Citizens of Earth, your attention, please!

A threat most diabolical has emerged from the far reaches of the App Store cosmos: interactive fiction on mobile has been a barren and desolate frontier for far too long, a void in which no full parser adventure game has dared to plant its flag. That changes now. Interactive Fiction (IF) on mobile will blast off like never before.

I am writing to you from Lab Boy Games to announce the imminent arrival of The Menace From Planet Z, a three-chapter episodic parser-based IF game for Mobile, and the proprietary mobile engine that powers it, both built single-handedly right here on this fragile blue marble.

Hot diggity, where to begin.

I. The Game

It is the year 2155. The villainous Emperor Zorvath and his crimson Death Ray have Earth’s governments groveling in terror. Only one person stands between civilization and oblivion: YOU. You play as Captain Rafe Randall, intrepid space explorer, square-jawed hero of the Outer Regions, a fellow of considerably more courage than common sense.

Flanked by the brilliant Professor Diana Cortez, the gruff Commander “Iron” Jack Morrison, the wisecracking mechanic Sparky Jenkins, and the dangerously mysterious Lady Isolde Vane, you must pilot through the void of space, infiltrate a hidden Martian fortress, race to a crumbling lunar base, and confront the evil tyrant himself aboard his terrifying warship, the Dread Conqueror.

The Menace From Planet Z is a snazzy love letter to the pulp science fiction serials of the 1930s. You get immersed into the story, no fourth wall breaks, no self-knowing winks, just a straight-forward tribute. The Death Ray is enormous, crimson, and magnificent (Zorvath’s words, not ours). The mechanical computers have spinning gears. The dialogue is period-authentic and gloriously earnest. It is the bee’s knees and then some.

Chapter 1: The Crimson Death Ray

The game is $4.99 and Chapter 1 comes with it. Chapters 2 and 3 will be available as in-app purchases at $3.99 each, delivered via a cloud infrastructure purpose-built for the game.

II. The Technology

Now here is where things get truly exciting and I suspect you will find this as thrilling as a zero-gravity fistfight in a Martian corridor.

The Menace From Planet Z runs on a proprietary full parser interactive fiction engine, built natively for Mobile and believed to be among the very first of its kind deployed on a mobile platform. This is not a web view dressed up in a trench coat. It is a purpose-built parser engine: it understands commands, tracks object states, routes dialogue trees, fires conditional logic flows, and manages complex multi-chapter puzzle systems on a phone you can hold in one hand.

But wait. There is more. Because this engine alone would be capital enough, yet the real advancement is what sits above it: The Adventure Game Builder (TAGB), an end-to-end platform through which design-partners can build and publish full parser interactive fiction games directly to mobile devices.

TAGB is, to our knowledge, the first platform designed specifically to build and publish parser IF natively for mobile. A visual logic flow editor, a dialogue tree builder, a room and item manager, a hint system, scoring, combat, all of it, point and click, build, publish. TAGB is not an open, public tool: it is available exclusively through our design-partner program.

The Menace From Planet Z is the first title built on this platform. It is a fully realized three-chapter adventure, and it is arriving on the App Store, with Android to follow.

The void of parser IF on mobile has gone uncharted long enough. Captain Randall is boarding his rocket. The Death Ray is charging. And the App Store will never be the same.