Fable developer Lionhead is pushing its new team, Lionhead Incubation - who develops and experiments with new game ideas - into the spotlight. Attempts to draw attention to the team from the public eye has included a game reveal that we’ll unfortunately never see: a cancelled project called InkQuest.
A small team was formed around a year ago with the hope of finding new ideas and inspiration that would in turn develop into revolutionary games, be they large or small. Although InkQuest hasn’t worked out for them, Lionhead is taking it in its stride: “[InkQuest] is not a measure of success: The ideas that don’t get developed further are just as important as those that do,” they said in a post published on their official website.
The concept behind InkQuest stemmed from a Creative Day, which is an event held annually at the Lionhead’s headquarters in Guildford, UK. At 2013’s Creative Day, a team of 4 - Jonny Hopper, Iain Brown, Adam Sibbick and Mike Green - put together a small demo of the project. The game was part magical-map, part visual-novel, part adventure-game and ended up being interesting enough that it was put into incubation, which meant that the concept was added to and developed until it became a fully-fledged prototype.
Elsewhere in the post, they go into a bit more detail about the InkQuest creative process: “We explored worlds made entirely from words and investigated different ways of telling stories within them. We explored various art styles and developed some amazing technology for a kind of artist’s ‘performance capture’ - capturing and replaying our artist’s creative process. We’ll blog very soon with more details about all of these.”
The game told the story of Sophie, a young girl transported into and trapped inside a magical book called The Inkwell. In order to escape, she had to unravel the mysteries surrounding her prison. Although the game has now been cancelled, Lionhead did put together a short trailer which you can watch below. It looked quite promising.
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