The Gates of Vienna is out now

You might have come here through the inter-webs purely by accident. Maybe you have a penchant for alternate history or know some crazy designer guy named Jim, or maybe just maybe you’re interested in this burgeoning but shouldn’t be still nascent thing sometimes called “interactive storytelling”. In any of these cases, you’ve come to the right place, because it is all of those things and just for you.

This blog has served truly as a “weblog”, a record of the trials and tribulations, the pain and punishment of trying to write not only a book, but to make the thing it lives on.

The Gates of Vienna has become a thing, well an iPhone thing for the moment, but soon to be an Android thing. It’s become a thing way larger than just a funny, little interactive novel sort of project. It’s now a book on a larger platform called Bastion where you can make other books that work just like The Gates of Vienna. Try it. It’s fun, easy and will win you friends and salvation. Now just to have a lot more people make some books like this and we’re on to something.

What this means for 2016’s best comedy about a 17th-century siege is that I now have a proper platform to put it on and something that it can keep on growing for a bit. This also means that I’ve been developing a whole slew of interesting things I can do with the Gates of Vienna, all based on talking to other people how they would do things and what sorts of books they would want to make. I’m still working on adding more points of view, both human and non-human by the way, and looking at interesting ways to add notifications that fit the story and better ways of using maps and timelines. It’s all coming over that hill at the last minute, with loads of cannons and 30,000 horses straight through the App Store and into your mind.

You’re going to need a code to read it though, email me at jim@bastionapp.com to get one.