Newsletter #1: Make a Game This Thursday — No Coding Needed
Into Storymode — Newsletter #1
What we've built, what we've been to, and what we're figuring out — plus our open-source engine for telling stories inside 3D scans.
Hello,
Back in April we ran our first Playable Stories event with Marlène Delrive, digging into how As Long As You're Here turned a personal story into something you could play.
Since then we've moved from talking about it to building it: workshops and web tools to help more people make meaningful games and interactive stories of their own.
Make a meaningful game — no coding required
In June we ran the first Playable Stories: Vibe Coding Meaningful Games workshop. People came in with an idea and spent the session working out how a single game mechanic can carry a story, an argument or a feeling — then used AI-assisted coding tools to start building it as a browser game.
The second one is this Thursday, 6 August, 6:00–8:30pm at SPACE4, 113 Fonthill Road, London N4 3HH. Free.
It's for storytellers, community builders, people working in social impact, and anyone curious about using games to say something they actually mean. No previous coding or game-development experience needed — bring a laptop and something you care about.
An open-source engine for storytelling inside 3D scans
We've also put out the first public version of our Spatial Storytelling Engine.
It's an open-source web tool for anyone working with 3D scans and 3D Gaussian Splatting — a way of capturing a real place in three dimensions from ordinary photographs — who wants to do more than just show the space off.
You bring a scan into the engine, add text, images, audio and video, and pin parts of the story to specific viewpoints inside the space. The result works two ways: as an immersive journey through the scan, or as a scrolling article with the 3D space sitting inside it.
A scan isn't the finished thing. It's a space that can hold a lot of different memories and accounts of the same place.
It's early, but the whole path — import a scan, author a story, export a standalone website — already works. Here's one we made with it:
→ Hyde Vale Fountain — Victorian public infrastructure standing at the edge of Blackheath, and part of its history.
Someone else worth your attention
We were in the audience last week at Somerset House for an evening hosted by Picilian Entertainment — not our event, but one we want to pass on, because they're chasing the same thing we are from a different direction.
Shereen Fares, Dwayne Connell and Denzel Dome shared work-in-progress on Junction Hill, a narrative-driven game rooted in underrepresented London communities. What made it land is where the material comes from: this is a team writing their own neighbourhoods. The London in it is grimey because that's the London they actually know — no lies, no filter. The city as lived, not as backdrop.
Shereen was also candid about how hard it still is for small studios to meet other developers, monetise and publish. Hence The Linked Creatives Hub, which they've started at Somerset House Exchange. Worth knowing about if you're building something.
Different as they look, all three come back to one question: how do we make interactive storytelling accessible to people who have something worth saying?
So — if the technical side weren't a barrier, what's the one thing you'd make? The answers shape what we build next.
William Wong
Founding Game Designer
Into Storymode
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This is the first Into Storymode newsletter. We send one roughly once a month — what we've built, what we've been to, and what we're figuring out.