Welcome Sarah Morayati

Textfyre is proud to welcome Sarah Morayati, an up and coming IF author, to our design and writing ranks.

Sarah achieved notoriety by placing second in the 2009 annual IF competition with her entry, Broken Legs.

Her Textfyre work is centered around the years 1821 to 1822, the Shelley’s, Keats, Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, with a historical tale surrounding the lives of these famous writers.

We’re very excited about this project and can’t wait to see the first episode.

Welcome aboard Sarah!

Progress Report 2010

Our secret programmer is hard at work on the new iPhone, iPad, OSX implementation for delivering our games on those platforms. Code is getting checked in and we’re seeing real progress there. Hopefully, when the iPad starts shipping, we’ll be able to be one of the first full-screen applications in the app store. Or one of the thousands.

We’re also awaiting word on access to the Kindle SDK and as soon as we get access, we’ll find another volunteer to help port our games to that platform. It may not be the perfect fit because of the way the screen works, so there may be a few rounds of testing before we get to something workable.

The Empath’s Gift is in alpha-testing (Paul and Chris are doing this work) and I’m hoping to see a second round of that soon.

I have a request. Graeme Jefferis is still working on the Inform 7 programming when he has time, but I feel the need to add a second person. If you have strong Inform 7 programming skills and want to help Textfyre succeed, please drop me an e-mail. I have to say that the pay is all back-ended. This means we can agree on a rate, but I can’t make payments until we see significant units sold (1000 or more per game) or until we find funding. This is the life of a start-up. There are no guarantees and the work you do has to really come from the excitement of seeing Textfyre do good works.

As mentioned before, I will be at PAX East in Boston in late March from Friday through Sunday (and possibly through Tuesday). If you want to meet-up, let me know.

Kindle IF – Here We Come

Amazon.Com has announced an upcoming beta for an Active Content development kit for the Kindle called the KDK.

We’re signed up and will be developing the interface as soon as the KDK becomes available.

With the iPhone and Mac development happening too, we’re soon going to be delivering to all platforms, natively.

2009 in Review

Last year was, to say the least, interesting. Some of our accomplishments include:

1. We managed to complete and publish two games and get a third game into the programming stage.
2. We have a relatively stable and functional, if boring, website.
3. We’ve had talks with interesting partners, including Infocom implementors, about working with Textfyre.

Some of the things we’re still working include getting the word out to the audiences that we think will appreciate our works. This is the primary goal of 2010.

I also have some other business I’d like to attend to…finally. As I have mentioned many times, Textfyre is currently funded entirely by me and a very small number of sales of games. To say 2009 was difficult can’t possibly describe the year we had. Since I can’t work at Textfyre for a living, I have been doing computer consulting work, independently. Prior to 2009, this was a fairly stable endeavor. I made enough money to provide for my family (I’m married with five children) and siphon off just enough to keep Textfyre rolling. It was never enough to really go all out though and that’s why I have always been looking for external sources of funding.

In 2009 though, things went south. Like south pole south. Like to the moon Alice south. Some know about my endeavors with a company called OneDegree.Com, but I will give you the summary. I took a contract to hire position with a start-up that claimed they had a million dollars in the bank. They didn’t. They went under and my consulting business lost about $90,000. To top that off, when I found out they were out of money, I did start looking for other work, but didn’t find anything until August, but that only lasted four weeks. Then I was out of work until the middle of December. I’m just now getting invoices paid for the first time in five months.

So needless to say, Textfyre has had to weather some troubling financial times. But most entrepreneurs will tell you, you can’t fail unless you quit. I haven’t quit and I don’t plan to quit. We’re making some headway in getting the word out. Sales are slow, but enough to keep the website up. I’m back to work and the consulting market looks to be improving slowly. We also have very passionate people helping us that understand that building the business isn’t a cake walk. It takes hard work, dedication, and most of that before anyone gets paid.

One of the things I have discovered is that there is one sector of help we need that doesn’t like the “get paid later” scenario. That is the artist. Well, I should say the _talented_ artist. There are plenty of people who think they’re artists, but if you want someone who you can direct and will deliver, you have to pay them. This is one of the things lacking in our process and would be the first thing rectified when we finally draw more revenue or find a funding source.

In 2010 we’re already looking at ways to get the word out. I will be attending PAX East in Boston in late March. I’ll be there Friday afternoon through Sunday night. If anyone wants to get together, please let me know. Drop a comment on the blog or e-mail me directly.

There’s a fall middle-school convention that I was sore to miss last year, but will not miss this year. By then we should have an official booth, CD’s, and several more games published. I plan to have at least one Infocom Implementor in the fold this year and possibly more than one. If we can convince Activision to let us at the Infocom material, we might do something there too.

We’re evolving. I started with many plans, but some of them have been set aside and new ones have taken their place. That will continue.

We’ve only just begun…

There’s an App for IF!

This week, I got news that a friend of Textfyre (who shall remain anonymous for now), who knows iPhone development pretty well, is going to help us build FyreVM for the iPhone.  This will allow us to publish our games to the iPhone App Store. The timeframe is fluid, but it looks like we’ll be sending our first three games to the App Store this spring.

In other news, Empath’s Gift is chugging along on the coding side, sales of Shadow in the Cathedral are slow, but steady, and we’ve added a fourth development team to the mix. The new team is still working out their story idea and as soon as that’s solidified, there will be a formal announcement.

There is also a fifth development team in the works and I’m waiting on one more e-mail to solidify their involvement.

As always, stay tuned!

Textfyre Meets iTwixie

Once upon a time there was a tween girls social networking site called iTwixie. One day, a start-up Interactive Fiction software publisher named Textfyre called upon iTwixie to see if they would like to be friends. iTwixie, represented by its owner, Rebecca Gaynier, checked out Textfyre’s demo game Shadow in the Cathedral and thought Textfyre had great potential as a friend to iTwixie and vice versa.

Anyway, Rebecca and I have chatted and she’s very interested in ways we can bring IF to her audience of tween girls. Obviously this is an important portion of our target market and I believe we can tell stories in ways that will be greatly appreciated by iTwixie’s users.

I look forward to continued conversations with iTwixie, bringing their ideas into our stories and having thier users review and play our games.

It could be a very beneficial partnership for both companies.

Register For More

We just implemented the registration process at Textfyre.Com. If you’re an existing customer, you will be able to access the latest downloads by clicking on the Download link. If you own The Shadow in the Cathedral, you can play online.

We’ve also added a new product called the Online Edition and the Shadow version is available immediately. All online play requires Silverlight and works with Intel Macs and Windows PC’s.

We’re still working through changes to Secret Letter and looking to have 2.0 out soon.

Could I have Glulx with my change?

Textfyre is still in the process of business development. This means that the business plan is fluid. We have to adapt to new ideas, new market pressures, and of course, we need to generate revenue, even if it’s small.

Secret Letter’s sales have been slow and that’s probably because we need to get it into the target market’s hands. Getting a text game in the hands of a middle-school student is very difficult, but we’re inching closer to seeing that happen. In the meantime, we need to diversify our plans and try to market to the indy/casual/hobbyist gaming communities. So we’ve made some dramatic changes…

All future releases of Textfyre games will have a Hobbyist Edition, which will come with the same End User License Agreement, an Introduction, Hints, and the raw Glulx file that can be played on any existing Glulx interpreter. The raw Glulx file will also be included in all other editions, except for the Classroom Edition, which is a different delivery model anyway.

We still expect to get the games into classrooms on a per-student seat licensing basis, but we need to build the business however it comes to us. We’re going to try to market to casual gamers interested in IF and see where that leads. It looks like The Shadow in the Cathedral is going to do well in this area where Secret Letter has not. I believe the next game, The Empath’s Gift, will also do well in this manner.

I’ve also realized that aiming a little higher with game content is probably a wise move. Secret Letter may be a little too simple in its story-telling. Blame me. I have four daughters and was really basing my instincts on their interests. My two eldest daughters are now reading tween books that are well beyond Secret Letter’s story-telling.

The pricing has come down and we’re okay with that. The gaming market is competitive and online prices aren’t the same as brick and mortar prices. If we ever box up the games and get a chance to sell them in Borders or BN, the price will most likely increase.

The price of the Deluxe version of Secret Letter is likely to come down too. I’m weighing what price point makes sense.

There will be a Deluxe version of Shadow, but probably not until next year.

Version 2 of Secret Letter is due out any day.

I’m glad to see the reviews by Emily Short at IFDB and PlayThisThing. It’s gratifying to see we’re doing good works.

Released! The Shadow in the Cathedral

Our second published game, The Shadow in the Cathedral, is available now in Standard Edition form for Windows XP/Vista/7.

We’re also working on version 2.0 of Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter, which should be released within a few days.

Please visit textfyre.com for more information.

New Releases Coming Soon

We’re wrapping up Secret Letter 2.0 and Shadow 1.0 over the next few days. Secret Letter has significant changes to the middle and ending, plus there are new images and some UI changes in the Deluxe Edition. Shadow has gone through exhaustive testing, although I’m still having a few people run through it to get those last second issues.

Jennifer Montes is once again doing a set of maps for Shadow (she did the map for Secret Letter that every has loved) and I’m hoping we can get her work into the final product by the 6th. If not, it will be e-mailed to all customers or a link will be provided in the new customer section of the website.

Speaking of the customer section of the website…we’re diligently working on it and although you can register and login, there’s really nothing to see quite yet. We’re going through some business model tweakings and this section may be handled in several different ways. We’re trying to nail down the Classroom Editions of each game before we complete the customer section.

The Classroom Editions will be based partially on SilverFyre, the vanilla Silverlight interpreter that Chris Cavanagh developed a few months ago. This edition will have a slightly different interface since the audience will be middle-school students and their teachers.

We’ve also gotten help from Giles Boutel from the IF community to help out on the website design.

Meanwhile, coding continues on Giant Leaps (Empath’s Gift) and we’re actively seeking a fourth design/writing team.