Over at inkle we’re releasing our next big interactive story project, “80 Days” in about a month, and so we made a video explaining how it works. Ugh, I know.
Still, you might be interested; 80 Days is a real-time choice-based game, and also an “ad-hoc” one, in that it’s made from lots of pieces of content that get strung together depending on which way you go, when, and what you choose to once your there. It’s like a board-game but where each card is actually a storyline; it’s like Fallen London but where the clock is always moving forwards.
The same strap-line applies as to our Sorcery! games: over 10,000 choices and all of them are remembered. You can see it here: youtube.com/watch?v=leHaJNhBn1M
The final version contains 150 cities to explore, 300 journeys with individual stories for each, and over 500k words. It’s an attempt at replayable - even competitive - interactive fiction, and we’ve seen a fair few people going round, and then going round to get a better score. The story content itself is a mixture of styles; some conversation-based, a few item-based puzzles; there’s a murder-mystery sequence, a tentative romance, and a tactical punch-up, all done through choices/adaptive text.
If you check it out, hope you enjoy it; if not, here’s a trailer.
Yes! So much so that I was very vaguely planning to do a round-the-world-race CYOA early last year. Not otherwise very similar, other than being a the-map-is-the-decision-tree thing: it was going to be a big Twine open collab with different people laying claims to different sections of the road-map, modern, not at all serious. It stalled when I was writing a single through-line, got to the coast of Africa and realised, hell, I don’t want to do a doofy speed-IF story about rich people on safari. But since the point of the exercise was a big doofy many-hands effort, I didn’t really see a way around that.
So I am super-glad that someone else had a somewhat-similar idea, and extra doubly glad that they took the high road on it.
Great thing that it’s out, but let me just confirm something before I purchase:
It’s really a management game, isn’t it? And does it actually require internet access to play?
I normally unreservedly support developers I know and trust and like, but a management game? I’ll probably give this one a miss and wait for your next IF, if you don’t mind.
Internet access isn’t required, it’s just a nicety.
Management game – well, there is that aspect to it, yes. If you really don’t want to do any management, then you can still play, you might just find the journey takes more than 80 Days. There’s no fail-states; you can’t die; the worst that happens is just skip some time waiting to top up your funds.