With Dorian, co-founder and CEO Julia Palatovska said she hopes to allow fiction writers and other storytellers to create their own games.
The startup announces it has raised $ 3.15 million in initial funding led by March Capital Partners, featuring VGames, Konvoy Ventures, London Venture Partners, Michael Chow (co-creator of the Twitch "Artificial" series), Andover Ventures and talent management company Night Media.
Palatskova previously worked in the gaming industry as the head of business development at G5 Entertainment and said she was thrilled with storytelling games and interactive fiction as well. And while there are existing interactive narrative platforms, it saw "an opportunity I felt was missing", particularly in the fact that those platforms are "entirely single-player, with no opportunity to play and collaborate with other people."
So he gave me a short tour of the Dorian platform, showing me how, without coding, a writer can essentially design characters and backgrounds by choosing from a variety of visual assets (and will eventually be able to load their own assets), while using a flowchart-style interface to enable writer to connect the different scenes of the story and create the choices of the players. And as Palatskova noted, you can also collaborate on a story in real time with other writers.
"In terms of writer productivity, I'd say there's almost no difference between creating interactive fiction on our engine and just writing fiction," he said.
From what I have been able to see, the resulting games look similar to what you might find on platforms like the Pocket Gems episode, where there aren't many technical bells and whistles, so the story, dialogue, and character choices roll into first floor.
When I talked about the Twine open source game creation software, Palatskova said that Twine is "just a tool".
"We want to be more like Roblox, both the tools and the distribution," he said.
In other words, writers use Dorian to create interactive stories, but they also publish those stories using the Dorian app. (The writer still owns the resulting intellectual property.) Palatskova noted that Dorian also provides detailed insights into how readers are responding, which is useful not only for creating stories, but also for monetizing via premium story choices.
In fact, Dorian says that in early tests involving around 50,000 players, the writers were able to improve monetization by 70% after just one or two iterations. And Palatskova noted that with Dorian's games - unlike an interactive movie like "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" - "It's quick and easy to test multiple branches".
Dorian is currently by invitation only, but the plan is to launch it more widely later this year. Palatskova is recruiting writers with and without gaming experience, but she also expects many successful contributions to come from absolute beginners. He wants Dorian to be "a completely open platform, like Roblox or Twitch for writers".
"Dorian's success in creating an interactive platform that values storytelling by prioritizing monetization for its authors is a game changer," said Gregory Milken of March Capital in a statement. "Julia and her team are building a community that is ready to grab the attention of today's influential but underrepresented audience of diverse content creators."
