![]() We’ve had over 2.5 million storytellers sign up to start creating stories. It was hard to build this in an intuitive way for storytellers who don’t generally have any animation or engineering backgrounds, yet it’s worked pretty well. ![]() Our goal was to make their scripts come to life on a phone, becoming visual stories with great animation and interaction. We wanted to let storytellers work in their usual way, writing great scripts. One of the harder elements was creating our own proprietary scripting language. Were there any significant obstacles you had to overcome during this process?īuilding a platform that could let anyone in the world create an interactive animated story then publish it globally was definitely a challenge! ![]() How long did development on the app and the underlying platform take?Įpisode launched in February 2014, but we had been working on it for a couple of years before that to create the underlying platform that would allow users to tell stories on Episode. Our answer to these questions is Episode. We asked ourselves, what’s the best way for someone to interact with a story? How can the story be bite-sized to fit with mobile session lengths? How is it a great experience with or without sound? Movies, TV shows, and books are all accessible on mobile, but they aren’t designed specifically for how we use our phones. Storytelling is one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of entertainment in the world, yet we don’t have a native format for stories on mobile. This was basically our approach for Episode. Michael Dawson: While our history is tied to casual games, Pocket Gems’ foundation is about building interactive entertainment experiences from the ground up for mobile. : Given Pocket Gems' history was social mobile games, what was the inspiration behind making an interactive storytelling app? To get to know more about the game, we asked the Head of Studio at Episode, Michael Dawson, about its development, the use of licenses, and the challenges of running a live service with such an active community. This is largely thanks to Pocket Gems' deals with IPs and brands like Mean Girls and singer Demi Lovato, as well as aggressive, targeted advertising on platforms such as Tumblr. It's now a top 40 grossing game on the US iPhone chart, with an estimated 7 million monthly active users. While the target audiences of and interaction fiction title Episode, from San Francisco based-developer Pocket Gems, may not exactly overlap, it's hard to deny that the game has become a big success since its 2014 launch.
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