Work continues on Burning Brigid’s next project, Wayfarer. For those of you who aren’t aware, Wayfarer is a work of augmented reality audio interactive fiction planned for mobile devices. Players will listen to part of a story, make a choice, and occasionally be directed to travel — in the real world — to new locations to continue.
That last part is what’s really exciting about the project. Wayfarer adventures are set in real world locations. For those who are local, playing the game involves physically traveling from scene to scene — say, in Chicago, walking from the Field Museum to the Shedd Aquarium. For players who are not so located, they can instead walk a comparable distance, tracked by the app.
When they’ve arrived at the new scene location — or traveled far enough — they can listen to the next part of the story, make a new choice, and continue on.
As you can imagine this is an involved project on both the writing and game development fronts. We’re currently producing a proof-of-concept demo that will be freely available, and are planning to do some fundraising to raise the money necessary to produce longer stories, including hiring professional voice actors and graphic artists.
I’ll be doing most of the coding myself. I’m no stranger to software development but mobile is a new arena for me, so I’ve been taking some Android development courses over the past several months. I’ve also got a special guest appearance at the Chicago Steampunk Exposition coming up in September, so much of my efforts have gone towards finishing up the seventh Galvanic Century novel so I can launch it at the con.
Kat has been handling the design elements of the app, and we have shown some of our preliminary layout sketches to our supporters on Patreon. We’ll be tapping them to help us test Wayfarer when it’s at that stage, so if you’re interested in giving it a try pre-release consider signing up and supporting us.
