Each and every day, The Tome of All Tales will generate a new old school shooter with different levels, enemies and weapons. Each story takes around 15 minutes to complete.

Endless possibilities.
Today you're shooting aliens with your pulse rifle in a derelict spaceship, maybe tomorrow you'll swing your wand of fireball to keep skeletons away in a dark dungeon or face hordes of zombies in a ruined city. There's just no way to know what surprise is in store.

Boom shooter galore!
The Tome of All Tales is a love letter to (very) old-school shooters such as Wolfenstein 3D, Blake Stone, Catacomb 3D and Nitemare 3D, back when walls were orthogonal and doors slid horizontally.

Play for fun, try to beat your past records or compete in the leaderboard!
With five difficulty levels for players of all skills, The Tome of All Tales can be enjoyed as a fun daily mini-game, just like Wordle but with guns. It is also possible to play it in a more "hardcore" way, as the game keeps track of your best victory streaks in each difficulty mode and tracks the best daily and monthly scores in an online leaderboard.

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Early access roadmap
(everything is subject to change)

First stage (spring-summer 2024)

• Additional content: contexts, enemies, levels and weapons.
  As of early access launch, 15 "contexts" (story environment like World War 2, Ancient Greece...), each with a variety of weapons, enemies and levels are available.
• Additional mission objectives
• Bug fixes and optimizations
• Improved leaderboard
• More music (the initial EA contains very few tracks)
• Thematic gameplay variations that make each story more unique
• Various visual improvements to enemies and weapon FX

Second stage (fall 2024)

• Achievements (complete a story in less than X minutes, beat a story on the first playtrough X days in row...)
• Bug fixes and optimizations
• Still more content
• UI and quality of life improvements

1.0/Release (holiday season 2024)

• Bug fixes and optimizations
• Even more content. By this time, 30 to 40 contexts should be available, a numer I consider a sweet spot as it means no context will appear more than once a month (on average, as context selection is randomized)
• More achievements

Future updates (2025 and beyond)

• Bug fixes and optimizations
• I'll keep adding more content whenever I have an idea, to keep the game fresh (and just because it's fun)

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F.A.Q.

Is the daily story the same for everyone?
Yes. So if you've found a nice shortcut to reach the exit or the location of a juicy powerup, you can share it with your friends, knowing they'll find it too.

At what time does a new story becomes available?
Stories change each day at midnight UTC/GMT. Stories do not change until you leave and restart the game, so you don't have to worry about not being able to complete a game

Does my computer need to be connected to the Internet to download a new story?
Yes. While stories are not really downloaded from the Internet (only a story generator seed is, so bandwidth usage is minimal) it is the only way to make sure people don't tamper with their system clock to play another day's story and possibly spoil tomorrow's surprise for everyone.

Does The Tome of All Tiles uses generative AI in any way?
Nope. Every game asset of The Tome of All Tales was hand designed and a combinatory generator picks them from tables (think "tabletop RPG encounter tables") to generate unique combinations.