Review Fix Exclusive: Jon Ingold Talks ’80 Days’

Review Fix chats with game developer Jon Ingold, who discusses the inspiration, development cycle and research process behind Inkle’s newest mobile game, “80 Days,’ based on the Jules Verne classic book, “Around the World in 80 Days.”

Review Fix: What was the inspiration for the game?

Jon Ingold: “80 Days” is a massively-branching interactive story that takes the player on a journey around a 3D globe by all manner of strange and wonderful modes of transport, as they try to win the famous wager from Jules Verne’s classic story.

We had the idea right while working our Sorcery! game, where we took a fantasy adventure, broke into hugely-branching interactive scenes, and then laid them out across a map: people loved the sense of exploration that came from moving across the world of that game and finding real stories buried inside it. So we began to look for concepts that would let us do the same thing but on a bigger scale.

And what could be bigger than the entire world? 80 Days has a map that spans all six major continents, a hundred and fifty cities, and about three hundred journeys from place to place, all with their own unique interactive narrative content.

It’s been a massive undertaking, but we think the result is something truly special.

Review Fix: How big do you think the demographic is for the game? Who will enjoy it the most?

Jon Ingold: One of the things that’s difficult with making apps is we never get to see our customers. The “Sorcery” games have been downloaded over 150,000 times, but we don’t know by who – old fans of Steve Jackson’s work, new fans, indie game lovers, story lovers..? Our games are quite unusual in that they’re fun and have lots of interesting decisions, but they’re also good, strong stories and easy to pick up and play, so we’ve seen them enjoyed by both hardcore RPG fans looking for something lighter and by people who never play games at all, but enjoy adventure stories.

We’re hoping “80 Days” will have a similarly broad appeal, and that it’s mixture of steampunk, historical fiction, and adventuring will connect with a lot of different people.

Review Fix: What was the development cycle like?

Jon Ingold: It’s been tough, but only by our own standards! We’ve always prided ourselves on never taking more than six months over a game, and never going over our deadlines – but 80 Days has been hard work, and just kept getting bigger and more complicated. It’s felt like every detail – from the art style, to the balancing of the market prices of the items around the world, to the story itself – has had to be individually massaged into place!

But we started on the project full time in January, so it hasn’t been that long. Meg was writing content for a fair bit before that.

Review Fix: How much research went into the game?

Jon Ingold: Hundreds and hundreds of hours. Meg must have read up on every country, and every inventor from the period. Despite our crazy inventions and colorful spin on history, there isn’t really anything in the game that doesn’t have its roots in reality somewhere. For the location art in the game, we’ve also researched; so every building you see is a real place, that would have been around and important at the time.

Similarly, our artist has been researching each of the crazy transports you can take, to make sure his drawing reflect how they’d work, but also where they would be built and by whom, and getting period detail for everything right down to the style of the girders and rivets in the legs of walking machine!

Review Fix: How do you recreate the speed and craziness of Verne’s race?

Jon Ingold: We have two key features to make our race feel like a race. The first is the clock – from the moment you leave London, the in-game clock is always running, regardless of what you’re doing: browsing a market, talking to another character, or considering which journey to take next. So if you think for too long, you might miss a train or a connection entirely – or worse yet, if you don’t get yourself to a hotel before nightfall, you can end up sleeping rough on the streets.

The second key feature is the network-connection. The game has a live feed built into it, so as you play, you can see other people who are playing as well – and you can race them. Their game-clock is synced to yours, so you know exactly who’s ahead and who’s behind at all times!

Review Fix: What makes Verne a unique character?

Jon Ingold: Verne was an amazing writer; one of the founders of the whole idea of science fiction, and an optimist too – all his stories are exciting, broad, they’re about possibilities and fun and excitement without too much heavy, grueling stuff.

We’ve taken that and opened it up a bit to create a more diverse world. Verne often wrote from a very European perspective, but our game contains several different cultures from all around the world. There are no Indian princesses to be rescued here – there are fighters for the Indian Resistance.

Review Fix: What did you learn about yourself during the development process?

Jon Ingold: Delegation. We’re a core team of two [Myself and Joseph Humfrey], but this project was so big and so complicated we just kept needing to get help, and to trust the people we brought on to do a great job. Meg Jayanth, our writer, was the first step in that, and she brought a huge amount of invention, and a really broad take on what steampunk can be. But we also hired extra coders, more artists, proof-readers, testers, musicians… it’s been a massive undertaking. We’re still reeling from it!

Review Fix: What’s your favorite element of the game?

Jon Ingold: I think each of us on the team has their own favourite part but for me, the magical moment came when I stopped off in Paris to explore the World’s Fair, came back to the map and saw the other players had hopped on the Orient Express and were now ahead of me. I then set about taking another route to catch up, bribing a train guard to leave a day early, and then bribing a boat (very expensive!) to set off ahead of time – and overtook my competitors somewhere around Cairo. That mixture of “every second counts” and “play it your way” – that’s pretty special; and I love that we’ve managed to build that sense of urgency without compromising the story, which is detailed, rich, imaginative, full of hidden surprises – and still totally interactive, with over 10,000 choices in the script.

Review Fix: What are your hopes for it?

Jon Ingold: The live feed in the game means that, once it’s been released, we’ll be able to open it up and see what people are up to – how far people have got, and what the best time to London so far has been. So I guess I hope that the game will be successful, and that we’ll be opening up the app in a year from now and still be seeing people setting off around the world in search of adventure.

Review Fix: How do you want it to be remembered a few years from now?

Jon Ingold: Apps have a short shelf-life, and it’s rare for an app to be remembered even a few months after release. With Sorcery!, we’ve been lucky: people are still playing it a year after release, and nagging us for Part 3. We hope that, in a year’s time, people are still recommending 80 Days to their friends, still finding secrets – and that those people who have played it and are done with it will remember it as an entire world they had the chance to truly explore.

For more information on the game, watch the video below.