Billy Anderson
"The Adventures of Billy Anderson" is a series of (mostly) choose-your-own-adventure and interactive fiction stories that I've made over the progress of several years. The project has taken root in multiple programming languages, including TI-Basic, C++, Java, and Perl. What follows is a description of all of the games and other media that Billy Anderson has taken root in. As the nature of the stories is extremely convoluted and random, every single one of these is considered to be canonical.
The basic premise behind all of these is just randomness and a protagonist named Billy Anderson ("Mister Anderson" is the origin of this, and the exact line pops up a lot in the games). Over the course of developing these games Billy has become somewhat of a superhuman, in that he's really dumb, will try (and eat) ridiculous things, and can survive almost ANYTHING. There are several obscure references and inside jokes within all of these games, so pretty much the only person who understands -all- of the humor is me. ^^;
Note that since most of these are really old, and never seriously intended for release, you might have varying degrees of success getting them to work. You have been warned.
Billy
The original endeavor that started it all. This one was on my old TI-85 calculator (oooold). I found out about the TI-85 menu functionality and then proceeded to make a choose-your-own-adventure story based on it. Really it's one of the best things you can do in TI-BASIC, since in order to do any sort of real-time graphics you pretty much HAVE to program in assembly (which I couldn't wrap my head around at the time, not to mention it wasn't until later on that I got a link cable anyways). Sadly I lost that calculator, and with it all traces of the BILLY program. I can remember a lot about it though, and I often make references to it in the other Billy games. A brief synopsis: you start in school and are bored, and then have to choose what you want to do. You end up getting detention, and then getting captured by Klingons who bring you to the Furby King. You get imprisoned but escape, then transport yourself back onto Earth. I think later you might end up joining the Io Squad 2 but my memory's fuzzy here. The programming here was basically a lot of Menus and Lbl statements. Everything was in uppercase, unfortunately, because there was no lowercase typing. This is also when I started to become fairly proficient with typing on a graphic calculator. Aside from possibly the end part, there were basically no branching paths in this one. I also vaguely remember running out of variable or label names as this got longer and longer. This work was unfinished, as most of the Billy games are.
The Adventures of Billy Anderson 2: Return of the Furby King
Download link (set of TI-89 programs, you need a link cable and a TI-89 to run it (as an alternative you can try to open it in wordpad and navigate through the text))
This one is an epic saga. It probably remains the biggest and best Billy Anderson production to date. Programmed on my trusty TI-89, it has numerous improvements over the first in the series, including lower-case characters and even the advent of small mini-games. In addition this one sets up branching paths, so there's a lot more replay value. The main branch comes in the beginning where you choose between the Furby King, the Furby Prince, and the Io Squad 2, but things keep on branching after that as well. Some of the branches even come together after a while (there's a Sario Rip path that can be reached via multiple branches). Like pretty much all of the other Billy games, this one is unfinished. After a while progress became a lot harder since I had to work with so many different branches. I decided to split it into several subprograms to ease up loading time and decompose the program a bit. Hopefully that doesn't cause any problems if you try to run it. This Billy game is also notable in that it actually keeps track of score (though how it calculates it is a little weird because of the branching mechanics).
Billy 0.5: The Dark Void
This one wasn't actually done by me, but rather by a friend who got inspired by my Billy program. Chronologically, it's set between Billy and Billy 2, but I think it was made after work on Billy 2 started, so that's why it's being placed here. It never really got that far, but this is where the infamous incident with Billy trying to swallow a pencil whole originated (I think...that may have been Billy 4/3rds though). Apparently my friend was a Star Wars buff, so he included a choice where you have to pick between an X-Wing, a Y-Wing, and an experimental "No-Wing". hehe. I don't have any record of this one since I'm not in contact with that guy at ALL anymore (even if I was, he probably wouldn't have the program anyways. it's too short to be worth it).
Billy 4/3rds: The Wrath of Draygon
Download link (windows executable, runs in a console text window)
This one was written in C++. Ironically, I programmed it while taking a Java programming class in high school (that class was a joke, hence why I ended up writing more C++ code in class than Java code). This one broke from Billy and Billy 2 and was setup as an interactive fiction style narrative rather than a choose-your-own-adventure. As such it has a slightly different flavor. There's definitely more to look at, and you can go around examining the different objects I have in there and it's pretty neat. The branching behavior is also a bit more complex as well. This one didn't get nearly as far as Billy 2 did, but it's still a neat little short adventure with a lot of humor packed in. Ironically enough, Draygon doesn't even appear at all in this.
Billy Unlimited
This one I can't seem to find, but that's okay because it was REALLY short. IIRC I didn't even get to any part where you would make any choices or actions. I just remember starting it and then scrapping it really early. The intro was Billy sitting at his computer screen and typing "asdf" a lot, but that's literally as far as I got. For the curious, I did this in C++.
Billy Beyond
Download link (.jar file, needs to be opened with java.exe (-jar) and NOT javaw.exe, so you need to run it from a command prompt and NOT by double-clicking it)
This one was written in Java, and as such is heavily object-oriented. I did this one in a second computer science class in high school (again it was a joke). Like Billy 4/3rds, this one was IF and not CYOA. The user interface and command interpreter is a bit better in this one. It starts out a little bit like Annoyotron with the keys bit but thankfully isn't the same at all (hint: you have to -eat- the door--a lot of people get stuck on this part but it totally makes sense if you think in terms of the other Billy games). This one actually has -some- semblance of an ending since I used it as my final project demo so I wanted to at least put in a temporary ending spot in there (you can tell it's half-assed though, even for the randomness that is Billy Anderson). Like Billy 4/3rds, the world is actually pretty interesting and if you take the time to examine everything there's a lot more humor.
The Adventures of Billy Anderson 3: Billy's Demise
A huge break from previous Billy titles, this one is actually a "Ductmation" (think Claymation, but with Duct Tape). This was mainly a collaboration between myself and a friend, which we used as a final project for our American Lit Honors class. It was totally above and beyond what was required for the project (some sort of report or something on Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five), but it was great fun to make and we were both really happy with the end result (probably more so than anyone else!). Again, there are some inside jokes here (our teacher was a fan of Jennifer Garner, hence the pic in the beginning), and the whole time-warping thing can be a little confusing, but it's still a humorous watch. My friend writes:
"This video was done by Kenneth Finnegan and 4 of his classmates in his American Lit Honors class as a comical immitation of Kurt Vonnegut's writing style in the novel SlaughterHouse-5 by randomly jumping around throughout the plot with no real useful connection between the different segments.
The entire video took almost an entire weeks worth of work, mostly between Kenneth and his classmate Timm[ie]. It consisted of 50+ audio clips and taking almost 600 pictures. Building the sets and taking the 600 pictures alone took 3 days and almost 15 hours."
So he was behind all of the photography and set-building, and I spliced all the images together using Adobe Premiere Pro. Kenneth originally had the Ductmation idea a while before this emerged, but he was doing it in Windows Movie Maker and I had the idea to use Premiere to crossfade between images, making it look smoother.
The Adventures of Billy Anderson 4: Journey to the Sun
This one doesn't actually exist, but it was referenced by Billy's Demise, so that's why I'm putting it here ^^;. I think Kenneth had some preliminary ideas about it, but it was pretty obvious it wasn't going to happen.
The Adventures of Billy Anderson 5: The One that Comes After Number 4
Download link (Perl script, run gamebookgame.pl and then type in Billy5.txt as the text file to load. -Might- not work properly on certain systems (I had portability issues between Linux and Windows because of carriage returns functioning differently in both). To fix it you might have to muck around with the text file, but hopefully you won't have to actually go into the script itself)
This one is done in Perl, which is kind of neat because Perl is all about text-processing, so it was the right tool for the job, so to speak. I actually used this as my introduction to Perl--I needed to learn it for my Summer internship so I decided to write this as my first real program in Perl to learn my way around the language. It actually uses -objects- and object-oriented programming, but this was before I learned that objects are mostly useless in Perl anyways. The actual Billy component of this is just all one text file, and the actual GameBookGame interface is what makes up the program, so if you want to you can actually use this to easily make your own CYOA story.
Billy 5 is kind of neat because it's in CYOA format, as opposed to all of the other Billy computer games which have all been IF. I worked on this mainly during my summer internship and then stopped afterward (again, another unfinished project). It's kind of short, but there's a LOT of branching, so the replay value is excellent. There's actually a flowchart included in the zip file that shows you the layout of the whole story, if you want to look at that. This one is also unique in that this is the first time you can actually get a Game Over. It's also the first time that it's possible for Billy to die, which is kind of an epic first.