Dear friends,
With a stomach-rattling cocktail of excitement and terror, I'm proud to announce our first Kickstarter. Silk, our lo-fi wilderness adventure, is seeking crowdfunding support to get the project over the hump - and we want your help to do it!

Firstly, we are seeking to appoint three Community Nazgûl to help build and maintain links with our fans and backers. If you love getting engaged with gamer communities and want to become an ihobo volunteer, email our Nazgul at ihobo.com address and indicate your primary social media platform (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) and your level of experience with Kickstarter.

Also, we are recruiting alpha testers for the Silk Kickstarter demo. If the game looks interesting to you, you qualify to apply - please email our alpha at ihobo.com address and include a sentence saying why Silk appeals to you.

We expect to launch the Kickstarter in the next month or so - I hope we can count on your support through this new adventure!

And whatever dream you are working towards - just keep going!

Chris.

PS: For updates and further announcements, please join our newsletter!

On 15th February, International Hobo's Founder Chris Bateman will be at Confluence in the Google Academy, London Victory, presenting A Crash Course in Narrative Design:

You came up with a fantastic story, but when you came to put it into the game you discovered the players hated it. Why? The answer could be that while conventional narrative techniques can be applied to videogames, what works in linear media seldom holds together when you put a player into the key role. When you work on game stories, you don't just need a writer – you also need a narrative designer. The title 'narrative designer' was created by International Hobo Ltd in 2001 to describe the unique challenges of combining game design and writing in the context of game stories. Since then, the term has spread out into the games industry – but there is still little understanding among writers from other media as to what narrative design is or why games cannot deliver great stories without it. This crash course in narrative design from the people who coined the term will open your eyes as to how great game stories are not just written, they are also designed.

Tickets are available from Eventbrite.