Stories you play where they happen
Illustrated stories in chapters, with games along the way that you play at the place the story is set. How a story gets made, and what changed this autumn.
Mini-games are the heart of Glødkeeper, but a pile of games on its own is a menu. The stories are what make it a world.
What a story is
A story is a short illustrated book in chapters, set in one of the world’s six regions: the Grove, the Iron Citadel, the Depths, Tome Reach, the Timeline and the Sunny Plaza. Your Glødkin are part of it. Along the way the story asks you to do things: win a game, answer a question about what you read, find a trinket, send a squad on a quest. Finish the tasks and the story moves on.
Each book shows its reading level on the cover, so a parent can see at a glance whether it suits a seven-year-old or a twelve-year-old. Reading level is about how hard the words are; what a story is about has its own age rating.
Play it where it’s set
The biggest change this autumn: a story’s tasks are played at the story’s location. You can read anywhere, and the game will tell you when there is something to do, but to play the task you travel there. A story set in the Depths sends you to the Depths.
It sounds like a small rule. It changed how the game feels. The map stopped being a menu screen and became somewhere you go, and the stories started pulling you around the world instead of being a list to work through.
Prizes in a pouch
Prizes from stories, and now from everything else, go into a pouch that opens the next morning at nine. You can watch it fill as you play, and see where each thing came from. It gives the day a small ending and the next morning a small beginning, without any pressure to log in at a particular time.
How a story gets made
Stories are written in our own Story Studio, a guided set of steps that takes an idea to a finished, illustrated, playable book. It keeps track of what has already happened in the world, so a new story never contradicts an old one. It checks every task is set up before a story can be published, and it plans the pictures chapter by chapter.
Every story is written to one house style, and read through in full before it goes in. The studio also lets us play a story from start to finish exactly as a player would, before any player sees it.
What’s next
Four more stories are written and are being illustrated now, each in a different region. Quests are getting the people who give them, journeys across the map, and gangs of bosses to finish on. Further out, the roadmap has the Story Studio opening to fans, with everything checked before anyone else reads it.