This year creative arts students had the honour of working on an officially licenced Dracula game based on the original Bram Stoker novel, which celebrates its 125th anniversary this year.
7TV: Dracula has been created thanks to a unique partnership between the University and Crooked Dice Game Design Studio, where students have been working within the design team, learning how tabletop games are written, designed and produced.
Creative Writing Lecturer Dr Peter Wright said: “Our students have created a fantastic, faithful retelling of Dracula in a tabletop skirmish game. Dracula is probably the most well-known gothic horror novel in the world and working on it has given our students practical and valuable game writing, design and development experience to enhance their employability when they graduate.”
Owner of Crooked Dice, Karl Perrotton said: “During the development process for 7TV Dracula I have seen the students demonstrate writing, design and project management skills that I know they will be able to take into any career they choose. The result is a terrifyingly fun game that allows players to recreate scenes from Dracula and create new stories of their own.”
The team working on 7TV: Dracula have completed its development and it is now listed on Kickstarter for the public to fund its creation. To discover more, and to donate, visit the 7TV Dracula Kickstarter page.
MA Nineteenth-Century Studies student Laura Glancy said: “As a long-time lover of Gothic fiction, I jumped at the chance to work on 7TV: Dracula. Undertaking historical and literary research honed my skills, and writing profile cards gave me the chance to move away from academic work and get creative.
“I was also given the opportunity to write the game’s metanarrative, which I built around British and European vampire media from the 1970s. I utilised my passion for the history of horror cinema in a professional setting, which I never thought I would have the opportunity to do. It was definitely my favourite part of the process.”
MA Nineteenth-Century Studies student Claire Bolton said: “I jumped at the chance to adapt the plot of Dracula for a skirmish game. It was an absolute joy to be a part of the design team, and the process of analysing the novel as a team to properly adapt the book was particularly great.”
The game is a faithful retelling of the iconic horror novel with players taking on the roles of the major characters such as vampire hunter Van Helsing, the hapless Jonathan Harker and his vampiric fiancé Mina Murray.
It all forms part of the growing StokerVerse franchise run by horror writer Dacre Stoker, the descendant of Bram Stoker, and Dr Chris McAuley of Stoker-McAuley Productions.
MA creative writing student Isabel Lovell said: “Having worked with Crooked Dice before, I knew I wanted to work on 7TV: Dracula. The fact it was in partnership with the StokerVerse team was an added bonus. It’s been an intriguing process, trying to adapt a novel into a game. Having only the original novel as our base source, there was often the battle of staying as faithful to the novel as possible, and making sure that we were creating a fun and playable game. In the end I think we’ve created a successful balance between both.”
To discover more about courses at Edge Hill, please visit ehu.ac.uk/study.
October 31, 2022
