Inside Questly: Publish Your Own AudioGame

Questly is the tool we use to make AudioGames, and it is open to writers, game designers and small studios who want to publish their own. We built it for our team first. Then we asked ourselves why keep it to ourselves.

What Questly does

• One editor for everything. Text, choices, conditions, stats, items and audio cues are written in the same place.
• Import. If you already have a story in an interactive fiction format, you can bring it in and keep working.
• Validator. Before submitting, Questly checks for broken links, missing conditions and unreachable scenes.
• Libraries. Creators get access to our original background artwork and soundtrack libraries.
• Community and support. A creator community on Discord and one-to-one creative review sessions with our narrative team.

From draft to the app

1. Create a Questly account and write your story.
2. Produce it: add backgrounds and music from the libraries, and record the voices yourself or with voice actors.
3. Submit it. Our team reviews it, usually within 30 days.
4. Pick a publication slot and your AudioGame goes live in the PlayNook app.

Creators keep ownership of their story, characters and world, set the price of their chapters and earn a share of net revenue that grows with sales. All details are on the For Creators page.

The pilot with Scuola Holden

Before opening Questly to everyone, we tested it with the students of Scuola Holden, the writing school in Turin. More than 50 students took part and wrote 10 AudioGames. It taught us a lot: which parts of the editor were intuitive, where writers got stuck, and how quickly people who had never written interactive fiction started thinking in branches.

Who Questly is for

• Writers, published or not, who want to try a new format.
• Game and narrative designers who already think in choices and consequences.
• Indie studios and small publishers who want to bring their stories to a new audience.
• Schools and workshops looking for a creative writing project with a real outcome.

Ready to start? Read our lessons on writing branching stories for audio, then join the creator program.