Sorcery update for December

Here at inkle we're winding down for the Christmas break, but we didn't want to go silent without first letting you know how the Sorcery app is coming along.

The big news for this week is that the text is complete for Book 1: The Shamuntanti Hills. It's balanced - so if you go right, it'll kill you, and if you go left, it'll also kill you - and we'll be playing it to death over the break, in its current, first, skeletal iOS version.

The expansion process has been really interesting, letting us get to know the different tribes and characters who inhabit the hills, as well as expanding some of the classic traps to be even more malicious. The Manticore's lair is now particularly fiendish... (We've also thrown in a few more hints, and lots and lots of multiple solutions to problems to make things fair.)

But just as when you pass through the Gate and into the foothills on your journey, the only way from here is up. Over the next six weeks we'll be adding all the extra features that will slot into the interactive text itself to create the game. Inventory, spell-book, spell-casting, combat, the map... And speaking of the map, there's one great feature which we're adding to original spec, which is that we're GRPPH MMBBMMPN MMM... [Rest of comment gagged.]

On the publicity side, we've been talking about the game wherever we go; mostly recently as part of our talk on "The Future of Adventure Games" at the excellent Adventure X expo last Saturday. All the talks there were recorded, so we'll be linking to that when it goes live.

We've got lots more juicy details to reveal over the next few months, not least of which is the new, revamped combat system which turns every battle into a tense, strategic puzzle. We've never quite seen anything like it in a game before, and we hope you enjoy getting beaten by it as much we do.

So - there's a long journey to still to make, but it's shaping up to be quite an adventure, and we're exciting to be producing something which is part-gamebook, part-RPG, part heroic-fantasy-novel, part visual-novel and all awesome...

If you've already joined our mailing list, thank you, and we'll be sending our best tidbits and screenshots in the New Year. If not, you can sign up here.