Milton’s Tale Beautifully Mixes Puzzles and Paper Craft
5 October 2015

Jeremy(TM) and Friends are excited to announce the release and immediate availability of Milton’s Tale 1.0, a finely polished puzzle game aiming to give people of all ages and gaming experience that “clever” feeling throughout. Available for free on iOS and Android, the game is presented entirely in a world of colored paper, and implements a unique new organic referral marketing strategy.

Milton’s Tale is at its core a physics puzzler. It implements the well known 3-star reward system to make the game immediately accessible to a wide market and place itself as a downtime game. What makes Milton’s Tale unique from a game-design perspective is the high quality of puzzles, challenging the player to think visually to beat each level, along of course with the rich paper craft style.

“We wanted the game to look different from other games” reveals Jeremy Bell, the game’s lead designer. “We were browsing the local art supply store looking for inspiration when we picked up a book on Papercraft and knew we had found our design direction. We have also been heavily influenced by paper-craft artists, Eiko Ojala and Alexis Facca.”

Set in a fictitious magical library, the game stars Milton, a happy-go-lucky bookworm whose fiance-to-be is kidnapped by evil fireflies and held in a pop-up book castle high on the back shelf. Milton devises a plan – the crux of which is a catapult made of stationary items – and needs the player’s help to acquire his supply of rubber-band balls. In each level, the player must guide one of these balls from its delivery crate to Milton by strategically placing blobs of paint around the paper-constructed scene. The game keeps the user engaged by providing new physics challenges, paint types, and other creative uses of stationary just at the right time before any one item might overstay its welcome.

One of the unique features of Milton’s Tale from a business perspective is its referral marketing strategy. The game provides the first chapter of 25 levels for free, and each of the other 3 chapters requires the player to either pay, or they can share the game with one other person by way of a simple referral code system.

“Other games which have implemented referral systems usually involve a link which tells their servers of the new user, and tracks the referral via the user’s IP address.” explains Jeremy. “However, there is a problem with this method allowing potential disconnect if the new user downloads the app on a different connection. Because we’re offering something so valuable to the user by referring a friend, we cannot afford for a referral to fall through. In our method, the user is given a simple 6-digit code to give to their friend who can enter this from the app’s landing screen, complete with simple instructions from start to finish.”

The music for Milton’s Tale was composed by Pittsburgh, USA artist, P.SUS, and can be enjoyed on the Milton’s Tale website.

Milton’s Tale 1.0 is Free and available worldwide through the App Store in the Games category. The first chapter of 25 levels is free, while each of the remaining chapters require the user to either pay $0.99 USD/$1.29 NZD, or they can share the game with one friend instead. There is also an Android version available on Google Play.

Jeremy(TM) and Friends is a home business in Hamilton, New Zealand comprised of Jeremy Bell and a few of his friends who have provided invaluable contributions to the game including Jacob Luckie, Karl Scoble, Maxine Scoble, and Matt Scoble. Jeremy also runs Blackout Rugby, an online rugby management game.