An Epic Adventure Concludes
Four years.
Four games.
One and a half million words.
Thirty-five thousand choices.
The mood in the inkle office today is one of celebration, and sadness.
The Sorcery! series is now complete.
The Fellowship
If you've enjoyed the adventure with us, here are a few people you might want to thank outside of the core inkle team:
Eddie Sharam - character artist. Eddie's done all the humans, monsters and re-animated furniture that appears in the series; sometimes drawing from John Blanche's crazy original illustrations, and sometimes using a little craziness of his own.
Laurence Chapman - composer. We now have original themes for Parts 2, 3 and 4, recorded by live orchestra, and we think they're incredible.
Emily Morganti - publicist. When we started work on part one we had three press emails in a spreadsheet and were planning to stand in a corner of PAX with a banner. Coverage is the oxygen of development and yet most developers have no idea how to do it. Emily sorted us right out.
Iain Merrick - coder. Iain started out in the Sorcery! team doing the audio design for the first part (the infamous walrus laugh that plays in the villages of the Shamutanti Hills was his idea). Since then he became rather more full-time, handling the cross-platform magic that takes iOS code and generates the Android and desktop builds.
Graham Robertson - writer. Graham wrote a lot of the core content for Part 4, adapting the original material, and adding a lot of strange new ideas of his own. Graham likes cats, ghosts, and hungry Goblins - you'll know when you stumble on some of his work.
Mike Schley - cartographer. Mike's maps and building drawings are the heart and soul of the Sorcery! experience. We've loved his work from the moment we first saw and it, and the most exciting moments during development have always been the delivery of a new piece of art.
And last but certainly not least, Steve Jackson himself. After creating the Fighting Fantasy series with fellow dungeon-master Ian Livingstone, Steve wrote the Sorcery!(/sorcery/) series as a standalone set of four books, with an innovative magic system, and aimed at slightly older readers.
Set in a previously unexplored corner of the FF world, they told their own story, and each book has its own tricks and devices. Speaking personally, I can still remember the feeling of being lost in the pages; and the thrill of casting the right spell at the right time (because in those days, you were supposed to learn the spellbook by heart!)
Steve created a vibrant, rich, nasty-but-nice world filled with potential; and then gave us the freedom we needed to play with it.
Then there are our testers. Fifty people played the adventure prior to launch, and of them, five were simply extraordinary. Kathryn, Felicity, John, Nikki and Jules - you guys have been amazing.
A long journey
The first Sorcery! game saw us taking our first steps as a company as not just technical developers, but gameplay and content designers as well: now, four years later, we're a BAFTA-nominated studio, working on our own game-worlds.
Where the first game saw us pushing our ink compilation script to breaking point; we're now fully migrated over to ink, and are enjoying seeing studios all around the world using the system as well.
The reaction to the series has been overwhelming to say the least - from the glowing reviews of Part 1 that appeared on mainstream gaming sites like IGN and Kotaku, through the wonderful Yogscast rendition of the first two games, to the antics at our preview party in London last week - it's been a real thrill to be seeing people getting excited about the series.
So what's left?
We've one more piece of business to do in the world of Sorcery! - a final update to the series, coming shortly. We'll have more information on that later, but if you've finished Sorcery! 4 already you'll know what we have in store.
And, of course, there is one last thing...
But for now - sit back, relax, and get ready, for death awaits you in the Fortress of Sorcerers...