A trip down memory lane with two of our original Fictioneers engineers, Danny and James.
Describe what the Fictioneers platform does in 15 words or less.
Danny: Firebase for storytelling - we provide the tools to build, measure, improve, and scale interactive experiences.
James: Tucks complex conditional logic behind a simple UI, providing a low/no-code interactive story authoring tool.
What were you doing when you first thought “this needs to be a thing of its own”?
Danny: During the development of The Big Fix Up our team built a number of decoupled services and experimental capabilities for the backend platform. This included a gamification system (think achievements, player inventory, tasks), a location based system (think spatial / cloud anchors), and a bespoke storytelling system (think narrative authoring, conditional progression conditions, and interaction analytics).
While the former are well served by various game backend products - the storytelling at scale element was unique in that it had very few direct market competitors - and our perceived value in this area was affirmed when we were able to analyse and quickly respond to user interaction, engagement, and progression in real time as the Big Fix Up played out.
Danny: Firebase for storytelling - we provide the tools to build, measure, improve, and scale interactive experiences.
James: I joined Fictioneers specifically to help solve the problem: how do we deliver the story of The Big Fix Up over 21 days and make it react realistically to user interaction?
Thanks to the ever-stellar work of Lee Cummings and Finbar Hawkins, we already had an incredibly engaging story laid out. It was clear to me that there were common patterns – a mix of long-running activities to complete, short puzzles to solve and plenty of content for our audience to consume.
With the story complete, we still needed to author the assets (video, AR games, VR puzzles etc.), develop our cloud-based delivery tool and build a user-facing mobile application …no small feat!
Along with my friends and colleagues Danny Milsom and Paul King, I was part of the team tasked with building the cloud-based tool that would hold the content and decide which audience members received what content and when. Our first prototype included a set of reliable APIs, along with flexible authoring tools for Lee and Edward Russell, and a way to simulate, validate and iterate the story long before production-level art assets and mobile app test builds were available – leaving our Creative Lead Jamie Innes and Programme Lead Richard Saggers free to focus on those.
James: Tucks complex conditional logic behind a simple UI, providing a low/no-code interactive story authoring tool.
I realised then that the tool we built specifically to deliver The Big Fix Up story had a valuable place in the product development lifecycle. By bringing both delivery logic and content together, we enabled one team to prove that their story behaved and felt as the authors’ had intended, another team to create stunning AV assets and a third team to focus on building a cross-platform mobile app.
Which story do you want to tell with the Fictioneers platform?
Danny: One USP of our product is how the final experience is not bound by any specific media type, user device or specific output - we instead provide a robust API which allows integrators to build out any user facing experience they can imagine.
So to flip this question slightly - for me it is less what story I want to tell with the platform - but how can the platform be used creatively to transform existing stories into more interactive and engaging experiences.
James: I’d love to see us support a large-scale, open-world-style Alternate Reality Game. As a self-confessed Mr. Robot fanboy, I was blown away by the complex trickery and level of detail embedded in their ARG (designed by the intimidatingly competent Sam Esmail and Kor Adana) however I also understand how much work such a task takes and all for an unknown payoff. If there’s anything we can do to better enable the creation of such a thing then that would make me very happy indeed. However I’m much more of an engineer than a storyteller and so must remain content with my job of enabling others more creatively minded than myself to craft and compose such complex creations!