Published! – Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter

We completed the initial publishing process last night and added the Intel Mac installation this morning (it’s 5am by me).

You can purchase Secret Letter, for $24.95, from the Textfyre.Com website.

Thanks goes out to Justine de Vesine for building the Mac installation package and to Thomas Lynge of Tenteo for all of his hard work and their partnership respectively.

We still have a lot of work to do. We’re just getting started.

Secret Letter is coming soon…

I’m working on the last few bits here. The digital download process is complicated and I want to make sure we test it thoroughly. The installation packages are backed and ready to go. We’re almost there…

One more day…

Everything is coming together…check out the new cover!

Good artists are hard to find, and keep…

We’ve been at this for a few years now and I’ve gone through several artists and one art director in the process.

I originaly worked with a local artist, Erika Swanson and thought she had a strong feel for the Secret Letter story and characters. We hit a few snags in art direction and she moved on.

I then started working with an art director, Will Capellaro, and that was a fantastic experience, except for the part where he decided to move on and do other things. But before he left, he helped me find Goni Montes, a great artist that also had a strong feel for Secret Letter. Goni unfortunately found other work and moved on as well. His wife stepped in and drew the game map, but we were in dire need of someone to do the artwork for the release of the game.

I contacted Erika, wondering if she still felt some ownership for the work and she did. With the experience I gained working with Will and Goni, I was finally able to communicate properly with Erika and we’re now getting sketches ready for the release. Eventually, the game will have several dozen professional sketches.

I could have delayed releasing the games until we had stronger artwork, but my advisors suggested this was not really the core of the product and that we can always add artwork in patches and updates, which is what we’re planning to do.

The image I’ve shared of Jack looking down at Grubber’s Market done by Goni is great, but it will not appear in the final product.

We’re working like crazy to get everything ready for Friday. I just wanted to share this last bit of production news before we officially launch.

Current Products Require Microsoft Silverlight 2.0

In the presale announcement, I mentioned that the online demonstration versions of our software will require Silverlight, but I did not note that Silverlight is also installed as a part of the downloaded product.

Because of licensing issues with Silverlight 2.0, we are required to have the user download and install Silverlight from the Official Silverlight Website.

Silverlight 3.0 has an “install local” feature that we will implement in July and this will make the download and installation process seamless.

We will continue to look at other cross-platform technologies, including Adobe Air and potentially C++ with a cross-platform toolkit, but right now, the best technology for our developers has been Silverlight.

If anyone has already purchased our games and would prefer not to use Silverlight and would like a refund, please let me know and I will be happy to refund your purchase.

Secret Letter Goes On Sale This Month

A funny thing happened while talking to several of my advisors recently. They said, “What are you waiting for?”

I’ve been nitpicking at Secret Letter for months now. I want more artwork in the game, but the reality is, it doesn’t require it and artwork takes an enormous amount of time and effort. I’ll add the artwork in upgrades over time, but we’re going to publish Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter this month. There is a short list of minor fixes, some minimal amount of artwork, and packaging to complete and then it will go on sale as a Windows and Mac OS X download.

The price will be $24.95 with free upgrades. I may offer a presale of The Shadow in the Cathedral in combination with a discount if the timing is right. Shadow is coming together quickly and will run generally in the same user interface as Secret Letter.

So get ready….Secret Letter is on the way very soon!

A Product Emerges

Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter
Despite my targeted publishing dates continuing to move, we are making real progress. Secret Letter is nearing completion. A handful of bugs, a bit more play-testing, more artwork, and then packaging. That’s all that’s left to accomplish before we launch our first product.

Thomas Lynge of Tenteo has been hard at work rewriting portions of the user interface in order to accommodate my insistent request for a paging mechanism. He was skeptical about the amount of work involved, but the gauntlet was thrown and he took up the challenge. In the process he discovered a major performance bug and completed the paging feature. The game now “scrolls” backwards onto dynamically created pages, which can be accessed with the page up and page down keys and eventually the mouse wheel. The pages “flip” as you go back and forth.

I’ve also had the game play-tested by several well-known IFers including Paul O’Brian, Jim Aikin, Eric Eve, Peter Berman, and Jacqueline Ashwell. These people have added great value to the final product and their efforts are immensely appreciated. We couldn’t do this without them.

And too, Mike Gentry took all of the resulting transcripts and marked them up. It was maddeningly tedious work that took weeks. And then Graeme Jefferis took the marked up transcripts and implemented the changes. After playing the game a few times it’s really wonderful to see how solid a piece of work it’s becoming.

The artwork you see is by Goni Montes. I think Goni has seen right into Miradania and made a home there. His artwork is strikingly accurate to my own vision of Jack’s world.

Shadow in the Cathedral
The content is moving along. Since the user interface is likely to be very similar to Secret Letter, the time to market will be much shorter for Shadow. Alpha testing, play-testing, artwork, and then packaging and Shadow is on the market too.

Gift of Empathy
Empathy is making tremendous progress. We haven’t started coding it yet, but the content is very far along. Chris Huang’s writing is bringing life to Paul O’Brian’s wonderful world. We should begin implementation very soon.

Business News
On the business side, things are moving along. I’ve been making new friends in the investor world which may pay off at some future date. We’re probably going to have to publish a few games before we garner any real outside interest. I’m confident we’ll get there though. If you want to help out, visit My Service Vine and OneDegree and sign up. The owners of both of these sites may be our future benefactor.

Summary
So that’s where we are today. I hope you enjoy the preview snapshot and stay tuned for Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter.

January Notes

Up until recently we’ve been sparsely testing Secret Letter because there was a much stronger focus on the user interface design and development. Now that we’re closing in on a production quality UI, I’ve handed Secret Letter out to a select few play-testers and we’re going to bring the content up to production quality too. Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter is nearing completion.

Each game we produce is likely to have a rating, both by the ESRB and a Textfyre rating. The Textfyre rating will note the difficulty of the game and the targeted Grade Level. Secret Letter is probably going to land in the Easy/6th Grade category. The ESRB rating should end up being Everyone or Everyone 10+ with Mild Violent References. The ESRB rating is likely to be one of those for most or all of our games, but that brings us to a change in Textfyre publishing policy.

Up until now we were looking for designers and writers to target middle school kids, 6th grade through 8th grade. But as I recall, I was reading Catcher in the Rye in middle school as well as a few other books with adult or strong adolescent themes. I had thought to curtail any references or material that fell in these categories, but I recently realized that we can’t have that restrictive of an editorial policy. We need to let designers and writers have a much wider range of topics and themes that they can address within their games. So from now on, the editorial policy will allow a much broader type of game material. In relation to ESRB ratings, I would say Teen and Mature are within scope. Mature games shouldn’t have things like Sexual Violence as interactions, though it probably should be allowed as secondary material. I would look at this sort of thing on a case by case basis, but writers should be aware that any strong content will be reviewed and edited for public consumption.

In other news, we’ve started looking at developing social studies content for middle schools and high schools. This would include any standard state historical topic like Mesoamerica, the Middle East, Europe, the Roman Empire, the Far East, the British Empire, and similar. If you’re interested in helping us develop this kind of material, please let me know. In relation to educational themes we’re also going to research the development of religiously themed games. We’re not targeting any particular religion nor would we base any decision on a proposal on any particular religion. I think my personal preference would be to develop games that were religious in a secondary manner. So a mystery game with Muslim characters or an adventure with Christian characters. These characters would be positively portrayed in accordance with their respective religions. I’m not sure if I want to get into doing direct Biblical stories like Moses or The Resurrection or similar, but if I were presented with a strong proposal, I might consider it.

If anyone would like to formally review Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter before its release, please let me know and I will allow access to an online version.

Another Year Ends

There are a few news items to share, but the one that everyone wants to see is not going to be one of them; that being the launch of sales of Secret Letter. I once again tried to push everything to get the first game out next month and that may still happen, but the window is closing. February or March may be more realistic. We are getting very close. Here’s a summary of tasks for Secret Letter:

- Produce final artwork including book image, major art, spot art, and character art.
- Complete user interface including new paging functionality, hints, help, compass rose, and map.
- Complete game testing.
- Complete market testing.
- Update website for secure access and sales.
- Develop short-term marketing campaign.
- Send out review copies.
- Setup physical distribution processes.
- Launch.

In other news, we’ve been testing the user interface with various volunteers and will be opening the test environment up to more people in the coming weeks. If anyone is interested in casual play-testing (for free), please send me an e-mail. I plan to open up a secure environment where people can play Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter and Shadow in the Cathedral online via the Silverlight browser plug-in. A signed NDA will be required and will be built into the website.

We’ve started publishing free content from existing games. Eric Eve’s Nightfall game is currently available from the Textfyre website and Jeremy Freese’s Violet is coming soon. If any authors of highly rated games, regardless of content, are interested in adapting their games to the Textfyre book metaphor user interface, let me know. There will be other metaphors in the future.

We have acquired the services of the illustrator Goñi Montes. You can view his regular artwork at GoniArt. Goñi is working on a few major art pieces for the opening scene in Secret Letter and will be adding major and spot art over time. Goñi is working closely with our art director Will Capellaro to raise the visual quality of our games.

We have started to actively seek permission to test in one or two school districts. We’re focusing on northeastern Illinois and southeastern Wisconsin, but would work with any middle school in the country.

We have yet to make contact with J.J. Abrams, but we’re hopeful we can get a proposal in front of him soon.

I’m negotiating with a developer to begin creating a Textfyre UI for the iPhone.

I had thought to open a pre-sale web page for Secret Letter and Shadow. The idea was that the IF Community could pre-purchase the games and we could use those funds as pre-launch funding. It’s unclear how much traction we would get with a pre-sale and so it remains on the back-burner.

So 2008 has come to a close. It’s a struggle to start a business without funding and without an obvious market, but we’re making progress at every turn. The recent economic issues are probably not going to help us, but I don’t think they will directly prevent us from succeeding either. It just narrows our options for funding, which means we won’t have access to credit, something I have a dubious view of in any case.

So here’s to the new year and the future launch of Textfyre games!

Samples of Progress

The images to the left (click to see larger image) are rough implementations of the user interface for Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter.

The first image shows the closed book with a cover. After clicking the book, the title page is shown including credits. Clicking on the right page will take you to the table of contents, which is a menu of sorts to play the game, save it, review maps, see hints, and get help. After clicking Start New Game, the prologue shown and clicking on the right page again will take you to the game page itself. The game plays on the left while the right side will display pictures, conversation topics, hint topics, help, and more.

In the last two images you see the game being played and a list of topics when a character is engaged in conversation. These topics can be clicked or the number can be entered into the interface.

Note that these are rough images of a design in progress. We’re still debating other features like where to display the map and hints (potentially as the inside front and back covers). The artwork is not what would appear in the final product either. We’re still working through the list of required artwork and that will be a sizable effort to complete.

Which brings me to the subject of cash flow. Up until now I have refrained from discussing monetary matters outside of the hints about looking for funding. We’re at a point where my personal funds won’t meet the needs of the company. We’re actively seeking investors or partnerships that will allow us to move the company from start-up mode to being a full-time job for myself and others. This is necessary to drive the products to completion and actively work on future products. Needless to say, looking for loans or credit of any type in today’s financial world is laughable at best.  I’m not sure if anyone out there can help us find investors or partners, but if you can and believe in what we’re trying to accomplish, now is the time to step forward.