Today we get to finally announce our latest project, created in partnership with Edmund Pevensey in America: Seven Poets and the Assassin’s Secret, a real-time, serialised adventure story for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
Check out the Seven Poets trailer video here.
Seven Poets was our first project coming out of Frankenstein and in some ways, it couldn’t be more different. For a start, it’s not an inklebook – it’s not a branching narrative and there’s no game-logic, no adaptive storytelling.
But it is a novel reshaped in a way that suits these strange, super-connected, multi-functional things we all carry around in our pockets. And so we’ve been solving a lot of the problems we wanted to solve on Frankenstein – how do you keep a reading coming back when the screen they’re looking at has the entire internet inside it? How do you make the book become a personal thing, digitally dog-eared as the reader turns the pages?
For a low-tech bit of storytelling though, it’s fairly high-tech: the chapters of the novel are released in real-time, and updated in real-time onto the device you’re reading. The novel itself, and the newspaper content that goes alongside it, are written and delivered as the story progresses. (We like to call it the first world’s first agile novel.)
It’s been a tech-heavy project to get it made, too. The author, Matthew A Brown, and his team at Edmund Pevensey are based in Texas. We’ve never met, except over video-conferencing, and we’ve done all our collaboration over the internet, across a permanent time-difference. There are plenty of international game studios that work like this, non-stop, all the time: we hadn’t quite expected to be doing it ourselves so early on!
The app is built in four main sections – two are about story-telling, and two are for recording your own progress through the story. The author had a clear idea about getting a light gameplay element from the novel and into the reading experience, and we’ve worked with him to design something that’s elegant; something between double-dare and keeping a diary.
The team behind Seven Poets have strong ambitions about where they want to take this story, and are running a Kickstarter project to fund it. If you want to take a look, then please do. Otherwise, we’ve got some servers to tighten.
Peter Pears
DISCLAIMER – I am all for these projects, they seem to be of very high quality, and I fully support everyone involved.
That being said, it breaks my heart to see things of this quality being available only for iPad and other iStuff. It’s just cruel.
martin noutch
This is an interesting next move! I was sure that you would do something serial – it is a very natural progression.
I have to echo Peter – for those of us without i-wear, we can only badger friends to buy on our behalf! Where is the android parallel?
joningold
I’m sorry there isn’t one! Perhaps that will change in the future — partly depends on how far the badgering takes us…!
Until then, at least inklewriter is open to all.
Kate Fuerst
Hi Jon,
I must say first that I love your work. And I’m sure that you realize, after so many years of writing it, that part of the sheer joy of IF has always been its accessibility. The fact that anyone, no matter what their class or status, life experiences or level of wealth, can access and experience a whole universe of fantastic stories. The projects that you’re working on here sound absolutely incredible, and it breaks my heart that they’ll only be available to those who have the funds to buy i-Tech. Your work looks phenomenal, groundbreaking, magical– but that accessibility that’s been the core of the IF community for many years has somehow been lost in the process.
I know that creating the translation from Apple to Android (or even to something web-based but mobile-accessible) will take work and funding and time, from people are already working at full speed on other projects. But please consider yourselves badgered! You’ll be thanked and thanked again by those of us who can’t afford an I-pad, but love the world of IF and the way that it’s continuing to develop in new and surprising ways.
The IF community is made up of people from all walks of life, all social classes, who are proud to love this unique and immersive brand of storytelling. And we’ll be proud of you, for your dedication to the spirit of IF (not to mention thrilled at the prospect of getting to play too!) if you bring your own amazing stories to a platform that can be reached by all.
By the way, it’s awesome that inklewriter is available to anyone.
Vincent Brown
This is a new and exciting form of storytelling for me as a reader. The more I become involved in the story, the more I am drawn in and become part of what is happening. Very unique and exciting project!