You've been logged out of GDC Vault since the maximum users allowed for this account has been reached. To access Members Only content on GDC Vault, please log out of GDC Vault from the computer which last accessed this account.

Click here to find out about GDC Vault Membership options for more users.

close

The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: A World from Words: Highly Interactive Stories with Text
Speaker(s): Jon Ingold
Company Name(s): inkle
Track / Format: Independent Games Summit

Did you know free users get access to 30% of content from the last 2 years?


Get your team full access to the most up to date GDC content

Overview: inkle's recent iOS release, Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, is a text-based game that tells a story and provides player choices entirely through words - using minimal art and no animation or cut-scenes. Despite this, it achieved 85%+ reviews on IGN, Kotaku and elsewhere, and reached the top 20 all-app iPad chart in both the US and the UK. Creating a commercial success in a genre usually perceived as either too retro or else too avant-garde for the mainstream required a tight focus on the strengths of working with text: versatility, modularity, fast iteration and expressiveness. Using examples from Sorcery!'s script, we will demonstrate how we built a game with two people in six months that has several thousand meaningful story-choices and no canned sequences.

GDC Europe 2013

Jon Ingold

inkle

free content

Independent Games Summit

Independent Games