Illustrated Interactive Gamebook Apps
Exciting games, well written, emotionally engaging, with beautiful illustrations, sound effects and music.
Our Mission
The arts are being eroded from education and from young people’s lives at an alarming rate. Often art subjects, computer games, films and graphic novels are looked down on as “low art”. Reading and writing are now reduced to “literacy”.
Starting with this project, Digital Writes are going to start putting back the fun and imagination into reading and writing. And we’re going to start raising the reputation of gamebooks as works of art.
In this project, young people, many of them disadvantaged, will work with professional artists to make their own gamebook and publish it on the app stores.
Our artists will be there to encourage and support the young people, and to help them develop their talents. But the finished project will totally be the creation of the young people themselves.
The Final Hurdle
We’ve had an offer of just under £15,000 from Arts Council England. But we won’t get it unless we can raise the required match funding.
Our partner schools and youth groups have pledged nearly £7,000 of in-kind support. But we now need to raise the final £4000 in cash to allow the project to go ahead. So the whole thing is depending on you.
The Activity
Young people will:
- Plot
- Write
- Illustrate
- Design
- Compose
- Code
The project will be offered to a wide range of young people living or studying in Swindon, to include young people with a diverse range of individual interests, aptitudes, abilities and educational needs. Which is one reason why we have chosen to work in the gamebook form. It’s perfect. It can be broken down into sections, elements, paragraphs. Every young person will be able to make a significant contribution and later identify their piece of the finished work.
Who We Are
Digital Writes is a new company. But, through our other company, Ideal Films, we’ve been doing creative projects with young people for 10 years. We have worked with disadvantaged young people whose lives have been transformed through the experience, and with talented young people who have gone on to careers in arts and media. Feedback from the young people we’ve worked with has shown they have had a great time, discovered that they can be creative and produce great work. They have worked harder than they thought possible, and collaborated to create something larger than the sum of its parts.
That is what we intend for this project - to produce a gamebook that is exciting and emotionally engaging: a book people will want to read; a game people will want to play.