We’re busy getting ready for our appearance at PAX East next week (yikes!) and as part of that, we’ve put up the first screenshots from Sorcery! The shots show the main game interface, along with the spell-casting, combat and map in action.
Learning to adapt
At inkle, we balance our time between big projects, and quick fun things we want to try out, so this week we made a quick demo showing how we could adapt a book (we pulled out by Alan Garner‘s classic fantasy The Weirdstone of Brisingamen) into our inklebook format.
The questions were: would it work? How easy was it to do? How close could we stay to the original text, without compromising the interactivity? How much fun is the result?
The demo story is pretty short – just a few scenes, from near the start of the novel, in which the two protagonists Colin and Susan arrive in the wonderful setting of Alderley Edge, and the first seeds are laid of the magical things that go on there. And obviously, we can’t release it! But it was a great experiment, and one I’d love to repeat on a larger scale.
What’s in a game?
Monday saw inkle‘s first public outing at the Futurebook conference, where I spoke as part of a panel on the subject of gamification under the watchful eye of Penguin Digital’s MD Anna Rafferty. Harvey Elliott, previously of EA, spoke about the barriers to entry between players and games, as well as the power of games and gamification to define people’s identities. My own talk was about the structure of games and game-like experiences: what does a designer need to make sure a game’s got for it to work?
The two complemented each other quite nicely, with one talk focusing on the gamification of reading, and the other the gamification of stories.
