The Art of Crafting Beautiful Stories
Most mainstream game developers would have you shoot hundreds of zombies, step in the shoes of your favourite sports star or explore a virtual megacity. We take a look at inkle, a small indie studio that places storytelling above everything else.
Storytelling in video games is often sidelined for action-driven experiences, but a growing number of game studios are trying their hand at serious character development, immersive world building and difficult decisions.
Inkle — a small startup based in Cambridge — embodies this trend. The indie studio takes stories from other mediums, such as novels and game-books, and turns them into beautiful interactive experiences for mobile.
The 20-person team has just finished its Sorcery! series, based on the Steve Jackson game-book of the same name. “It’s grown a lot beyond our original ambitions, but we’re extremely pleased with the end result,” said Jon Ingold, the 36-year old co-founder of inkle and main scriptwriter.
Jon and his business partner Joseph Humphrey started inkle six years ago and have published just over half a dozen mobile games in that time, all of them based on a game-book or novel with a similar title.
“When we founded the company, iPads were new and the App Store was a burgeoning market with lots of potential, but few clear successes. We kind of felt what was needed was strong content presented in a beautiful way.”
After an initial beatdown by some of the press for the studio’s first game, Frankenstein, based on Dave Morris’ gamebook version, inkle received glowing coverage from critics for its Sorcery! adaptation. The game was a tease of what was to come, as inkle started to increase the size of its team and mobile manufacturers started to add more processing power for higher intensity and larger gaming experiences on mobile.
Sorcery! 2 greatly expanded the scope of the series, introducing a wealth of new characters, scenarios and hidden areas. Players would spend hundreds of hours testing different scenarios, using a rewind button to find the most optimal path for them.
“Most of what we do is step-by-step development; so 80 DAYS is a step along from Sorcery!, which was a step along from Down Among the Dead Men.” Jon expects the trend to continue with the latest game, Heaven’s Vault, a sci-fi adventure that will for the first time have a story built from the ground up by inkle.
The team went from strength to strength when it launched 80 Days, an adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days novel. Taking on the role of French valet Passepartout, players were tasked with choosing a route, maintaining a budget, making sure Phileas Fogg was kept happy and chatting with other travellers.
80 Days cemented inkle’s position as one of the best storytellers in the mobile industry. TIME Magazine awarded it game of the year in 2014 and inkle received four BAFTA nominations in 2015. That confidence boost pushed inkle to be even more daring in the next two expansions of Sorcery!, especially the finale, which critics have described as a ridiculously challenging experience.
Jon agrees with some of the criticism, but he assures me it was a tactical decision to make the gameplay harder as the player progressed:
“Every part [of Sorcery!] has something new to offer and a greater sense of threat, but we felt the last part was where we could mess with the player, make it seem almost impossible to win.”
What separates inkle from other studios is how the team goes about building a video game. “Most developers start with basic mechanics — shooting, looting, whatever — but we don’t add mechanics unless we think they’re meaningful to the narrative,” said Jon.
That power structure means everything is connected to the narrative. Spells in Sorcery are prompted at certain times to get out of sticky situations or win otherwise apathetic characters to your cause. Expensive items in 80 Days which may seem pointless can be useful because of the possibility you will run into someone a few weeks later that will buy it from you at a higher price or send you on a thrilling quest.
“We always start with an idea of what the player would be doing in the game, and a sense of the tone and what we want to achieve. The writing takes precedence over everything else,” Jon pauses. “We’re pretty serious about it.”
“One thing we’re really keen to avoid is gimmickry. You see games designed around a mechanic, lets say telepathy, and the story revolves around telepaths. That could be fine on its own, but often it means the stories are, at their core, a bit ridiculous.”
Jon is not prepared to start naming and shaming, but Dishonored, Assassin’s Creed and Bioshock: Infinite could very easily fall into this category. Games where the narrative and characters aren’t in sync with the gameplay.
The success of 80 Days and the Sorcery! series may push more developers in the direction of what inkle is trying to achieve. Some, like Ubisoft, have already tried this with Child of Light and Valiant Hearts: The Great War, though most of its catalogue continues to be action-driven experiences with a muddled narrative.
We are also seeing other developers, like Telltale Games, become prominent players in the video game industry with a heavy choice-driven story. But Jon isn’t too pleased being bundled in with Telltale.
“They’re very much single-narrative, high-production values; with an emphasis on doing 3D and voice-acting and keeping choices big and bold and exciting. We use multiple narratives, with hundreds of choices, both major and minor, and lots of adaptation of the narrative, a bit of a difference.”
Still, Jon concedes that he is seeing some movement towards better storytelling and expects the industry at large is keen to move away from shooting baddies all the time.
Inkle has not seen huge sales yet, but its next game, Heaven’s Vault, could be the breakthrough. It will be the studio’s first shot at a game built entirely in-house, removing the shackles of a pre-existing universe.
