*** New Trailer for "The Ice-Bound Concordance" Shows an Interactive Story Entwined with a Printed Book ***

A new trailer celebrates the launch of the winner of the 2014 IndieCade award for "Best Story/World Design," The Ice-Bound Concordance. Driven by cutting-edge interactive narrative technology, the game needs the help of a physical printed book to complete the story: The Ice-Bound Compendium. This full-color 80-page art book drives the game forward as pages are recognized and modified with augmented reality.

The game is available for iPad and Windows, and the book can be purchased through Amazon or Indie Press Revolution. 

Trailer: https://youtu.be/s5sIwaFfbaM
Website: http://www.ice-bound.com
Screenshots: http://iceboundgame.tumblr.com 
Media presskit: http://www.ice-bound.com/promo/presskit.zip

When a digital simulation of a long-dead author is created to finally complete his unfinished masterpiece, the player must help this self-doubting A.I. explore a shifting literary labyrinth filled with doomed polar explorers and fragments of his former self, in pursuit of the perfect ending to his life's work.

Created by award-winning game designer Aaron A. Reed (a three-time IndieCade finalist) and writer and interactive story researcher Jacob Garbe, the Ice-Bound Concordance game combines cutting-edge technology for combinatorial narrative with a nested, recursive story inspired by writers like Borges and books like Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves.

The game can only move forward when the player shows it pages from a printed book, The Ice-Bound Compendium. This 80-page art book (filled with story fragments, haunting images, and strange distorted transmissions) is used to communicate with the game’s central character, by choosing what pieces of his story to show him, and when.

Markerless tracking augmented reality (AR) lets the camera recognize what page of the book it's seeing, and overlay more storytelling layers on top.

The game’s dynamic narrative system avoids branching paths, instead treating story narrative fragments as flexible "building blocks" that can be assembled and reconfigured. The player's developing relationship with the digital author character affects how the algorithm chooses blocks for the continuing story, part of the designers' ongoing university research into interactive narrative technology.

Both book and game will be released on January 21st, 2016. The Ice-Bound Concordance game will be a free download, available for Windows PCs with webcam and iPad 2+, while the physical Ice-Bound Compendium book will be available from Amazon and Indie Press Revolution, priced similarly to a graphic novel ($25 USD at launch). The first two chapters of the game can be played without pages from the book. Order both at www.ice-bound.com.


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Game Features:

* Over 100,000 words of potential story and conversation content
* Co-created by the author of Blue Lacuna, named one of the Top 10 Interactive Fictions ever written (IFDB)
* 60+ minute soundtrack by N.J. Apostol (Ether One) 
* Hundreds of explorable variations for each story
* An experimental new genre of interactive storytelling (based on cutting-edge academic research!)
* Story pieces become customized to your preferred themes
* 3-8 hours of gameplay per playthrough; play again to discover new story fragments
* First two stories are free; unlock the others with pages from the printed Ice-Bound Compendium

Book Features:

* A professionally printed art book, two years in the making
* Custom printed to work with the game's augmented reality
* 80 full-color pages, each with a secret overlay unlocked by the game
* 7.5 x 9.25 softcover, layflat binding
* Control the game by choosing what pages to show the camera
* Only available until copies run out!

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About the Designers

Co-creator Aaron A. Reed has previously been featured at IndieCade, IGF, and the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemakers Festival. His 2009 interactive novel Blue Lacuna (IndieCade '10) was named one of the top ten text adventures of all time (IFDB), and he wrote over a thousand dynamic story sequences for the groundbreaking A.I.-based story game Prom Week (IndieCade '12 and IGF '12). 18 Cadence, a 2013 IGF Nuovo Honorable Mention, was named a "Best Book App" of the year by prestigious literary magazine Kirkus. Aaron's textbook Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 has been used in interactive narrative courses around the globe.

Co-creator Jacob Garbe is a writer and new media artist working with augmented reality and procedural narrative. He was the recipient of the 2010 International Aeon Award for short fiction, and has shown work in the ZERO1 Biennial, as well as other exhibitions. He is currently pursuing his PhD at the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UCSC.

A true collaboration, both creators contributed to all aspects of the project: code, writing, art, and design. Both are currently PhD researchers at the Expressive Intelligence Studio, a lab studying the intersection of narrative and artificial intelligence at UC Santa Cruz. 


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Academic Paper About Our Combinatorial Story System

"Ice-Bound: Combining Richly-Realized Story with Expressive Gameplay," at Foundations of Digital Games 2014: 
http://www.fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_23.pdf


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Keep Track of Us
Website: http://www.ice-bound.com/
Dev Blog: http://www.ice-bound.com/news/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IceBoundtheGame
Twitter: https://twitter.com/IceBoundGame
Tumblr: http://iceboundgame.tumblr.com 
RSS: http://ice-bound.com/news/feed/

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Contact Info

For more details and to sign up for announcements, visit www.ice-bound.com. Follow @IceBoundGame for Twitter updates.

Aaron A. Reed, Co-Creator
aareed@gmail.com
aaronareed.net
+1 (801) 403-9513
@aaronareed

Jacob Garbe, Co-Creator
logodaedalus@gmail.com
jacobgarbe.com
+1 (502) 379-5967
@logodaedalus


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Buzz about Ice-Bound

"[A]n amazing project... Aaron’s work is consistently some of the most unusual, format-expanding stuff being done in IF." -- Emily Short (Galatea, Blood & Laurels)

"If @aaronareed is on board a project, it means intriguing things." -- Alexis Kennedy, Failbetter Games (Fallen London)

"'Ice-Bound' is epic and skill in equal proportions." -- Richard Evans, AI Designer (Versu, Sims 3, Black & White)

"...mind-boggling... and very, very cool." -- Indie Game Magazine

"After playing around with early versions of the app and book, I can't wait." -- The Verge


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Praise For Our Past Work

"Play this. It genuinely deserves the often-abused term 'groundbreaking.'" -- Zest For Life (Prom Week)

"...one of those rare experiences that turn your set of assumptions about a medium on its head... something unique, as close to 'interactive literature' as I've ever seen in gaming." -- Jay Is Games (Blue Lacuna)

"...among the most entertaining and innovative things I've yet seen at E3." -- Wired (Prom Week)

"If the creators of Zork or Witness had a copy of Blue Lacuna travel back in time and appear on their computers, they would have wept openly." -- G4 TV (Blue Lacuna)

"By far, I'd have to say this is the most ambitious interactive story I've played this decade." --Deirdra Kiai, creator of multiple 2013 IGF nominee Dominique Pamplemousse (Blue Lacuna)

