Shortly following our second appearance on Channel 5′s The Gadget Show last year, that episode about casual gaming, we received a lot of calls and offers of work and pitch opportunities. A good few we declined because they weren’t a great fit for what we do, but one of them we absolutely loved and said yes to— and now we’re in a position to tell you a little bit about it!
Blue Flame Publishing asked us to develop an interactive gamebook app!
It’s in the style of ‘choose your own adventure‘ books, which were popular in the 80s, as a reader you would have to make choices at the end of each chapter which affected your hero’s journey through reading the rest of the book.
With Askary’l Grimoire which is part of the Hamnasya trilogy, you play as Edhan on a perilous mission to find a stolen book of immense power, while avenging the death of his mother! It’s a complex plot with lots of twists and turns and lots of opportunities for you to completely immerse yourself in the storyverse.
To further expand its reach, it’s totally bi-lingual! (French and English) and multidevice for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, with interfaces which suit each device.
We see a lot of nice interactive projects centered around reading, a lot of projects where the content needs to find a right vessel, but many of them suffer from a paucity of content, or they haven’t really considered their target market carefully.. or quite simply they have serious usability issues. Well we’d like to think this one is a little bit different not just because we feel very vested in the idea as developers, but what’s fresh about this project is that it’s working with original never seen before content and a client who is genuinely concerned about tailoring the format for the audience familiar with either dark fantasy writing or the vernacular of RPG gaming.. from the style of the interface to how the instruments in the melodies sound like, everything has been considered.
To us retronauts and avid readers, it’s one of the most exciting developments in publishing we know of that beautifully merges new content with some additions that makes sense for the platform it’s on without diluting the focus which is the reading experience itself. We’re merely enhancing that reading experience with unobtrusive interactivity.
Specification
The content comprises of 500 chapters written by Nicolas Lenain accompanied by incredible illustrations by David Revoy. We actually really enjoyed unravelling the complex interactive narratives as kids in the form of analogue books, so an app for iOS devices really will make the book a truly engaging read and adventure. Music and sound effects are by by Leaf Sound Design and a top VFX studio in France Delapost Paris are working on a trailer!
In short we’re excited about working on an enhanced reading experience. combining the reading experience of a traditional choose your own adventure style book, with RPG elements, score keeping, inventories, set collection and interactive fight sequences to make for an engrossing journey alongside the character, where you can be the hero!
We were lucky to be one of the first mobile agencies in the UK to work with publishers like Harper Collins doing interactive accompaniments to books, and this project feels perfectly in keeping with that.
Petite url: http://rith.co.uk/blog/hxdnr
