A Decade of Creativity

As Digital Writes enters its tenth year, we look back on our most significant projects to celebrate our achievements, and especially the remarkable accomplishments of the people we’ve had the privilege to work with.
Binary: Decoded

In a model of mutually supportive collaboration, young people with diverse special educational needs, physical disabilities, and autism spectrum conditions, from various schools and home education settings, collaborated to create a Japanese-inspired interactive visual novel, which was then published on the Apple and Android app stores.

Sharing ideas. Generously collaborating.

Designing a rich story with complex, interesting characters.

Working with a professional artist to create and animate the illustrations.

Working with professionals to write, perform, record and edit the dialogue and sound effects.

Working with a professional musician to write and record the music.

Working with our tutors to publish the game on Google Play and the Apple App Store.

Working with our marketing team to put on a public launch event.


Paper Dreams

In an artistically ambitious project, children from various primary schools and home education settings collaborated to create a Surrealism-inspired video game with a cutout-paper aesthetic, which was then published on itch.io.

Studying Surrealism with a professional artist.

Sketching with a professional artist at the Tate Modern.

Working with a professional artist to create Surrealist art work.

Working with our tutors to turn their art work into a video game.

Participants testing each other’s game levels.

Working with our tutors, participants published their game on itch.io

Carniville

Young people from special and mainstream secondary schools in Swindon and Bath collaborated to create a creepy, supernatural video game with an intricate storyline.

Young people worked together to generate ideas and design the content of their game.

Young people researched images and created a mood board.

Researching and emulating art styles and drawing body elements to create a puppet.

Using Photoshop to fill the body parts with colours and textures.


Working with a professional musician to make soundtracks.

Working independently using GarageBand.
Folklore

Theatre practitioners, who had been unable to practise their craft due to the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, came together to write and perform an audio drama, and broadcast it on Swindon Radio 105.5 and distribute it as a podcast.

Project participants came together to form an informal theatre company to make an audio drama based on Wiltshire myths, legends, mysteries and folklore.

They wrote the scripts, performed and recorded all the parts, all the sound effects and edited every episode.

They wrote, performed and recorded all the music.


Folklore was broadcast on Swindon 105.5 and is available as a podcast on the usual outlets.
A Moral Paradox

Young people are writing and illustrating their own interactive fantasy-adventure gamebook, which they will self-publish as a print book.

They have created a lovely story about an apprentice mage trying to find the home of a lost and lonely baby Dragon.

They have crafted a story with rich, complex characters, embracing diversity in both gender and relationships.
The Lost Manuscript of Callie Evernight
Young people from various schools and youth groups are working together to create a unique accessible reading experience for reluctant readers. This will come in the form a gamebook simulator – a video game that mimics a book, but has voice-over narration, animated illustrations, and even spooky 3D game sections to act as rewards for progress.

Each participant is writing their own chapter, starting with brainstorming ideas.

Other young people are drawing the illustrations.

To get the illustrations into the game, participants are digitising them and editing them in Photoshop.

They are animating some illustrations to bring the book to life.

Some groups had fun making their own spooky background atmosphere by using their voices and recording a performance as live.

Our team of young game developers are doing the coding.
