This article was taken from the August 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
When Jules Verne published Around the World in 80 Days in 1873, only a new railway across India made Phileas Fogg's £20,000 bet feasible. But to make the race a choose-your-own adventure game, more possible paths were needed. "My job is to make you meander -- to force you into a more interesting route," says Meg Jayanth, writer of 80 Days, from Cambridge-based developer inkle. To do so, Jayanth set the tale in a world full of futuristic travel, from airships to mechanical elephants.
Jayanth wrote encounters for each of the game's 200 cities; her script, at 350,000 words, covers thousands of routes and choices.
The game creates a new map for each play-through based on a random sentence from the novel. The story was then further filled out with programmatically generated text. "The goal," says creative director Jon Ingold, "is that no one will spot which [sections] aren't hand-crafted."
80 Days is out on iOS.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
