Introducing Storycraft, where gamers connect & create stories together 🎒
By Andy, cofounder at Storycraft
Games and me
We've started something audacious — an entirely new approach to gaming that lets people craft game worlds, characters, and everything else they need to tell stories with friends. It's called Storycraft. But before digging deeper into what we're building, I want to start with a little bit about the role games have played in my life.
I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember. I got my first “console” in 1981 and it looked like this:
I still own it and it still works:
After that it was an Atari 2600 (those tanks were so realistic!), Amiga, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Gameboy, every Playstation and X-BOX generation, every Sony handheld (Vita was amazing prove me wrong!), DS, and as I got older a lot more indie PC, mobile games, and D&D.
You could say that outside of the people in my life, the things I’ve always loved most are stories, systems, and games. I’ve come to realize over time that stories and systems are really ways to connect with another person. After all, somebody had to write those stories, and design those systems, and put them all together into the game I’m playing! That feeling of exploring a gameplay system, and mastering it so you can progress to unlock the next story beat, and getting a sense of the people who designed each of the various aspects that make up a game is the feeling that has kept me gaming for decades.
Over the last few years though I’ve found myself increasingly playing multiplayer games which provide a different way to connect with the people in my life. Whether it’s preparing for and heading out on a group adventure in a Minecraft Realm, stealthily making your way across a massive map to meet a friend in Day-Z, or most recently spreading democracy in Helldivers 2, playing with real live people brings a whole new level of emergent gameplay and story. The feeling of using gameplay systems to tell your own story with your friends is a big part of what keeps me gaming today.
Games and creativity
When it came time to start our new gaming startup Storycraft (a story for another day!) we asked ourselves, what do we think will keep us gaming well into the future? Unsurprisingly, connection was at top of our list, but we added a second idea that is also important to us, and we think will be a dominant force in gaming in the future: player creativity.
What we mean by this is that games, while they can have a lot of room for creativity in how they are played, are almost always bounded by the finite nature of content creation. If the developer doesn’t create a game object, or an NPC, or a story beat then no amount of gameplay system mastery can unlock it - it just doesn’t exist. Hello, Elden Ring DLC I’m looking at you!
As gamers, we also want more creative control over the stories we can tell in game worlds. We want to be able to truly impact not only the environment, but the characters and the communities we are part of. Today experiences like Helldivers 2 (and Blaseball before that!) have shown that dedicated developers who listen to their community can shape stories post-launch in ways that players want, but what would happen if players themselves had the ability to take the world where they wanted to take it, without the need for developers at all?
What if players could imagine worlds, characters, creatures, quests and all the other aspects of storytelling and bring them to life with the touch of a button?
Finding your tribe via AI
We think a game that allowed us to create our own worlds could unlock a diversity of worlds, characters, and themes that would allow us to find people we connect to through shared interests and who we forge bonds with not only through playing a game, but by crafting one together. We want Storycraft to be a place where you can tell whatever story you want, in whatever world you want, with whoever you want. Personally, I want to craft and play in an 80’s era horror world with a lot of my favourite characters like the ones in this painting! Where are all the old gamer horror nerds at who want to help me?!
How do we let players craft worlds and characters and stories based on who they are and what they care about? That’s where AI technology comes in.
But firstly, since AI and games is a touchy topic, I want to say that as gamers we are first and foremost fans of the writers and artists and the iconic auteurs that create games from their unique point of view. We do not believe that AI can replace any of the hand crafted games (or films, or books, or comics) that made us love all this stuff in the first place. But we do think that AI can unlock a whole new generation of creators who can tell their own personal stories through the medium of games, even if they lack millions of dollars, huge teams and technical skill that modern games development requires.
If you want to make a personal hand crafted game, and you are inspired to learn the various technical aspects of game development then Unity, Unreal, Roblox, and UEFN are all great choices. That’s not what Storycraft is. Storycraft is a game that we all play together that uses AI to help us craft the worlds, characters and stories we want, as we play it. We call this Player Generated Content or PGC.
What has sparked our imaginations as we’ve played early builds of Storycraft has been that visiting a world made by one of us is more like stepping into that person’s personality than it is like visiting a game biome. Here’s a post-apocalyptic world I made in a very early mobile build:
Enjoy my apocalypse shelter and rusted robotic monstrosity friends!
Getting involved
I realize this post is light on details about what the game is exactly, and how you play it. In all honesty, we’re still figuring it out! Right now it’s mostly a crafting game where you walk around, gather resources, and craft things that help you progress to new worlds, a little bit like Minecraft meets Animal Crossing, but it’s going to evolve a lot from here.
I wanted to write this post as a way to find our tribe; the people who are excited by a vision where even as non-developers we can all be creative and tell the stories we want in the worlds we want with whoever we want, where our own aesthetic preferences, subcultures, fantasies and unbridled imagination shape not just the environment, but craft the story. If you feel like this is you, there’s a few ways for you to get involved.
The first is to become a play tester. We playtest one to two times a month, and play testers get to keep a running build for free after the playtest is over. If you want to become a play tester all you need to do is fill out our play tester application form here.
The other way you can get involved is to become part of our community by joining our discord.
We’re excited to craft a universe and travel it together! 🎒