Speaking of finishing, it looks from our database that the game has been completed over two and half thousand times, with several of those play-throughs by people playing two or more times through. We’ve had a great response to the game as well, with 80% of our reviews 5-star on the App Store worldwide.

Most of the lower reviews either look to the price – $5 is high for the App Store – or the length of the game; and it’s true that if you simply aim to survive the story, it can be done pretty fast – missing of the content along the way, of course.

A little more challenge…

If you’re looking for a bit more challenge, here’s a carrot – the current best number of Gold Pieces to finish with that we’ve heard of is 54. Can you do better? Also, have you managed to complete the game without fighting the Manticore at all? Have you saved the Plague Village? Have you found the jewel-studded collar, or the Borrinskin boots? Have you made it through the Black Lotus? And have you heard of Vik?

Reviews!

If you haven’t yet tried Sorcery!, here are some of the reviews to wet your appetite from some major gaming websites:

• Gamezebo
• Kotaku
• Pocket Gamer
• Eurogamer

…and if you have played, please add your own on the App Store!

An epic journey

It’s been our most complex and challenging project to date, and when we started we didn’t really know what we were letting ourselves in for. That we were going to expand on the original we knew, but we didn’t realise that would mean adding whole new routes and locations, new puzzles and traps, and writing whole scenes of dialogue to expand on the original. And we definitely didn’t know we’d need a 3D engine, a system for mixing sound effects, a server back-end to save your finished game to the cloud, a procedural text generator and, as they say, a fez…

In the six months since we began work, the scope of the game exploded, as we tried things out, developed our ideas, and discovered new elements that just had to make it into the game. But as always, there are a few ideas that didn’t make the final cut, so there should be some surprises for Book 2.

But despite everything that’s new, we’ve worked hard to keep to the spirit of the original: it’s quirky humour, the emphasis on brains over brawn, and its many tricks, traps and puzzles.

The map

We had some ideas for a map-based interface from the start, to control your path through the story, but it wasn’t until we got Mike Schley on board that we realised quite how important that world map was going to be. It’s not just the way you choose your route – it’s also a living, breathing graph of the story. A lot of people were fascinated by the Frankenstein story-map – in Sorcery!, that map is built right into the app, hinting at the paths and branches you have still to explore.

The 3D relief effect was a big risk: could we get it to work smoothly? Would it slow things down? Would it cope on older devices? Big images (“high-res textures”) are one thing that even major consoles are afraid of and here we were, trying to make them run on an iPod. At one point, we even considered turning the 3D effect off on slower models – but with some code magic, and some clever games industry techniques, we’ve managed to get things both silky smooth, and gloriously pointy.

The art

Almost the last feature to make it into the build was the original art by John Blanche. In fact, it wasn’t even in the build sent out to reviewers! But we didn’t leave it to last because we weren’t sure whether to include it: rather, we kept it back because we were absolutely certain that we wanted it in the game – we didn’t need to test it out early; it absolutely had to go in, and we’re glad it did. The images look great, particularly on super-sharp Retina screens, and we’ve kept them in the original black and white.

The images for the combat sequences went in a bit earlier, and were a particularly difficult challenge for our character artist, Eddie Sharam. His brief was to produce images of the various monsters attacking and defending, staying true to the original illustrations but bringing these strange characters to life. We weren’t sure if it wold work – until we saw the Sightmaster, in all his detail, coming to life (as he beat us up with his staff).

The combat

We could write a whole post just about the development of the combat system, but most of all, we want to hear what people think about it. Moving away from the dice-roll system of the original books was a big decision: we wanted something new, but as with everything else in the app, we didn’t want anything too new. The most important thing was that the system played like the old system gave the same kinds of outcomes – but with the player taking decisions, and taking risks, on every turn.

We spent a long time trying out different mechanics, and testing different rules, and the final system is an unusual mix of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Rock, Paper, Scissors. Two opponents each pick how much power they’re going to attack with and the highest choice wins. But! A high choice this turn means you’ll have less power to play with next turn (and a low choice means you’ll get more). And more than that – if you lose the turn, the higher your choice, the more damage you’ll suffer. So sometimes, it’s worth defending completely – rebuilding your power and taking minimum damage. Other times, it’s worth risking an all-out attack, to be sure of overpowering your opponent. But a lot of the time, it’s worth trying something in between…

At the same time, we wanted to make sure the combat fed right back into the story, and wasn’t just a mini-game. That’s what gave us the idea of making a system to procedurally generate combat narrative based on the fight. That was a lot of work to get right, but we’re pretty pleased with the results.

Then he is diving forward for your throat! Your own stroke is overpowered. The Assassin’s sword is punishingly deep. You move quickly to deflect the blow as best you can with your shield.

‘My duty is to sever your head from your neck,’ he declares, in a voice as cold as polished marble. ‘You will not hold me from it.’

The story, the Spirit, the spells…

There’s lots more crammed into Sorcery! – the text of the story adapting around you, the Spirit Guide which changes to reflect how you play, the Spellbook with its 48 spells, with strange and weird effects as you journey through the world… but this post is long enough and you’ll have more fun, discovering for yourself.

So if you’re intrigued, please pop along to the App Store: Kakhabad is open for visitors.

Two weeks since PAX already? Seems like only yesterday when we were stepping into the main hall of the Convention Centre bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, with a hundred printed Sorcery! maps, and a build with a 3D version of the same, ready to let some journalists play.

Nerve-wracking stuff: our first big games convention – arguably our first game, unless you count Poems By Heart – but also the first time anyone outside of inkle had played the game. Would they get it? Would they like it? Would they get destroyed by the first Bandit and never see the Hills?

…So what is it?

Making it particularly difficult for us was one thing we didn’t have: a one-line pitch. We know Sorcery! is adapted from the book by Steve Jackson. We know it has RPG-elements, and we know it’s turn-based and played across a virtual tabletop. But it’s not a gamebook, it’s not an RPG and it’s not a tabletop game. So with every journalist we gave the game to, we made sure to ask them one question: how would you describe it? We met twenty writers and got twenty answers, like:

• It’s an old-school text adventure
• It’s Dungeons and Dragons, but where the iPad is the Dungeon Master
• It’s Diablo in text
• Dude, it’s a gamebook
• It’s an interactive interactive choose-your-path story

In the end we settled on “It’s a tabletop interactive story game”. Which doesn’t really help describe it, but at least we feel we haven’t missed anything out!

Previews and podcasts

One aspect of PAX we weren’t expecting was how many of our interviews would in fact be podcasts – and in some cases, vlogcasts (or whatever they’re called). Being shy retiring English types, having a microphone pointed our way and being told to “go!” was pretty intimidating. But apart from re-using the same jokes about a hundred times, we think we managed to get across a little of what’s got us so excited about Sorcery!.

Here’s a smattering of the videos and recordings that have gone up so far:

• A written interview at Spong.com
• A video preview over at iMore, including a 7-minute demo of the game
• An audio play-through on Just Press Start
• A walkthrough on My Plastic Heaven

…and we were also interviewed on a Press2Reset podcast, after getting home (so sounding a bit less wired). Our bit is 36 mins in.

Indie Storytelling panel

While in PAX we also ran a panel on storytelling in the indie game scene, with friends from across the industry – Phil Tossell from Nyamnyam, Andrew Plotkin of text adventure legend, Steven Hewitt of Blazing Griffin, Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games and Oded Sharon of Adventure Mob.

The theme was “How does being indie help you tell good stories?” On the text side of things, we talked about the freedom to iterate, and Andrew talked about the integrity that comes from one person being able to develop the entirety of a game for themselves, with reference to Emily Short’s recent text-game, Counterfeit Monkey.

From the world of adventure games, Dave Gilbert and Oded Sharon talked enthusiastically about the freedom of working away from publishers and not having to please anyone but oneself with everything from the design, tone, through to the marketing of the game. (There was a little irony here, as Wadjet Eye is now a publisher itself – but as Dave pointed out, not all publishers are so bad.) Oded talked about several games he’s made covering hard-to-market topics: including sex, drugs, and rock’n'roll (coming soon!)

From the other side of things, Phil talked about their upcoming iPad title Tengami, in which the player controls a Japanese-inspired paper world in pop-up, moving the parts of the book around to allow a character through. Tengami‘s storytelling is entirely implicit, and dream-like, and Phil discussed how they’ve worked to provide players enough freedom to find their own stories within the game.

Feedback from the audience was good, with lots of great questions getting asked in person and over Twitter. And while we were busy upstairs doing interviews, Phil had a lot of people coming to the Nyamnyam booth to thank him for the talk.

So long!

PAX was full of great things to see (and people – lots of people). We particularly enjoyed exploring the Indie Megabooth, checking out all the interesting things being done right now, as well as finally meeting our fellow Fighting Fantasy-ers, Tin Man Games, in the flesh. We hope to return! But first, we’ve got this little app to finish…

Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics is an app for iPhone and iPad that we designed and developed for Penguin Classics in the US.

Before high-piled books…

The app aims to help you learn poems by presenting a simple but more-ish game, in which words are removed, one line at a time, and you have to put the right ones back in, against the clock. As the difficulty level goes up, more words are taken out until eventually you’ll have to rebuild the entire line of the poem from memory.

A thousand thousand slimy things…

It’s a simple mechanic but one with some subtleties that we discovered during our prototyping process. Filling in the right gaps quickly becomes more than just a matter of memory – quite often we found we could deduce the right word to use as well. The “gaps” in the poems are represented by marks showing the stresses in the missing word, and the mixture of real words and red herrings suggested by the app can give you a clue as to what’s coming up.

And of course, if you know some of the line, you can use the internal rhymes and the poem’s rhythm to figure out which of the possible words would fit best.

So the more we tested, the more we found we were actually thinking about and discovering the elements that made up the poem – the sense, but also the rhythm and the metaphor scheme – as we played. Getting a really high score means filling a line in seriously fast, so the more you understand the poem, the more confident you feel.

We got lucky here, stumbling on a game mechanic that makes you think a bit like a poet; once we spotted that, we iterated like hell to bring that sense to the fore. (And in the process, all of us at inkle have learnt twelve or so poems entirely by accident.)

Hear, O Hear!

To help you remember the line and understand the sense, the app includes two audio recordings of each poem, synced up to the poem’s text. But the main goal of the app is to enable you to recite the poem for yourself, so once you think you’ve got it down you can attempt a reading from memory for yourself. The result is recorded and synced up with the poem text – so over time, the app changes from a set of recordings to a set of your recordings.

You can email your recitals to people, too, and share them on social networks via SoundCloud (which, incidentally, has an awesome developer API).

Thou art more lovely…

The app is released April 4th in time for National Poetry month in the US and it’s free with two poems: Shakespeare’s Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? and William Blake’s Eternity. Another 22 poems can be downloaded in seven bundles, including all seven parts of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (a total must for Douglas Adams fans).

Look upon my works, ye mighty…

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.

The map

Like all good fantasy stories, Sorcery! starts with a map, drawn specially for us by the excellent Mike Schley. But the map is more than just an illustration: it’s there for you to explore, with all its locations and details containing adventures to be discovered, explored and survived…

Cloth and dirt

For the look and feel of the app, we’ve been keeping to Frankenstein‘s strong material aesthetic, with fabrics, photographs and shadows. But we’ve been looking abroad, to Nepalese, Tibetan and Indonesian influences, to get the look and feel right. The background for the inventory page, for instance, is a Vietnamese national dress, an ao dai, photographed at super-high-res. Sorcery! was originally inspired by Steve Jackson’s visits to Nepal and that mixture of Western fantasy and Eastern flavour is part of what made the books so special.

The inklebook flow

Those of you have seen Frankenstein will recognise the main reading interface, of course; we’ve kept the flow of slips being stitched together, although the look is now canvas and string. But there’s also now a persistent UI showing the core resources the player will need to husband on their long four-book journey: their stamina, wealth and provisions.

The Spirit Guide

There’s one other detail up it the top right: the player’s animal Spirit Guide, who’s taking over the role of Libra, Goddess of Freedom from the original books. Your Spirit can be prayed to receive aid: but the nature of the Spirit also changes as you read, to reflect the kind of character you are.

In Sorcery! we don’t have one single good/bad spectrum to rate how you play: we measure six different qualities, from your bravery to your empathy, from your nobility to your recklessness, to allow you to mould your character and your experience as you play. Sorcery! is part-gamebook, part table-top RPG.

Combat and Magic

There are two other core mechanics in Sorcery! – the spell-casting, and the combat. There’s a hint of each on our screenshots page, but we’re going to save the details for the moment – particularly for the combat. (If you peer closely, you might get a hint of what we’ve done…)

Coming to PAX?

If you are, do check out our panel on storytelling, alongside IF legend Andrew Plotkin, Tengami creator Phil Tossell and adventure game don Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games. And if you say hello, we’ll let you have a play…

The first piece was about Stoic Studio’s The Banner Saga. Stoic recently did a pretty major update to their Kickstarter page, detailing where they are at, what they’re working on, and their plans for the next steps of their game. They’ve got a lot of followers and that update was reposted on several sites, but PC Gamer was the only one to include their image of the story’s branching narrative tree – as generated in inklewriter.

The second story was about interactive text games in general, and featured interviews with us, and our friends over at Fallen London about their StoryNexus platform. The article appeared first in print (here in the UK) in the February edition, but it’s great to see it online as well. It includes a bump for Frankenstein although, being a PC site, it only links up to our web-demo, rather than the iTunes purchase itself.

We’re seeing a lot of articles at the moment about interactive stories and text-based games, with the popularity of Twine amongst indie designers and branching narrative becoming mainstream thanks to the Walking Dead – and we’ll be at PAX East in March showing our Sorcery! game and talking about how indie developers are pushing forward game storytelling. Right now seems like a good time to be gaming with stories!

There are updates to the way stories can be read and played, as well as new ways to vary the text that gets written. But possibly the most important update in this whole package won’t make any difference to the story itself, but to the writer…

Editor settings

If you look in the toolbar you’ll find we’ve moved things around a bit, adding a gear icon to the far right. This will bring up the settings menu. There’s not many options there at present, but the one that might be of most interest is the ability to rescale the editor view. There are now three settings – normal, compact, and dense. Compact will shrink the font a little and make the pages you write on a little wider. (Dense mode is provided for people who don’t mind sacrificing their short-focus vision.) The setting is saved on a story-by-story basis.

This feature was kindly sponsored by the folks at Stoic Studios, who are using inklewriter to author content for their upcoming, strategy-meets-cartoon Viking game, The Banner Saga.

Story settings

In addition to the editor settings, there are also two settings to change how your story will be read. The first is to stop the text of options being included in the flow of the story. This is on by default, but if your story makes sense with the player’s input hidden away, you can now turn it off. (In Future Voices, about half the stories have this on, and the other don’t. It really depends on the writing!)

Secondly, a much-requested feature to help players tackling stories with lots of failure options and dead-ends – you can now insert a lot more rewind points during the course of your story. By turning on this option, an extra rewind point will be inserted every time the reader passes a section header in your story.

You said what?

Since we launched last summer, one of the most commonly requested features has been randomness. We’ve taken the first steps in that direction with a new inline text feature: random printing. So you can now write a line like:

It was a {~dark|grey|moonlit} and {~stormy|rainy|calm|balmy} night.

…and every time the player reads the line, it’ll be different. Random braces can be stacked inside one another, and include other conditionals as well, so it’s possibly to make some quite complex flavour-text – particular useful if your story has lots of loops!

‘{~{~Well|My|Gosh|Goodness}, but {~would|won’t} you|Here,|Crikey,} look at {~this|that|those}!’ explains the Inspector, {~pointing at something or other|peering {~behind|under} the {~sideboard|hatstand|table|dresser|man-servant}}.

Here’s a quick story to demonstrate.

How much?

Another highly requested feature: you can now write the value of a counter into the text of your story, either has numbers or as words. To do this we’ve introduced a new kind of inline bracket – square ones, with a function name, and then a colon. In this case the functions are “number” and “value”. So writing:

‘It’s my birthday,’ says the boy. ‘I’m [number:age]. Well, [value:age] and a half.’

will produce text like

‘It’s my birthday,’ says the boy. ‘I’m 5. Well, five and a half.’

The numbers-as-words can go up to several billion, should you really need them to, and they can go negative as well!

Easier images

One of the biggest usability issues we’ve seen since launching inklewriter was from people having issues with adding images grabbed from a Google Images search. The old way to get round this was to make sure you clicked through to the actual page that the image was taken from… but since this is such a common and useful way to get images into your story, we’ve added a fix to let you paste the link directly from Google. Right-click a thumbnail you like the look of and either copy the link or the image URL, and paste it into inklewriter’s Add Image dialogue as normal.

(We’ve also fixed an issue which meant pasting in links didn’t always work, but that was a silly bug that we’d rather not admit to.)

And finally…

We’ve updated the Frequently Asked Questions in the tutorial to cover the above, as well as finally admitting that it’s possible to include hyperlinks from your story.

So enjoy! And let us know on the forums if you hit any problems.

The Future Voices anthology is now available to download free on the App Store!

Eleven stories, eleven writers

Choosing stories for inclusion in the app was a tricky process, with a huge range of submissions, genres and styles. Entries used interactivity to make puzzles, to hold conversations, to alter events, and in some cases barely at all… we whittled down the entries to a short-list of 50, then again to a short-list of 15, then chose 10 … and then caved, and included 11 stories in the app.

So here’s the full list of winning stories:

• 1. Dance of the Mara, by David Essex
• 2. Hangman, by Alexxis Sade
• 3. The Sometimes Adventures of the Devil and Death, by Phoebe Bell
• 4. Facing Life, Facing Death, by Jeff Xilon
• 5. Try the Swan, by JMR Higgs
• 6. Spin, by CJ Harrison
• 7. A Most Deadly Disease, by Rob Warden
• 8. Your First Giant, by Lee Williams
• 9. Ruby of Fire, by Sophie Kass
• 10. Time Enough?, by Teel McClanahan III
• 11. Creedwater’s Revival, by Euan Jackson

Our authors hail from the UK, American, South Korea, Australia, Malaysia and Germany. The stories are a mix of ghost-story, low fantasy, comedy, science-fiction, folk-tale, modern satire. Some are puzzles, some are games, several are simply tales. The age of our authors ranges from 16 to 40. Four of our eleven authors are female. Several are by first-time writers; a few are by experienced authors. Some are by authors who have written games in the past, most are by authors who have never tried interactive writing previously.

Some have perspectives you will have seen before and some are striking, different and new.

The app is free to download, so why not take a look? And let us know what you think!

An analogy just popped into my head that goes some way to explaining why I like the idea of interactive books.

While listening to music (Mozart this time, but this holds true to any musical genre), I often have a longing to play along. I wish I am the pianist tinkling the ivories expertly with passion and precision. Some people drum their fingers, some whistle along, others can play along. (As a half measure, I can recommend learning a simple blues scale in a simple key and bashing a keyboard along to some jazz. There are few notes to learn, and most things sound good!)

Guitar Hero was popular because it so successfully constructed the feeling that you were playing, despite the relative extreme simplicity compared to the real thing.

The feeling that you’re a part of the music elevates it further than listening passively. It helps you to concentrate, discern the themes and follow the threads.

And, whether we’ve achieved it or not, this is precisely what we’re trying to do with inklebooks. The point is absolutely not to allow the player to do anything and go anywhere or change the story. The point is to let them play along within the musical score, working inside a narrow margin of narrative creativity. (As an aside, how nice to confidently be able to use the word “player” over “reader” for once!)

An opportunity for self-expression goes a long way as long as the boundaries are well-defined. At the very least, as the lead guitarist or first violin, you should be able to vary the intensity and timing of the notes. But we can go further: we can provide the narrative equivalent of a solo with the opportunity for improvisation. However, the boundaries and parameters of this improvisation needs to be well defined. You need to start at the right time, in the right key, continue the narrative of the composition, and hand over gracefully to the rest of the band by the end.

Therefore, the goal is to bring the concentration and the focus to a magnificent story that players of guitars, both real and plastic, get when they play along to a pre-written score. Very few video games have done this successfully, despite their mastery of immersion and interactivity in other contexts. Usually the story is interleaved with the player’s interactions, rather than integrated.

And that is perhaps inkle’s highest ambition.

Here at inkle we’re winding down for the Christmas break, but we didn’t want to go silent without first letting you know how the Sorcery app is coming along.

The big news for this week is that the text is complete for Book 1: The Shamuntanti Hills. It’s balanced – so if you go right, it’ll kill you, and if you go left, it’ll also kill you – and we’ll be playing it to death over the break, in its current, first, skeletal iOS version.

The expansion process has been really interesting, letting us get to know the different tribes and characters who inhabit the hills, as well as expanding some of the classic traps to be even more malicious. The Manticore’s lair is now particularly fiendish… (We’ve also thrown in a few more hints, and lots and lots of multiple solutions to problems to make things fair.)

But just as when you pass through the Gate and into the foothills on your journey, the only way from here is up. Over the next six weeks we’ll be adding all the extra features that will slot into the interactive text itself to create the game. Inventory, spell-book, spell-casting, combat, the map… And speaking of the map, there’s one great feature which we’re adding to original spec, which is that we’re GRPPH MMBBMMPN MMM… [Rest of comment gagged.]

On the publicity side, we’ve been talking about the game wherever we go; mostly recently as part of our talk on “The Future of Adventure Games” at the excellent Adventure X expo last Saturday. All the talks there were recorded, so we’ll be linking to that when it goes live.

We’ve got lots more juicy details to reveal over the next few months, not least of which is the new, revamped combat system which turns every battle into a tense, strategic puzzle. We’ve never quite seen anything like it in a game before, and we hope you enjoy getting beaten by it as much we do.

So – there’s a long journey to still to make, but it’s shaping up to be quite an adventure, and we’re exciting to be producing something which is part-gamebook, part-RPG, part heroic-fantasy-novel, part visual-novel and all awesome…

If you’ve already joined our mailing list, thank you, and we’ll be sending our best tidbits and screenshots in the New Year. If not, you can sign up here.