We’ve written a lot about Zombies, Run! on our Kickstarter page and official website, so in this blog we want to talk about how this game became about and why we’re making it.

*We just made that term up.

The Dream: An original, self-funded game

When we founded Six to Start, we had a very simple plan: we’d make brilliant games for great clients and when we had enough profits saved, we’d make our own game. Either that, or we’d make our own game in our spare time. Easy!

Or maybe not. Believe it or not, it turns out that making brilliant games is really very difficult; if you’re spending all of your time trying to make We Tell Stories or Smokescreen – two highly original projects – as good as they can be, you don’t have that much time to do anything else. In 2008 there was the financial crash, which didn’t help our clients all that much; and during all of this time, we were trying to learn how to run a company.

We’ve had time for a few experiments, like Werewolf 359, an online framework for playing Werewolf, and Wanderlust, a location-based storytelling engine that integrated with Foursquare. Around this time, we’d also been developing an action game for the iPhone with time travel and ARG elements – unfortunately we let the scope grow too far and we didn’t have the skills to do everything we wanted to. A simple mistake, and one we were determined not to repeat with Wanderlust, which was made entirely in-house, and we tapped our writing buddies to craft stories for it. Despite being made in just a few weeks, it got a decent amount of attention and also boosted our confidence that we were going down the right path.

The Running Dead

I’m a keen runner. I didn’t always use to be one – I hated it at school – but over time I’ve really fallen for the sense of freedom and energy that you get from running, and of course, it’s got to be one of the cheapest ways of keeping fit. Being an early adopter, I’ve always had a close eye on running tech, buying two successive versions Garmin Forerunner GPS tracker and having three different running apps on my iPhone.

There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that knowing your exact pace and distance is a fantastic way to make running better and more fun; it makes your progress – both in a run and as a runner – much more transparent. That’s why RunKeeper, Nike+, and Garmin Connect are so popular.

And over the years, there have been various ‘running games’ out there, including Seek and Spell, PacManhattan, Journey to the End of the Night, and the more sedate Pokewalker. These are all really interesting and I’ve played most of them, but most of them aren’t really about running at all. They often involve running, but more in the sense of running as a side-effect of the game mechanics rather than “I’m going to spend 30 minutes running 5km this evening”.

There are even other augmented reality running games out there where players avoid enemies or collect loot that has been superimposed on nearby roads and parks! But because they often require you to look at your phone’s screen to find the next waypoint or whatever, you can’t really do any extended running unless you want to get injured. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – not everyone wants to run – but it’s not ideal for regular joggers or runners, who prefer to stick to one or two or three familiar routes (which is antithetical to the discovery-centric nature of many location-based games).

On the flipside, sites like Fitocracy, Superproof, and Nike+ are attempting to add badges, levels, points, and collectibles to running. I am sure that some people like these things and find them motivating, but they all seem centred around the idea of competing, either with other people or with yourself. The truth is that for many recreational runners, running isn’t always about beating your personal best time or distance. Running is fun and tiring and exhilarating and painful and freeing; it generates numbers, but those numbers aren’t the reason we run.

So we wanted to make an iPhone game that was really about running (or jogging, if you like). Our first idea was based around actual geography and was more classically game-like, but it didn’t seem like it would have enough longevity and was a bit too geared towards hardcore runners, so we weren’t that satisfied. Then we talked to Naomi Alderman – who became our lead writer for this game – about it and we came up with the brilliant idea of setting the game in a post-apocalyptic world of zombies where running would be an essential and life-saving skill. It was also clear why you would run – to help gather vital supplies for your people. Naturally, there would be a story delivered straight to your ears, and much more behind it. Everything fit into place.

Making It

Even better, making Zombies, Run! was something we could do almost entirely in-house, and it would exercise all of the skills that we’d been honing for years – new forms of storytelling, great user experience, sound design, ARGs – they’re all essential for this game.

We did some proper feasibility testing to make sure we could actually make the game well and in a reasonable amount of time – creating an internal prototype, writing the script, recording the audio, adding SFX – and everything looked good, so we began creating the Kickstarter trailer. While Zombies, Run! isn’t as difficult to explain as other games we’ve made, it’s not quite like anything else that’s out there. Other than saying “It’s like Nike+ but with zombies” we felt a live-action trailer and interview would convey what the game was all about.

We’ve also had many long discussions about how we balance storytelling and play in the game; at one end, Zombies, Run! might just be a podcast – at the other, it’d be a highly complex system. We’re somewhere in the middle, and the same applies to the game mechanics: we made a deliberate decision not to have traditional points or XP or levels. We do have analogues to them, but they’re much more integrated into the fiction of the game. They are the people in your base you want to save. They are the things that will feed and clothe and protect them. They are the secrets, mysteries, and tales of the people and the barren environment that you run through.

In short, we are creating a world filled with stories and characters that make you want to run – a world where your ability and drive to run is a matter of life and death, not just for yourself but for the people around you. It’s not a crude and empty system of points and levels, it’s a game that is about what it means to be alive.

Support us – and help rebuild civilization!

If you like the sound of this and you want to support us – and get a discounted copy of the game plus some great swag – check us out on Kickstarter. This is a real labour of love for us, and we think it’ll be something very special.

It’s not as if The Code is the first TV show to innovate online; The Million Pound Drop, Misfits, Virtual Revolution, Push Nevada, and more have all done very cool things mixing the web and TV.

But what we’re doing is new in a few ways…

TV and online, side-by-side

Long before The Code was commissioned, the producers at the BBC were thinking about how to reach out and engage a broader audience in a deeper way. “Doesn’t everyone do this?” you might wonder.

The answer is: not really. In our experience, it usually boils down to, “Let’s do something on Twitter and Facebook.” If broadcasters are feeling particularly flush or reckless, you might even get a Flash game or a dedicated microsite that solicits audience photos and videos. But very little of this online activity ‘touches’ the TV show, mainly because TV workflows are completely different to online workflows – everything is produced in one go, scripts can change day-by-day, and the edit might see entire sections chopped out.

So it’s easy to understand why many TV producers are reluctant to delve deeply into any online integration when they themselves aren’t sure what will be in the show – you need a lot of trust and very good communication right from the start to make it work. To help establish this, Six to Start’s producer for The Code, Matt Wieteska, is embedded with the BBC production team for part of every week – and not just with our Julian Phillips (our exec producer there), Jo Witt, and (previously) Morwenna Gordon, but with the TV people as well.

Finally, it really helps that not only is Marcus du Sautoy well-versed with the web and Twitter, a designer of maths games, but he’s also a big fan of treasure hunts. What more could you want for a project like this?

The right kind of games

Our four Flash games strike the right balance between fun and educational – which is to say, first they are really fun, and second they are educational. Let’s face it – it doesn’t matter how educational a game is unless people want to play it, so that’s what we focused on. Some of the games are much more on the fun side, but one, about mosaics and symmetry, is just about perfect in how the gameplay is inherently educational. I should also thank the super-smart guys at Devilish Games for their work here!

It helps that we’ve focused on just four games. It might sound like a lot, but we were thinking of doing even more during the design phases. However, in our experience in other games like Smokescreen, the vast majority of traffic flows to only a few missions or minigames – and that you can normally identify what those might be in advance. We took a long, hard look at our game designs and picked the four best. But even then, I’m pretty sure I know which of those four will be most popular…

Not a Pyramid

Seen this before? It’s our old friend, the ‘inverted pyramid’ model of engagement for ARGs and transmedia! But I don’t like it so much. It feels like a post-facto justification of why only a few people get really engaged in most projects by suggesting that what you’re making is just way too awesome/hard for the public, who’ll have to make do with lightweight stuff (yes, like Flash games).

The fact is, most people are smarter and more engaged than you might think. Masquerade – an incredibly challenging treasure hunt book – sold millions not just because it had a pretty cover and pictures (although that helped). It was because it had a beautifully-judged difficulty curve and contained all sorts of tricks and ways to draw even the most novice or hesitant reader in. Also, it was just a book – everything you needed was contained in it, rather than scattered across multiple places.

We’ve tried to do the same with The Code. Without giving anything anyway, while there are plenty of clues and ways in to the treasure hunt on TV and online, we are going to make it very easy for people to understand what they need to do, even if the puzzles within that are more challenging. That’s something we’re sticking to throughout the design.

To repeat: It’s really easy to play The Code. Most people should get most of the way through it. But even when it gets really difficult, you’ll still think you could solve it…

Exuberant!

We (Six to Start and the BBC) realised we had an opportunity to do something really wonderful with The Code. We could get thousands of people to think about maths in a new, exuberant way, and not just by creating a treasure hunt, but through everything in that treasure hunt: from the design of the treasure, to the clues in the show, to the ‘ultimate challenge’.

I think everyone will be really delighted by some of things we’re doing. You’ll find out some of them very soon, and others won’t be revealed until everything is over. I hope you’ll join us when The Code airs!

You can listen to (or download) the podcast from the site, and it’s certainly a useful window into how the BBC is approaching the area these days.

But of course, it’s not really the tech that’s important, it’s the experience, so do check out the games and read our brief case study.

(One of our favourite games was Line of Best Fit, a single-player word-tile game that you should check out – let us know what you think and we might do something with it!)

The session itself wasn’t recorded, but I’ve done a screencast of the talk which you can watch below:

As an ‘Intermediate’ level talk, it assumes that you’ve played or read about ARGs before, although you may not have made one. On the whole it was received very well, with lots of great questions about the role of marketing ARGs, smartphones, RPGs, and LARPs in future developments; I also got to see some sneak peeks of upcoming ‘mobile ARGs’ by indie teams, which were extremely exciting.

If you don’t have the time to watch the talk, here’s a summary:

Like every other new product, experience, or technology, ARGs are following the hype curve. The technology trigger came in 2001, with cheap broadband allowing a critical mass of players to easily communicate and collaborate online. Excitement peaked around 2005 with games like I Love Bees and Perplex City, both commanding budgets of six to seven figures. Since then, we’ve been on a precipitous descent since we haven’t attracted the millions of players (and dollars) we expected.

Why the disappointment? In short, it was difficult to scale up player numbers without losing the ‘magic’ personal interaction and multiplatform nature of ARGs; we got hung up over the ‘This is Not a Game’ (TINAG) mantra; and the friction of moving between different platforms was too high for casual players (no matter how cool it is to go to live events or get post in the mail).

The answer is to reduce friction, by means of converged devices like smartphones, and single sign-on mechanisms like Facebook; to get rid of TINAG and just make the games more transparent to consumers; and to steal/borrow ideas from other game genres on how to make games accessible and sticky without creating impossible amounts of content.

I feel like we’re definitely turning a corner in the ARG/transmedia space this year; I’m very enthusiastic about what’s coming up!

Naturally, we’ve long wondered how best to make location-based stories.

Of course, the idea of readers having to move in the real world to advance in a story is nothing new. But they haven’t become particularly popular, for a few different reasons:

1) They often require readers to be in a specific physical location, which drastically limits the audience. For example, a Sherlock Holmes story in which readers visited locations in London would be very neat, but only for people in London. One way around this is by making a lot of stories around the world, but it can be hard and expensive to achieve that level of scale and momentum.

2) It can be difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating for writers to contribute stories; they might need to spend a lot of time talking to a developer to format and map it correctly, and many writers don’t have the time to spare.

3) Many stories are designed and written to be read in a single session, requiring at least a few minutes and potentially over an hour of walking. Unfortunately, sad to say, most readers just don’t have the time to spare on something unproven.

4) The variety of smartphones on the market can make it difficult to support a wide audience.

Wanderlust

A few weeks ago, we came up with an idea that addressed many of these problems. With SXSW providing an ideal deadline – we like making experiments in time for the conference – we decided to create a working prototype of the idea.

And here it is: Wanderlust. Try it on your smartphone, at wanderluststories.com:

Imagine a book that could tell stories tailored to your location – stories that take you from cafes to libraries to museums, not just in one city or one country, but wherever you are in the world.

Wanderlust is an experimental mobile storytelling platform that works on all smartphones including iPhones, Android, and WebOS. Using a simple web-based editing interface, writers can create stories that move readers from location to location – but unlike previous location-based stories, these locations aren’t fixed. Act 1 of a story could require readers to be in any cafe in the world; and Act 2 could take place in any bar in the world.

It’s not just location-based storytelling – it’s atmosphere-based storytelling.

The Stories

A platform is nothing without good stories, so we invited some fantastic writers to contribute tales for the launch, including:

• Tourism by Naomi Alderman: A chilling urban fantasy, beginning in a bar.
• Tech by Tom Chatfield: A thousand words of science fiction in one act, beginning in a restaurant.

• Ivy by Andrea Phillips: A dark and dreamlike fairytale, beginning in a nightclub or music venue.

• In The Shadow Of Her Tail by Matt Wieteska: An urban fantasy, beginning in a shop.

• South by Southwest by Adrian Hon: A homage to Hitchcock’s spy thriller North by Northwest set during SXSW 2011, beginning (of course) in a convention center.

Because Wanderlust uses HTML to display stories, it’s easy for writers to include images, audio, hyperlinks, and even videos. We’ve created purely text-based stories, but a location-based cartoon or audio drama would be trivial to add.

If you would like to write a story, just contact us at @wanderlustapp or by emailing hello@sixtostart.com.

How it Works

Wanderlust combines the GPS feature of smartphones with Foursquare’s database of venues to determine whether readers are in the right type of place to continue the story – and if not, to help guide them to the nearest cafe (or bar, or museum, or shop…).

We’ve created Wanderlust as a web-based app, meaning that readers can access stories without installing anything. Thanks to JQuery Mobile, Wanderlust is also fully compatible with a wide range of smartphones including iOS, Android, WebOS, and any other standards-compliant mobile browser. In fact, Wanderlust even works on any modern computer browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Safari (although it’ll look a little weird).

More Information

We created Wanderlust as an experiment, but we’re eager to see how it’s received. We have some great ideas about how it could be extended into more time and location-sensitive ways, and also to introduce branching storylines and gameplay. And as a web-based app, it can also easily be ‘skinned’, packaged up, and even sold through Apps Stores as a native mobile app.

If you’d like to explore what could be done with Wanderlust commercially, or otherwise, contact us at hello@sixtostart.com.

Credits

• Producer: Adrian Hon
• Developer: Ernesto Jiménez
• Writer: Matt Wieteska
• Graphic Designer: Estee Chan

See more details on our Case Study.

If you’ve followed Six to Start for a while, you’ll know that we have a thing for treasure hunts, whether that’s a bibliophile’s dream prize of 1000 books in We Tell Stories, or our worldwide hunt for the launch of Muse’s album The Resistance. And of course, before Six to Start, I was the lead designer of Perplex City, an 18-month long epic alternate reality game with a £100,000 prize.

Treasure hunts have a special kind of romance about them, the prospect of fame and fortune, if only you can be smart and persistent and lucky enough. The best treasure hunts are not the most difficult, nor those with the biggest prizes, but those that offer up an intoxicating mix of mystery and revelation that keeps pulling people back to stare, just one more time, at that cryptic riddle or that strange pattern. You know there’s a solution, if only you can find it…

Perplex City was unusual in having a huge range of puzzles with different difficulties, from simple spot the differences that were easy even for children, to ultra-hard codes and multi-step challenges. We were a little concerned about whether we were making the puzzles too niche at the high end, but what was extraordinary was the real desire for players of all abilities to solve them, whatever it took – even if that meant learning to read hieroglyphs or figuring out the intricacies of the RC5 cipher. In other words, treasure hunts can be great ways to motivate people to learn.

It’s not unusual for TV shows to tie in online treasure hunts, like ABC’s Push, Nevada and Channel 4′s The Search. Unfortunately the treasure hunt tends to take a back seat to the show, to the extent that the clues are either:

a) Really, really obvious (as in, repeated multiple times in plain sight)

b) Literally tacked on to the end of the show

And this is often simply because the work of creating the treasure hunt tends to be left very late – sometimes after filming of the show itself has actually finished. Now, this makes sense if you’re treating the treasure hunt purely as a promotional tool, but not if you actually expect anyone to take part, or – you know – learn anything.

That’s not the sort of experience we’re going to make with the BBC.

Later this year, a BBC 2 documentary about maths called The Code is going to air, presented by the fantastic Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and it’ll have a ‘next-generation’ treasure hunt (i.e. not a normal one) seamlessly integrated with it. I mean seamlessly; we sit alongside the TV production team and we’ve been talking about the project before the scripts were even written. We are going to take full advantage of the fact that we’re on TV. It is not going to be tacked on at the end.

It’s going to be fun, challenging, accessible, and exhilarating, all at once. It’s going to involve a lot of maths, in the form of awesome Flash games and puzzles and real world challenges! And it’s going to recognise that people work together online…

So stayed tuned.

So, over the years we’ve built up strong relationships with a range of freelancers we’ve worked with, or whose work we’ve admired. And now we’re proud to announce the first Six to Start Associates – creatives whose skills and experience we can draw upon for the right project.

They range from writers to producers to developers to game designers, and they live in London, New York, and Toronto – but they’re all among the best in the business, and we know we’ll be able to make even better games and experiences with their help as Associates.

They are Andrea Phillips, David Varela, Naomi Alderman, David Fono, and Kate Raynes-Goldie:

Andrea Phillips / Writer, Game Designer

Andrea is a New York-based award-winning transmedia writer and game designer, having worked on Routes Game, Perplex City, The 2012 Experience for Sony Pictures, Cathy’s Key, and True Blood. If you’ve ever read anything about transmedia, then chances are, you’ve seen her fantastic blog, Deus Ex Machinatio, which covers games, storytelling, digital culture, and gender issues. Follow @andrhia.

David Varela / Writer, Producer

David is a writer and producer who works across a huge range of media – sometimes all at once. He’s written and produced two epic transmedia games for Reebok and Sony PlayStation, and he worked on Perplex City. David’s stageplays have been performed at the ICA, the Royal Court, Hampstead Theatre and RADA, his short films have premiered in Leicester Square and been broadcast on ITV, and he’s also written several one-off dramas for BBC Radio 4 and BBC7. Follow @writingstudio.

Naomi Alderman / Writer

Naomi is a novelist, transmedia and games writer and journalist. Her first novel, Disobedience, won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstones’ 25 Writers for the Future. Naomi was lead writer on Perplex City, wrote the Alice in Storyland game for Penguin’s We Tell Stories, and created the online story The Winter House. Penguin published her second novel, The Lessons in April 2010. Naomi broadcasts regularly, and writes on games and technology for the Guardian. She is currently working on a game for BBC Languages, a new novel for Penguin and a Doctor Who novel for BBC Books.

David Fono / Game Designer, Developer

David is the co-founder of the award-winning Toronto-based Atmosphere Industries, makers of fine pervasive games since 2007. Atmosphere’s games have been played at festivals around the world, including Toronto, London, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin and Perth. Their latest effort, the critically-acclaimed Gentrification: The Game won Best use of Tech and Best of Fest 2010 at Come Out and Play in New York. In 2006, David developed Waking City, a Toronto-based ARG. David has also developed online games for clients such as PBS, CBC, and TV Ontario, and worked on research prototypes for Microsoft Research and the Human Media Lab. Follow @fonograph.

Kate Raynes-Goldie / Game Designer, Researcher

Kate is the co-founder of Atmosphere Industries – but when she’s not making games, she’s a Research Associate at Ryerson’s new Experiential Design and Gaming Environment Lab, where she is researching MMOs for kids, and Guest Faculty at the CFC Media Lab, where she teaches social media and internet culture. Kate is also the founder of PrivacyCampTO, Canada’s first privacy unconference series funded by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the Mozilla Foundation. Follow @oceanpark.

(We’ve also produced a handy Twitter list that includes everyone at Six to Start, both staff and Associates!)

We Want You!

We’re always on the lookout for other talented creatives to bring on as Associates. It’s not an exclusive relationship, and we fully support our Associates in their own work outside of Six to Start, but it’s one where we can bring fun and stimulating work to smart people. Let us know if you’re interested.

Because I didn’t have a Playstation, the series’ 40+ hour story and endless cut-scenes scenes held a tantalising mystique to me for an entire decade. I imagined vast worlds populated by complex characters, with the power of CGI giving total freedom to artists’ imaginations, and simple but enjoyable game mechanics that would perfectly complement the games’ stories. After all, with review after review proclaiming the perfection of every single Final Fantasy game, how could it be otherwise.

So when I bought a PS3 and Final Fantasy XIII, I was as enthusiastic as can be. Even the cautionary tales that the game was ‘too linear’ for the first dozen hours didn’t put me off – I don’t have a problem with linear games, as long as they’re engaging.

Of course, I was disappointed – disappointed by the nonsensical story, the astoundingly cliched and sexist characters, but most of all, by the gameplay (not by the graphics though – those were fantastic). Graphic adventures are linear; Fable 2 is linear; Halo is linear; even Red Dead Redemption is basically linear. I believe that if you want to give players a memorable, emotional experience, then telling a largely linear story is one of the best ways to do that.

Final Fantasy XIII’s problem, unfortunately, is that it doesn’t take any care at all to justify or conceal that linearity with an appropriate story or game mechanics (Rockstar, for example, is particularly fond of blocking or temporarily destroying bridges to other parts of its worlds). Instead, you’re literally forced down straight and narrow paths to whatever fate might await you, and for about 3-4 hours, I could win every battle by just tapping the same sequence of buttons over and over again.

The game does try to alleviate boredom by switching the player between multiple characters. On the face of it, this is a good idea and can create more elaborate and interesting stories, but the too-rapid jumping merely diluted the drama. Even worse, the fact that at least two of the player-controlled characters hated each others’ guts posed a serious problem – as a player, I would rather not be forced to perform actions that could kill my characters (as an aside, this is related to the lack of omniscience you see in games but not some novels).

Now, I understand the impulse to make games accessible to new players and why you might want to limit player agency in order to prevent confusion, but it’s madness to keep this up for hours. People have said that it ‘gets good after 12 hours’ but that’s hardly a ringing endorsement for new players – I can watch an entire season of Mad Men, or finish Portal and Braid, in that time.

So I just gave up; I couldn’t bear the thought of spending even more time in a frustrating world that was unable to justify its limitations.

If you want to play an even more linear and non-interactive game that Final Fantasy XIII that is actually incredibly fun, then you’ve got to play Super PSTW Action RPG – it’s the lowest of the lo-fi, but it’s also a glorious few minutes of fun. And once you’ve played that, try the sequel.

It starts with some strange symbols around the edges of a double page spread about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Alien Glyphs? Messages to agents in the field? No. But fold them a certain way and you’ll see – they form a number. A phone number. Curiosity piqued, you dial:

The British Empire welcomes you to the Ministry of Immigration, Naturalisation and Citizenship. Your call is very important to us. Please select one of the following options…

What follows is a labyrinthine bureaucracy – a series of nested menus, wrong turns and endless informational messages. Full of information about the mysterious Ministry of Immigration, Naturalisation and Citizenship. You navigate it like any automated phone line – dialing numbers, taking notes of important options, swearing when it sends you to the wrong prompt. But unlike other phone lines, this holds a secret.

One option offers you access to the Administrative System – a chance to get your application for citizenship approved automatically! But only if you can alter your Application Reference (AR) number until it equals zero, which requires some careful logic and mathematical manipulation. Each step in the Administrative System alters your AR number according to a certain mathematical function. By following the steps through, keeping track of their effects and then applying them correctly, the successful player can hack the system and emerge victorious!

We liked this puzzle for a few reasons. Firstly, its architecture and audio design was created by the fantastic Alexander Macmillan, which meant it was robust, reliable, and sounded creepy as all hell. Secondly, it let our players use their powers of deductive reasoning and apply their maths skills – which are often neglected in today’s games! The solve rate on this one reflected its level of challenge, but it was consistently rated as a players’ favourite – tough, atmospheric and satisfying to solve.