About
Whole Bean Interactive is just me, John Hiner III, in my capacity as an independent game developer. I'm a husband, father, and programmer in my mid-thirties who believes in computer games as art, but not as Art. I trust I make myself obscure.
Here you'll find various computer game related projects of mine, including my point-and-click text adventure engine, my "enhanced" mobile version of the classic Chase, and my blog, where you might find computer game related musings.
If you have any questions or comments, or you'd just like to chat about computer games, you can reach me at ludenscogitet@protonmail.com
FATE
The Fantastic Adventure Text Engine (FATE for short) is a browser based point-and-click text adventure system.
What that means is that, like Zork and other classic text adventures, you play a FATE game by issuing written commands and seeing how the game reacts. However, you don't construct these commands by typing them, but by clicking on words on the screen. Each word used to describe something, record a command, or respond to a command can be clicked on and used as a building block for the next command.
FATE is a system, not a single game. It is designed to be a platform for anyone with knowledge of JavaScript to write and share adventures of their own. I do write adventures for it myself, however. :)
Robots!
Robots! is my first and only "commerical" release (which is to say I put it on itch.io and the Google Play store). It was written specifically for Android phones in Java using the libGDX framework.
This game is an attempt to fix what I thought was a deficiency in the design of games like Robots. While I think it has deficiencies of its own, I'm still satisfied with it, and I know at least 3 kids who continue to enjoy it. (For kids, I recommend the 99 lives cheat. On the main menu, tap on the title 5 times until you hear a ding).
Check it out on itch.io