With Dorian, co-founder and CEO Julia Palatovska said she\u2019s hoping to empower fiction writers and other storytellers to create their own games.
\nThe startup is announcing that it has raised $3.25 million in seed funding led by March Capital Partners, with participation from VGames, Konvoy Ventures, London Venture Partners, Michael Chow (co-creator of the Twitch series \u201cArtificial\u201d), Andover Ventures and talent management company Night Media.
\nIn addition, John Howell, the former vice president of partnerships at Twitch, has joined the board as an independent director.<\/p>\n
Palatskova previously worked in gaming as the head of business development at G5 Entertainment, and she said she\u2019d also become entranced by narrative games and interactive fiction. And while there are existing interactive fiction platforms, she saw \u201can opportunity that I felt was missing,\u201d particularly in the fact that those platforms are \u201centirely single player, with no opportunity to play and collaborate with other people.\u201d
\nSo she gave me a quick 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 they\u2019ll eventually be able to upload assets of their own), while using a flowchart-style interface to allow the writer to connect different scenes in the story and create player choices. And as Palatskova noted, you can also collaborate on a story in real-time with other writers.
\n\u201cIn terms of writer productivity, I would say there is almost no difference between creating interactive fiction on our engine and just writing fiction,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Image Credits: Dorian<\/p>\n
From what I could see, the resulting games look similar to what you\u2019d find on platforms like Pocket Gems\u2019 Episode, where there aren\u2019t a lot of technical bells and whistles, so the story, dialogue and character choices move to the forefront.
\nWhen I brought up the open-source game creation software Twine, Palatskova said Twine is \u201cjust a tool.\u201d
\n\u201cWe want to be more like Roblox, both the tools and the distribution,\u201d she said.
\nIn 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 analytics on how readers are responding, which is helpful not just for creating stories, but also for monetizing via premium story choices.
\nIn fact, Dorian says that in early tests involving around 50,000 players, writers were able to improve monetization by 70% after only one or two iterations. And Palatskova noted that with Dorian\u2019s games \u2014 unlike an interactive film such as \u201cBlack Mirror: Bandersnatch\u201d \u2014\u201dIt\u2019s fast and easy to test multiple branches.\u201d
\nDorian is currently invite-only, but the plan is to launch more broadly later this year. Palatskova is recruiting writers with and without gaming experience, but she also expects plenty of successful contributions to come from complete novices. She wants Dorian to be \u201ca completely open platform, like Roblox or Twitch for writers.\u201d
\n\u201cDorian\u2019s success in creating an interactive platform that values storytelling while prioritizing monetization for its writers is a game-changer,\u201d said March Capital\u2019s Gregory Milken in a statement. \u201cJulia and her team are creating a community that is primed to capture the attention of today\u2019s influential but underrepresented audiences of diverse content creators.\u201d
\nUpdate: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Dorian had raised $3.15 million.<\/p>\n
Roblox raises $150M Series G, led by Andreessen Horowitz, now valued at $4B<\/p>\n