I’ve just released a small new game: The Mirror Sorceress. Magic, prophecy, and a dragon!
Inkle Studios (creators of the excellent 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault) recently put out a call for submissions for interactive “campfire tales” that could appear in their next game, Pendragon. It wasn’t one of the few they picked (they picked 23 out of over 400 entries), but I’m still quite pleased with it, so I’m releasing it for you here. A bunch of the other writers have also released their entries.
The game is a story told by one Arthurian character to another, as if around a campfire. You control the listener and can interject in various ways as the speaker tells the story. The character names are randomized each time, and some of the dialog options will randomly appear or not, to simulate the listener having different possible personalities.
I’d like to talk about the story but there’s not much I can say without spoiling it. I tried to mash up a few different fairytale tropes into an original fairytale-style story. It was a challenge to try to write something that would definitely read like a legend or fairytale rather than a piece of modern fantasy fiction, and I hope I managed it.
This is also my first solo game I’ve written in a language other than Twine. To write this story I learned Ink, Inkle’s free interactive fiction scripting language. I liked using it; it’s pretty versatile when it comes to story structure (I only scratched the surface of what it can do) and I might use it again in future projects. It wouldn’t be appropriate for a system-driven game like Seedship, but it would be good for choose-your-own-adventure style stories like Rage Quest.
Thank you all for your continued support! I’ve been continuing to make progress on Beyond the Chiron Gate, and I’ll release my regular dev blog about that towards the end of the month.