Updates and Alpha News

Hello Everyone

We’d love to thank all of you for your patience - We’ve had a hectic couple of weeks since our Kickstarter spectacularly succeeded. That time has been spent planning our development, contacting various of our pledge supporters and of course navigating the particulars of Amazon Payments.

What’s been going on

This past week Simon has had the pleasure of dining with Jesse Schell, yes THAT Jesse Schell, infamous games designer and lecturer at Carnegie-Mellon. You can catch a little of his passion for games in his TED talk.

They talked about The Written World, how systems of play can support exceptional heroism in stories and the way the industry is shapped around these ideas in general. We’ll be using some of that advice to think about the way the Force system works, and to develop our ideas about ways in which to make this game sustainable commercial entity.

Excitingly, We’ve also met Ian Livingstone, President for Life of Eidos Interactive, co-writer and creator of the Fighting Fantasy books, Games Workshop and White Dwarf. Ian devotes a chunk of his time to assisting indie games makers such as ourselves and he has very kindly offered us a further meeting when we have the beta up and running. 

He’s given us a bit of advice as well - telling us to focus on GAMEPLAY GAMEPLAY GAMEPLAY. His words/emphasis. This has inspired us to ramp up the release schedule so we can iterate as quickly as possible, and not make too many untested game play decisions.

Development News

We’ve got a great base in our Kickstarter supporters, and we plan to talk with them as much as possible. We’ll be sending out early code to these girls and guys and asking them what they think - we’re looking forward to it!

Loads of love,
The Written World team