It’s celebration time at inkle: as Part One of the Sorcery! saga is now available for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch from the App Store. The Shamutanti Hills await!
Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! is here
Gamification talk and Frankenstein demo
Two goodies from inkle today: first up, the video of a talk we gave at BookNet Canada’s technology forum in March is now online.
It’s about 45 mins long, and I was a bit jet-lagged when doing it, but it’s a nice little overview of our ideas about game design, and how games tie up with books and digital experiences. It was also the first public showing of Frankenstein’s look and concept. It’s an extension of the talk we gave at the Futurebook conference last year, only longer, and with more jokes.
Secondly, we’ve launched the web-demo version of Dave Morris’ Frankenstein, so those of you without iPhones and iPads can get a taste of what you’re missing. Try it out on the Frankenstein page: just click the iPad to get started.
More Frankenstein press
Update: We’ve had another national newspaper review, this time under the title “The app that’s a monster hit”, in The Independent.
With about a week and a half to go to release, Frankenstein has started to pop up in a few more places around the internet, and in print.
First up, a detailed interview with Good E-Reader, in which I discuss inkle and interactive apps, and Dave talks adapting the story of Frankenstein.
Then there’s a (slightly unexpected, but most welcome) half-review half-discussion of the Apple/DOJ court-case by Porter Anderson, as illustrated by inkle.
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.
Partnering with Publishers
(This is a reprint of a blog post that first appeared on the Futurebook website.)
Our first project, Frankenstein is being built using our “inklebook” platform, designed to let non-technical writers make interactive content with the minimum of struggle. One of the question that’s come up a lot since we started showing it to people is – if your technology is aimed at writers, why do you need publishers? Why don’t you work with the writers directly?
It’s true. We could do that. But first and foremost, we’re a software and design company. We make things. By working in partnership with a publisher, we get to focus on what we’re good at and know we’ve got a lion in our corner.
