In our first two weeks back on the game side of the project, we’ve made some good progress. First among those is getting to some of the improvements and suggestions that have been on the back burner since the Early Explorer release and our time showing the game at IndieCade, IGF, and SxSW.

• We’ve planned out some changes to the introductory levels, to better control pacing and give the player more control over how and when KRIS learns certain vital pieces of information about himself.
• We’ve implemented a number of small technical changes that the later levels need: for instance, now activating a socket can reveal hidden sockets that depend on the parent socket to make sense. (This feature has long been planned for the 5th and 6th levels.)

• We completed the design and layout of the complex 6th level (“the maze”), leaving only the final level of the game to be implemented: this is one of our priorities in the coming week. The content for these levels still needs to be written also, which will also be ongoing over the next few weeks.
• We’re in the midst finishing up the written content for the 3rd (Aaron) and 4th (Jacob) levels, which was started way back before the Kickstarter but is now being dusted off and completed.
• We’ve updated the music engine to the latest idea of how it’s going to work, and added all the hooks for UI sounds. Our composer is working over the next week to fully build out the sounds for one level.

We’ve also invited our Kickstarter backers at the “Author” and “Legendary Author” levels to help us with some special pieces of content. (If you were a backer at these levels and haven’t received these instructions, please let us know at [email protected].) We’re looking forward to seeing what people come up with!

Compendium Update: the printers have been analyzing all eighty pages of the book with a fine-tooth comb, and have sent a few back with questions or concerns. (For instance, we have some images that are deliberately low-res or pixelated for artistic effect; when they quite rightly brought these to our attention, we had to assure them this was in fact deliberate!)

We’re about ready to move on to the next phase, which will be getting a few physical proofs.

Another chance to see us gab: We’ll be talking Ice-Bound and interactive story this weekend at Indie Revolution Expo, a free online indie game convention happening now and continuing through the weekend. Check out our panel “The Future of Truly Interactive Story,” streaming tomorrow (Saturday July 18th) at 12 noon EST.

[In case you haven’t been following the Kickstarter updates, you can see the last few posts here, here, and here. We’ll try to cross-post all future updates both here and to Kickstarter.]

Greetings, backers!

We’re happy to report, at long last, that the final Ice-Bound Compendium files have been delivered to our printer!

Here’s a look at the final cover and back cover:

After extensive testing to make sure each page could be recognized by our AR engine (and several iterations of redesign and retesting for some of the more difficult pages), as well as the usual rounds of copy-editing, and our project-specific demands of cross-referencing with our game (whew), the full 80-page book is finally ready to become a reality. Our book printer, Regent Publishing Services, now has the files and is starting to move them into their production pipeline.

The whole process (from proofs through test runs through the printing and final delivery) will take several months. While that’s happening, we’re eagerly turning our attention back to the other half of the project: the game.

Despite being radio silent for a while (we really wanted to get the book out the door before sending an update!) progress has been ongoing on a number of fronts.

The Game’s Title

In part because of another game called Icebound that’s coming to Steam, and also to more clearly distinguish the book from the game, we’re happy to announce here for the first time that the game’s official title will be The Ice-Bound Concordance. Along with The Ice-Bound Compendium (the book) the two halves together will make up the the full Ice-Bound experience.

Music

Now that the book’s finalized, we’ve been meeting again with our wonderful game composer,NJ Apostol. An ongoing challenge as NJ’s been developing material is figuring out where the musical core of our multi-layered story lies. Is it with KRIS, the AI you’re conversing with? Is it in the stories you’re reshaping? How should the player’s nonlinear changes to the state of both of these layers affect the music? We have a new strategy we’ll be trying out in the next couple of weeks that we feel good about. Keep your ears open, because we hope to be sharing some sample tracks in the next couple of weeks, too.

What’s Next?

We’re doing the last of the coding for the game this week and next– mostly some custom code for a few of the special levels you get to later in the story. We also need to build the final UI for the game’s climactic level, which exists in a functional but ugly form right now, and there’s a stack of (mostly UI-related) bug fixes we’ve been putting off addressing until the book was finished.

Writing the remaining content will be the next major task after the code-jockeying is finished up. The second half of the story will be moving from sketches to drafts to its final, polished form. Here’s some text written this week, the introduction to a character from one of the weirder, deeper levels:

***

Ice had consumed his ship, warped by pressure into funhouse distortions, or shattered to spar and timber. He’d put it back together over the years, but in new forms: forcing back the entombing ice with reclaimed nails and boards, building a womb of wood. It was a sort of patchwork home now, only much bigger, somehow, than his ship had ever been in life.

He was well aware he should be long dead.

***

We also have about half the AR overlay content still to create (the images you see when you show pages from the book to the game), and some revisions to the intro levels based on early feedback.

Beta testing will also be happening more formally at some point. For those who indicated they might be interested in participating in their Backerkit surveys, you’ll hear from us later this summer.

Metaio’s Acquisition

We have one alarming piece of news, although we’re hoping it won’t affect any of you. A few weeks ago, Metaio (our augmented reality framework) announced it had been acquired by Apple. This made our hearts jump straight into our throats, because Apple has a history ofbuying up small companies and discontinuing their products, sometimes to remake them under the Apple brand, other times simply to squash competition. We don’t know Apple’s plans in this case, but in fact the Metaio forums now say all support for existing Metaio products will end December 15th.

What does this mean for Ice-Bound? We’re hoping that as long as we release before December, the tech in the game will keep working– that is, Apple won’t remotely disable Metaio licenses or anything underhanded like that. We’ve been in touch with Metaio and they can’t yet 100% confirm their licenses will keep working after December, which is distressing to say the least. We’re obviously hoping the eventual answer will be yes. In case it isn’t, we’d have to find a different AR library and re-code a bunch of things from scratch, which would be a grim but not fatal blow to the project– it would definitely delay the game’s release even more, and require some creative solutions on our part.

We’ll keep you posted if we hear any news on this. For now, fingers crossed we’ll be able to keep using our existing Metaio license.

Logistics

If your address has changed since the Kickstarter, you can update it through BackerKit at any time (https://ice-bound.backerkit.com/). When we’re getting ready to ship (hopefully in early fall), we’ll post an update reminding people to double-check their address.

High-tier backers, you’ll be hearing from us shortly to talk about your creative rewards.

Thanks!

Thanks for sticking with us– and we’ll try to keep the news rolling at a quicker clip from here on out.

“I sometimes remember what never was, and my memories of the countryside where I really lived can’t begin to compare, in sharpness and nostalgia, to my memories that inhabit– floorboard by creaking floorboard– the vast rooms of yesteryear that I never inhabited. …I’ve become so entirely the fiction of myself that any natural feeling I may have is immediately transformed, as soon as it’s born, into an imaginary feeling.”

–Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Hi Backers!

We’ve had a pretty incredible start to the year. Ice-Bound‘s been honored with nominations at two prestigious indie game events: the Independent Games Festival at GDC, with a nomination for “Excellence in Narrative” (and an Honorable Mention for the Nuovo Award, to boot), as well as the South by Southwest “Gamer’s Voice” award. In both cases, we share a nomination with some pretty incredible games. We’re amazed at the love, and looking forward to attending both events!

And we’re not the only ones getting recognition– our composer, N.J. Apostol, made Indie Game Reviewer’s Top 10 Indie Game Music Soundtracks of 2014 list (at #4!) for his work on last year’s adventure-puzzler Ether One. (Congrats, NJ!)

Work continues on two major fronts right now: putting the finishing touches on the Early Explorer for PC version of the game, and finalizing the pages of the Ice-Bound Compendium before we deliver them to our printer. A few days ago we printed out all the pages at 1/2 size, spread them over a table, and discussed the arrangement, the thematic tagging, and what should fill the last few pages to be designed. Assembling the Compendium is a more delicate operation than it might appear: since the book pages drive the game’s story, the two parts of Ice-Boundhave to stay roughly in sync. One of several positive results of our tabletop exercise was realizing there are a few thematic threads on the digital side that don’t yet have enough analog pages referencing them, which hampers players’ ability to bring those elements into their own versions of the story.

The only bad news is that we’ve had to push our schedule back by about six weeks. There are three major reasons for this:

* The PC port continues to take more time than we’d budgeted for. It’s one of those things where the last 10% is taking 90% of the time: something that works on one setup will crash the webcam on another machine, or not reliably pass information back and forth between the interactive narrative and AR parts of the app on another. There are also more extensive UI changes than we’d anticipated to handle the context change from “camera as window” on the iPad, to “camera as mirror” on the desktop. It’s been a long and sometimes frustrating process, and we’ve been “almost there” for a while now, but the experience is still not quite solid enough for us to sign off on. But we’re getting there! Early Explorers, please bear with us for another few weeks…

* The festival nominations (while amazing) necessitate a week of our time each, for travel and exhibition, assembling the requested press materials, preparing a demo build appropriate for a show floor, and so on. That’s two fewer weeks between now and release to actually work on the game itself.

* Rather than rushing the printed Compendium into production, we’ve decided to take our time to make sure every page is exactly how we want it first. Nothing like getting ready to pull the trigger on printing a couple thousand books to make you double-check everything…

So our revised plan is now for the game and books to come out in early June. We’ll keep you posted with our latest info once we get that more locked down. And in the next month or so, we’ll start contacting our Author Explorers to chat with you about the collaborative parts of your backer reward (which after six weeks of code slogging, we’re really looking forward to!)

Hope your 2015’s off to a great start. Stay warm and keep in touch!

–Aaron and Jacob

We’ve just posted an update over on our Kickstarter page talking about some of the literary inspirations behind Ice-Bound, including works by Borges, Calvino, Nabokov, and Danielewski. Check out the post on Kickstarter for all the details!

In part one and part two of this series on the combinatorial narrative system behind Ice-Bound, we gave an overview of how stories are constructed from narrative fragments, and how the player uses the printed book to communicate to the AI KRIS which themes are most important. In this installment, we’re going to dive into the actual story text itself: how we make hand-authored prose that’s still responsive to a changing narrative context.

While most of the reader’s interaction takes place in the map view, by rotating the iPad (or clicking the appropriate icon in the PC version), you’re taken to the page view, a mode where each story fragment you’ve assembled turns into a paragraph of text: “excerpts” from Kris Holmquist’s novel in its current configuration. While this text looks static, it actually can vary in both obvious and subtle ways, based on the player’s interaction with it, and how the pieces are reconfigured in the other view.

Most of these fragments are not written for a specific story, but for a global pool of content available when the system builds a “level” of Carina Station. This means the system must be able to “cast” a fragment with a particular story’s characters, and use appropriate names and pronouns throughout. The system uses the casting call to reject fragments inappropriate for a certain story: for instance, discarding a fragment requiring three characters in a story that has only two. We can also request a character who appeared in an earlier fragment or type of fragment. For example, a scene might require a character who was previously in a fragment where something tagged as “unsettling” happened.

Once the cast has been determined, we need to make sure names and pronouns appear correctly throughout the text. You don’t quite realize how often we use pronouns in English, and how many subtle variants there are, until you need to hand annotate each one! Not only is this prone to mistakes (do you mean his/her as in “her book,” or him/her as in “give it to her”?) but an awkward syntax makes it nearly impossible to write creatively: constantly having to interrupt the prose to call a function or insert curly braces can be a real cognitive drain that makes it hard to stay in a creative zone. We devised an authoring syntax that tries to minimize mental overhead. For instance, when you reference a character you tag which alphabetical “cast position” it’s referring to, but subsequent pronouns will assume you’re still talking about the same character unless you say otherwise, simplifying the syntax:

_name/a/ tried and tried to get to sleep. _They rolled over and clasped _their pillow over _their ears, hummed lullabies to _them~self.

(Why “they” and not “he” or “she”? It’s because third person plural is the one of the few pronoun forms in English that has a distinct word for each possible pronoun. We also have tags like _himher, but found the “they” form more natural once we got used to it.)

But slotting characters interchangeably into stories doesn’t do much to make those stories feel personalized. We also have more complex replacements triggered via additional underscore-prefixed keywords. One example is “mix-ins,” a technique borrowed from Aaron’s work authoring stories for the game Prom Week. By giving each character a word or phrase that they’d use in a particular context, such as saying hello or in a moment of shock, you can personalize dialog written for any character. So for instance:

“_mixin/thanks/a/~, _mixin/friend/a/~,” _they said.

…might produce “Thanks, comrade” from one character, or “Thank you, my dear” from another. While this technique seems simple, it’s a remarkably effective injection of a particular character’s sensibilities into a narrative moment, and makes the rest of the scene seem written just for them.

These replacements can get rather complex. The underlying system is actually a full contextual expansion grammar, meaning a replacement can expand to a more complex form containing additional replacements, ad infinitum, and that each replacement can execute code referencing the full state of the system to decide what text to produce. (Aaron actually used Ice-Bound’s system to write a procedurally generated novel in a couple of hours for NaNoGenMo last year.) Some of the other tricks this system enables include using different text based on how many other characters are present, using specific language for specific time periods (such as changing an “email” to a “letter” or a “telegram”), or even changing text based on the way the reader ended a previous story.

These techniques get even more powerful when combined with conditions that let us guarantee certain things about the story state before even selecting a narrative fragment. For instance, we can request that an event card only appear when the character we’ve cast in Slot A has an active “personal” socket, regardless of what it is. Since each personal socket corresponds to an item connected to that character, we can then write some story text where that item plays an important role:

_They/a/ held _item clenched tight in one hand, the can of kerosene in the other. “What are you doing?” _name/b/ asked.

This strikes a nice balance for our purposes between hinting at a dramatically consistent story, without actually doing all the incredibly difficult work of generating narrative from whole cloth. Why would Katrin burn her prized college diploma? Was it Bjorn’s trip below that led him to give up his drug addiction? Humans are remarkable meaning-making machines, and Ice-Bound’s fragments provide just enough leverage to imagine connective tissue between our isolated fragments, without us actually having to generate it.

Another example of this weakly-connected cause and effect is conditions that can require fragments to appear in conjunction with others sharing the same tag and cast members. For instance, readers who enjoy horror stories and start showing KRIS creepy Compendium pages might start seeing horrific symbols in their story maps. One set of these introduce some sort of monstrous force loose in the station: these are given the “monster” tag. We can then have ending fragments that require a “monster” tag to be already present: so, feeling in an actiony sort of mood, we might write a dramatic conclusion (perhaps involving a flamethrower) that could be the end to any of the various “monster” intros. This is some of what we mean when we say the system feels like playing with Legos: “monster” events become a block type that can attach to “monster” endings to produce something with narrative coherence. (We also do this in less melodramatic ways, too: creating emotional setups and payoffs involving a character dealing with loss, a romance, or a journey of self-discovery.)

One of the most visually pleasing aspects of the system is what we call “shimmer text,” that wriggles into other forms even as you’re reading it. We author this quite simply by including a run of alternatives set off by curly braces:

Katrin was {only seven|nine|eleven|just thirteen|already fifteen} when the accident happened.

As the text changes between options, the reader can tap one to “freeze” it in that configuration. We use this to create the feeling that KRIS is constantly exploring permutations of the story, even down to individual words, and also to give the reader a sense of editorial control: any writer can relate to the feeling of agonizing over the right word for the right moment. The speed and frequency of the changes can also be tuned with a special control tag for authorial effect: frantic constant shimmers suggest text KRIS is worried about, while slow, contemplative changes make him feel more musing. The choices themselves don’t mechanically affect the rest of the story, but can sometimes have a profound effect on your perception of an entire scene:

McKinley stared down at the bloody knife, {eyes filling with tears|feeling nothing at all|and his grin eventually turned into giddy laughter}.

Pulling all these tools together, we have a flexible system for authoring Ice-Bound stories that lets them adapt to the particular context the system decides to use them in, without becoming overwhelming for us as authors. Here’s an example of a complete story fragment, appropriate for a moment where one character has “gone below,” and when themes of despair and futility are not prevalent in the current story configuration:

"foolhardyRescue": {
	conditions: "tag_goingBelow && !tag_manIsWicked && !theme_futility",
	cast: "/tags_goingBelow/anyone/anyone/",
	name: "_name/b/ sets out Below to search for _name/a/~.",
	text: "_name/b/ was hefting the expedition pack onto _their parka-covered shoulders when _name/c/ found _them/b/~. \"What _mixin/swearmodifier/c/ are you doing?\" _they asked {frantically|calmly|angrily}. \"_name/a/~'s gone, _name/b/~. _They/a/~'s not coming back. Even if there wasn't _timeGate/anything strange about this place/1992/any weird shit going down/~, _they/a/~d be dead by now in this _mixin/swearAdjective/c/ cold.\" _name/b/~'s face was a mask as _they kept loading _their pack. \"For god's sakes, _mixin/friend/c/~, why?\"<br><br>_name/b/ pulled a strap tighter and finally looked at _them/c/~. \"Because,\" _they/b/ said simply, \"there's a chance _they/a/~'s still alive.\"",
	themes: ["doingWhatsRight", "humanDignity", "trialByFire"]
}

While this isn’t exactly free writing in a notebook, it’s simpler than a lot of interactive narrative environments we’ve worked in in the past, and once we got the format down, we can more or less just write, staying in a creative zone but still ending up with content that can be flexibly used by our combinatorial narrative system.

We’ve got one more post in this series scheduled, talking about the visualization tools we built to help manage the space of possible narratives, so stay tuned. In the meantime, check out our Kickstarter page, or follow the official site, Facebook, or Twitter accounts to keep up with the project. More soon!

We’re pleased to announce the launch of a Kickstarter for Ice-Bound!

In development for over a year, both the book and game halves of our hybrid interactive narrative are nearing completion. But the printed book has always held some challenges. Our augmented reality works when the page has as little reflective glare as possible, which means using a particular paper stock, printing process, and page coating. Unfortunately, most print-on-demand services don’t offer what we need to address this and other design issues with the book.

If we meet our goal, we’ll be able to do a print run with a professional book printer, exactly to our specifications, and everybody wins: we get to make the perfect Ice-Bound Compendium, and you can take advantage of economies of scale and pick one up at a special pre-order price. Becoming a backer now is the cheapest way to get a Compendium and play Ice-Bound.

Check out the video or visit the Ice-Bound Kickstarter page for all the details. We have some really cool rewards, including early access, a customized Compendium unlocking secret content, and chances to collaborate with us on some of KRIS’s dreams and stories. Help us get Ice-Bound printed and be one of the first explorers of Carina Station!