GDC 2015: Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! 3 for iPad

Hey guys Jonathan dollison here from I more and we're checking out sorcery part 3 with John and Joseph from inkl how's it going guys hey great yeah yeah so uh what do you got we got here for us ok so if you haven't played that sorcery game before this is part 3 you can stop from here or go back and play the whole series and I'm going to take you through it so sorcery is an epic adventure across a fantasy land of traps monsters and magic and it's played out on this we've got a pretty unique style it's played out on this hand drawn map as you can see it's got a range of different terrains as a forest as a desert there

Are some mountains the mountains are rather than 3d so you can scroll around so it's a nice little effect though and this is the land you're going to be crossing as you try to get all the way from the city of car a to the Z Monroe this is part three of the adventure if you pick it up if you've not played the previous ones and you just pick this one up the plot will make sense to you it will adapt itself so you can tell what's going on otherwise you'll be continuing your character almost I'm going to show you how it works because it's a bit different than most games so here's my

Guy there is and he's standing upon this tower now everything that happens in the world of sorcery is narrated to you in text ok so the game writes the story of your adventure as you go along and it gives you choices so here I've just a left the road and approach to tower just coming the moon is rising it's nighttime at the moment I'm going to look up at the tower and if you read that I'm going to find it this an ID up that tower and that's going to let me let me climb up to the top and so I can explore up onto this tower and the story continues turn all right and the idea is that if you

Make your way around the world you can investigate anywhere and i'm going to show you what i mean by that using our little rewind feature so if I rewind back to the road because this is a sobrante narrative you can go anywhere you can have lots of choices and you can die this is a dangerous world it's full of traps it's full of monsters there's a permadeath I know it's quite the opposite it's totally in Burma there sorry if you die then you can rewind at any time and try and explore a different way go two points I'm going to rewind a bit to show

You so because it's based on a game book series from the 80s it's kind of recreating that sensation that you did when you were a kid when you when you turn to page 256 and then around that killed you and then you still kept your finger in the page previous choice and so you go back again right but the Stowe says it's adapted from a game but but it's really not a lot like a game book anymore and I'm just going to show you why not this is a new feature in sorcery 3 there when you're anywhere on the map then when you finish your bit of story there you can go to anywhere else that's

Nearby so that means this isn't a game book this is an open world game you can go from anywhere to anywhere you can explore them up in any order and the story will right itself around your choices on us so I'm just going to show you show you that so this is me going to the tower so I'm going back to that tower you remember I rewound before and that's time to the top this time so I'll look up at the tower find my IV again climb all the way up i'm going to show you one of the big new mechanics in in sorcery three so as you can tell my guys an adventurer you can place a male or a

Female and he's got a sword there's a combat system there's also a spell casting system I'm not maybe not going to show you either of those things today actually you want to see them you should check out the I more video we did for sorcery 3 a couple of years ago sorcery the first story sorry yeah and Kieffer's this for one it's been a long old GDC but I think this will be pretty worth it because I've just played around this contraption on top of the tower I've turned it on and it's a it's a lighthouse Oh six of these lighthouses in the game but um it's not actually a

Lighthouse of light it's a lighthouse of time and where that beam shines that's the same land a thousand years in the past so you can see here there's a hut that's just been revealed you can walk to that Hut because it's an open world you can go inside you can meet someone there you can talk to them you can find out all about them okay this is a world full of stories but a great thing is the lighthouse you can point wherever you like so what's happening here is that there's actually two completely different times at the present time which is kind of a

Wasteland and there's the ancient time which is when the land was more at peace and there were lush fields and trees and it was really green and by focusing this lighthouse on different parts of the map we're kind of looking back into that time so we can position the lighthouse and then by rotating it in pointing it in different directions we can go and explore what what was in that area a thousand years ago so we can use that to solve puzzles too like this broken bridge here which we can point the tower and then we can go across the river but we can also use it to make discoveries

So for example here there's a cave in the cave of the bones of a someone who lived there you can put in the tower at it you can go and meet them the map has six towers on it you the themes can intersect you can find any you can put them in any old direction you can make your own way across the land and change the shakes of it and the story will adapt and the rate itself around everything that you do awesome and that is sorcery 3 and this is coming to work multiple platforms so this is for this is an ipad obviously it's also i I'm going to be out on iphone and we're also

Doing a simultaneous launch on Android tablets bones as well and when is that large yeah we don't have an exact date yet but we're looking at middle of April but if people want to keep track of this game they should come to our website there's a mailing list you can sign up to or if you haven't played sorcery yet you better get started on parts 1 and 2 you've got some tough times and once you've played subpar sorcery part 2 you can use a cloud save from it's also part 2 to continue on into sorcery 3 and continue your progress and you can even do that cross devices between Android

And iOS oh that's really cool yeah because this is a story all about making not just big choices but every choice in the story every little decision every big decision and every single one of those choices is remembered and to just give you a sense of the scale of that this particular episode contains twelve thousand choices in it or nice you won't have to choose all of them Oh answers where you go but everything you do shapes the character shakes the world shake to your own adventure so it really is it really is something quite front from from risking grip and that's

All sorry three all right I'm gracing thank you guys for your time all right guys Jonathan for my more you guys enjoy okay thank you very much you