A whole new world

We're excited to finally announce what we've been up to for the last year, in the background, here at inkle HQ. In collaboration with Cambridge-based studio Cape Guy, we've rebuilt 80 DAYS from the ground up in Unity, for PC and Mac. And it'll be out on Steam, GoG and Humble at the end on September 29th, priced at $9.99.

A bigger adventure than ever before

To celebrate the release, we've included a massive content update, adding thirty new cities, over 150k words, and two major new world-spanning plotlines. Love, betrayal, thievery, murder, poker and piracy await! (UPDATE: Read more here!)

We go into a bit more detail in this interview here on Macworld.

About the port

The desktop versions are being built in Unity, with the bulk of the work done by Cape Guy, a new indie studio founded by ex-Rocksteady developer Ben Nicholson. Ben approached us to take the game on, and quickly impressed us with his credentials as a developer (if you want to know what he did on the Batman games, for instance, take a look at the company name and guess - Ben wrote the original physics code for Batman's cape in Arkham Asylum.)

We've been building in Unity 5, and leaning heavily on the new UI canvas system, with some of our features - such as the gently animated text reveal - really putting it through its paces.

We've also been making use of the graphical capabilities to produce some fancy new colour and shading effects, including a day/night cycle that moves across the surface of the globe.

The new version is prettier than ever!

Update: Laurence has written a bit about the new work on his own blog - along with an early preview of the theme for Sorcery! 2!

We've got a little treat coming for Sorcery! 3 players soon - a new recording of the epic theme tune, by composer Laurence Chapman, and recorded by a live orchestra.

The recording came about thanks to the $99 Orchestra, a Kickstarted-orchestra dedicated to making high-quality live recordings for use by, well, whoever!

We've been so pleased with the results we're looking forward to using them again on two new pieces of music - firstly, the theme for the final Sorcery! instalment (coming soon - and no, sorry, we don't know when!) - but we're also going back to create something new for Sorcery! 2.

Here's Laurence hard at work composing more Sorcery!

We're looking forward to the results!

It's taken six weeks, but it's finally been cracked!

When we released Sorcery! 3: The Seven Serpents in late April, we teased on this forum (warning: major SPOILERS on that thread!) that the game had one ultimate secret: an ending that was totally fair, but almost impossibly difficult to find. An ending so hidden, in fact, that we hadn't managed to do it ourselves.

Normally, on the internet, "difficult" means "solved today" and "secret" means "solved tomorrow", but this one has kept the posters on Touch Arcade busy for over a month, and has been repeatedly declared impossible.

NBAS - No Beacons All Serpents

The goal is to complete the game, killing all seven, but without using any of the "beacons of time". Yes, that means, getting across the ravines, gullies, and mountain ranges, all without the power to alter the landscape. It also means defeating that Serpent. And yes, it seems, it can be done. (We thought so!)

There's now a full walk-through on the forum, so if you want to play the game unspoiled, then you've been warned...

Other Records

While people have been Serpent-slaying, other players are still working on 80 Days, and Phileas Fogg fans will be pleased - or appalled! - to hear the world record has been smashed to a mere 28 days. The previous best of 30 lasted for a good six months.

Speaking of Secrets

...We're keeping one. No, we're keeping it. For now. More, soon.

The long wait is over. The Gates of Kharé have opened (or not, depending what you did) and the path into the Baklands beckons. A place of dust and stones, empty of life but cursed and haunted by terrible creatures. A place where you will starve, tumble into canyons, be murdered in your sleep... unless you have what it takes to survive.

In short: Sorcery! 3: The Seven Serpents is now out on iOS, Amazon Kindle and Google Play. It's our most ambitious title yet - a fully open world to explore across two time periods that can be blended between at will. The monsters are tougher, the traps meaner, and the secrets and hidden corners more weird and surprising than before. But we've still ensured that, if you haven't played previous games, you can pick up the adventure here.

A year in the making

When we say this game is big, we mean it; what was intended as a four month project grew to take most of a year. When we began, we knew we wanted to throw the game open and leave the normal branching-path structure behind, but brought a lot of big changes with it.

For instance, if the player can go anywhere, how do we handle the passage of time? In previous parts, that's keyed to where you are - but now you can be anywhere, at any time. And with the player's paths looping back and around on themselves, our previous rewind system had to be overhauled into the new "active rewind" feature that you'll see in the game.

Under the hood, too, we had to upgrade our core text engine, making it possible to spin side-stories out from the main flow of content at any time - allowing the serpents and Snattacats you might be hunting to stalk you right back, appearing anywhere and at any time.

It's a technique we played with a little for 80 Days and have now gone all out on, meaning areas such as Lake Ilklala are built entirely from these procedural story components.

And then there was the graphical work, blending two massively detailed hand-drawn maps dynamically, in real-time and under the player's control, using a development on the shader technology we originally created to give the 80 DAYS its crisp outlines.

And finally, we were committed to a simultaneous release on both Android and iOS, which meant building all these systems in a way that worked across not two devices, but hundreds.

Judge for yourself

So was the extra work worth it? We think so, and early reviews agree, like this one from Touch Arcade:

“Sorcery! 3 is easily the biggest and most robust gamebook inkle has produced to date. It offers all of the strengths of the previous chapters and builds a ton of improvements on top of them... The hunt for the serpents is thrilling, and the battles with them are tense and exciting... easily the biggest and most satisfying gamebook ever released on iOS.” - Touch Arcade

How will you fare?

Now the game is finished (and don't worry, Part 4 is already under way). But we've got a request for you. The new open world structure means we have a question we don't know the answer to -- how quickly can this game be completed? (When we released 80 Days, our best time was 56 days. It was recently completed in just 27.)

So how fast can you cross the Baklands? Destroying all 7 Serpents, naturally. Let us know in the comments.

We've been silent on the blog for a while now. It's partly the shock of 80 DAYS receiving four BAFTA nominations, but mostly its been because we've been buried in the wild wastes of Kakhabad, fighting not one but seven Serpents, and trying to survive the curse that covers the land.

The good news is, our journey is almost complete. The game is just about to go out to our dedicated beta-testers, who'll strap on their legendary swords, ready their nose-plugs, glue and sand-pouches, and most likely die horribly at the first bug they encounter, whether it's this one...

... or this one...

New art, new music, new monsters...

As ever, the cartography is fresh from the pen of the brilliant Mike Schley - but this time around, it comes with an as-yet-unannounced twist. Suffice it to say for now that if you thought the original Sorcery!'s 3D mountain ranges were cool, be prepared for something truly magical this time around. Here's a clue for the eagle-eyed.

We've also brought on board Laurence Chapman, composer of 80 DAYS' rousing and widely-loved theme, for some new epic music. You can get a sneak preview on his website already.

And all of that comes alongside twenty new monsters, smarter Swindlestones opponents, another half million words, and an unprecedented level of freedom of exploration. More on that later...

The Adventure Begins - or Continues

As before, you don't need to have played any previous Sorcery! games; you can start your journey right here - one of the advantages of a game that writes its story on the fly is it can insert the extra backstory and tutorials a new player needs without interrupting the game for returning adventurers.

Those of you loading games from Sorcery! 2 will be pleased to know you'll be facing a stiffer challenger than new players as well. If you struggled through Kharé's mean streets then you deserve it, right?

While we aren't announcing a launch date yet, we can say for certain that Sorcery! 3 will be launching on all platforms simultaneously.

And finally...

In case you can't wait, you can always indulge a bit of Sorcery! love in our new online store, where you can pick up some gloriously high-def poster prints of the maps so far, or battle a Skunkbear while you have a cup of coffee. Take a look.

We're happy to announce that 80 DAYS will be finally be making it onto Android platforms, via Google Play and the Amazon App Store, before the end of the year.

Releasing on December 16th, the Android version will contain some brand-new additional content, taking the loyal Passepartout and the implacable Monsieur Fogg on their most dangerous journey yet: into the icy Arctic wastes of the North Pole, as they attempt to short-cut their wager. Pack your furs: it's cold outside.

The new content will also be available to iOS players via a free update.

The extra journeys clock up at 30k more words, which is a third of a novel but only a 5% increase in the game's text - text which has just earned our lead writer, Meg Jayanth, a nomination in the UK Writer's Guild awards. The winners aren't announced until January but we'll be biting our nails for her in anticipation.

They say good things come in threes, and we think that probably qualifies when we think about yesterday in the inkle office.

Firstly, there was a mention of 80 DAYS in the New York Times in an article about the rise of interactive storytelling in computer games.

“Of all these games, 80 Days is the most fully realized.” - New York Times

Alongside Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Walking Dead and four other indie games (including the enjoyable audio spy drama Codename Cygnus and the interactive-but-not-in-a-choicey-way The Sailor's Dream), the article concluded: "We’ve been dreaming about this future for decades. Guess what? It’s here."

At the same time, we were also listed as a top pick "book" in this article in The Telegraph, rounding up the best novels of 2014. Is 80 DAYS a book or a game? We don't precisely know, and they don't know either - "Both, really," they declare, "and a delight."

Game of the Year!

Both of those were pretty nice write-ups to receive, but got slightly knocked down again when TIME Magazine published their top ten games of 2014 - across all platforms and scales - and in a list that includes Dark Souls II, Hearthstone and Monument Valley, they put us at #1.

“Here be mechanical golems, underseas trains and steam-powered creatures as you traverse a game world (designed by a British-Indian woman) that doubles as trenchant commentary on the nature of colonialism.” - TIME

Now, we suspect that'll prove to be quite an outlier choice when other places start listing their GOTY picks (are we even a real G? Of course we are, right?) But it's still an amazing thing to receive. We've been gobsmacked by the reception our little game about a valet and an Englishman has had out there in the world.

A little thank-you is coming...

That was Monday. Which makes Tuesday seem like a good time to say we've got a couple of nice surprises coming, hopefully before the end of this year. First up is the long-anticipated Android port of the game, which we teased a few weeks ago. It's already racing against the clock as we speak, and we're just hammering the last few bugs out of the clockwork in time for release.

We've also got another little treat to announce just in time for Winter, but we'll announce that a little closer to the time...

But what about Sorcery! 3?

Of course, if you've been following our work since before 80 DAYS came out, you're probably wondering about what's happened to Sorcery! 3. Originally slated for April it's now so-late-it-isn't-funny, but the good news is we're almost there. The content has hit alpha and the crazy new gameplay features are dropping into place. Mike Schley is back to produce some more maps for the game. And we've brought on board Laurence Chapman, composer on 80 DAYS, to write us a new stirring theme.

This one is big, complicated and different, and we think will up the ante on the kind of gameplay a text-driven choice-based game can achieve.

Wish us well as we knuckle down for the final sprint!

September 19th is one of the internet's silliest inventions: International Talk Like a Pirate day. We're celebrating with a launch, somewhat overdue: our adaptation of Dave Morris' splendid pirate adventure, Down Among the Dead Men.

Dead Men is an interactive novel you can play as male, female; governess, changeling, thief, buccaneer, warlock... Be bold or cowardly, a good Cap'n or a scurvy sea-dog. Sit back, and lose yourself in a quest of justice - or revenge.

Gameplay

There are three difficulty modes - from benevolent (where no matter how bad things get you can be sure you'll win out), through fair, to cruel. (If you're interested, cruel is an exact replica of the book. Only without any way to cheat.)

There are hidden secrets, and mysteries galore, from buried treasure, to vampires, long-lost galleons, shoot-outs. There's a monkey, and a parrot.

(True pirate-gaming enthusiasts might also recognise the title, Down Among the Dead Men, from one of the songs performed by tireless robot musicians who haunt the taverns in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag.)

A delayed launch

If you've been following us for a while, you'll know we first announced this project in 2012, after the release of Frankenstein. The ship was built and rigged, but ran afoul of its moorings. It's finally been salvaged, dredged, and made sea-worthy once more for your enjoyment, at the cut-down price of one dollar.

If you've played 80 DAYS or Sorcery! then you might be a bit surprised to find Dead Men is a simpler affair, laid out more like a book (well, a message in a bottle, anyway) than a board-game. That's certainly the case: although under the hood, it's running the same adaptive-text inklewriter engine that powers our other games, with 125k words and two thousand options.

It looks, well, a little like this:

Adventure awaits!

So set sail, enjoy, don't forget your cutlass - and you can find more of Dave's work on the Fabled Lands blog. Avast!

We still can't quite believe it. We're not pinching ourselves, we're bashing our heads with hardback Folio-society copies of Verne's classics. 80 DAYS, text-based interactive fiction, is currently Editor's Choice on the App Store in the UK and US and others, and several thousand people have already completed multiple journeys around the world.

“This is a brilliant adventure based on the adventures of Phileas Fogg, with a whole world to explore, and a script that will hold your attention throughout. Interactive storytelling at its best.” - The Guardian

“Thick with mysteries and opportunities for disaster, Inkle's new title is far more palatable than its source material... 80 Days is a voyage that must be taken.” - The Verge

“Verne fans in particular are going to have a fantastic time with this game, but I think almost anyone is going to find plenty to like in 80 Days.” - Touch Arcade

Going around and around

When we set out to make 80 DAYS we had a few goals - we wanted to tell a great story, with a strong sense of the world it was in. We wanted interactive fiction narrated from an "I" not a "You". And we wanted to make a game that could be played multiple times.

We didn't totally believe that was even possible with a narrative game - surely you play to see the story, and then it's done?

Well: we've seen people playing four or five games in a single day, trying to improve their score, or simply exploring the world and its hidden corners.

More there's still more to find...

But there are still secrets to be unearthed. What's in the airship into Reykjavik? Will love be waiting for you in London? What's the secret of the Irktusk harbour-master? Who did kill the Yokohama hover-craft Artificer?

Thanks to the live feed, we're pretty sure that right now, no-one out there knows. Yet.

We're celebrating in the inkle office, because 80 DAYS has finally been unleashed. Right now, people are boarding trains, steamers, boats; catching malaria, inciting mutinies, sleeping rough and being captured in the jungles of North India and more...

When watching the trailer remember, every line drawn on the globe is a journey, and every journey has a story, and every story has choices, and every choice is remembered...

Reviews are beginning to trickle in too - here's a few snippets:

“A sublime video game to immerse yourself in... With impressive visuals, a simple yet elegant game design, and a story to tell based on classic literature, 80 Days is an excellent addition to your mobile game library” - The Examiner

“Probably the best example of interactive fiction ever produced” - Pocket Tactics

Jump aboard today, and see where your journey takes you!