This summer I built The Inklands, a fairytale adventure that coaches children aged 7 to 10 to write. Until now, only people I invited could play it. Starting today, the beginning of the game is open to anyone, until the end of October.
How to play
- Go to theinkland.com and press Play the demo.
- Sign in with your Google account.
- Enter the code thefirstpen.
It plays best on a tablet with a keyboard or on a laptop, held in landscape, with the sound on. A good session is about 20 minutes, and your progress is saved to your account, so you can stop and come back. The code opens new accounts until October 31; an account made before then keeps playing after it.
What's in it
The demo is the prologue, The First Wood, and the first region, the Storybook Kingdom. Every problem in it is a writing problem. A squirrel can't tell her winter jars apart in the dark until you help her label them; a notice on the castle board has a mistake nobody can spot. A writing coach reads everything you write and answers with a hint rather than the answer, so the fix is always yours. At the end of the region you face the first rival storyteller, Baron Ashveil, in a Story Challenge: three word cards, a blank page and a story of your own.
What the public code leaves out
In the full game, a story you write in a Story Challenge becomes a picture book, with an AI-drawn cover and pages. Every one of those pictures is a paid image generation, and a code anyone can read would let that bill run away. So the public code doesn't include them. Your stories still become books on your shelf, with simple sketch pictures, and every word in them is yours. The writing coach is all there.
Grown-ups first
The Inklands is being built for children, but this demo is for adults (18 and over) to try themselves. A children's game needs a few more safeguards before anyone else's child plays it, including a stricter data arrangement with the AI provider, which I'm applying for. Until those are in place, please play it yourself and don't hand your account to a child. Your writing is sent to OpenAI to be coached, and the terms on the site say exactly what is kept and for how long.
Tell me what you think
There's a feedback button inside the game, and I read every report. If you'd like to hear when more of the game opens, leave your email at theinkland.com; you don't need a code or an account for that.
The full game has eight regions and an ending, and I'm polishing them now. If you'd like to know how it was made, I wrote that up in Six Lessons from Building a Game with AI.
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