Purple Guerrilla Take Mantic Games Digital
January 21, 2014 by brennon
It looks as if Mantic Games are entering the digital realm with their rulebooks thanks to a company called Purple Guerrilla. First up to take a look at are their eBooks for a variety of different publications by Mantic...
From the fluff...
- Easy to navigate. You can jump between sections, or even books, by accessing the menu and choosing the relevant sub-heading.
- Definition popups. Want to know what the Misdirect ability does? Press on it to get pop-up rule details without losing your place.
- Media galleries. See beautifully painted miniatures in high definition!
- It’s alive! Your Mantic Digital purchase will automatically update with the latest FAQs and Errata.
- Buy once, read anywhere. Once you’ve made your purchase, you can read your rulebook on Android, iOS, Kindle* and more.
- Mobile ready. Unlike a lot of online rulebooks, Mantic Digital products will adapt to any screen size – even a smartphone.
- Beautifully (re)designed pages. Digital content doesn’t have to be ugly, and we’ve used Mantic’s art resources to give the books some real character.
- Stream or download. Save space on your device by streaming, or access your rulebook anywhere with a download – it’s up to you.
Now that all sounds very cool indeed and it seems a natural step for them to leap into the digital realm with their books. They also appear to be available on a variety of devices too which can sometimes be a stickler for people.
They also have plans for this neat piece of kit above, the DreadBall Playbook...
- Team builder. Choose from famous teams like the Trontek 29ers and Greenmoon Smackers, or build your own.
- In-Game Reference. The playbook shows legal actions and abilities for ever member of your team.
- Game Tracker. As the game progresses, the playbook keeps track of actions, strikes and kills and updates your roster accordingly.
- Easy Access. With a few taps you can easily look up definitions for abilities directly from the the PlayBook.
- More to come! League management software, stats tracking and plenty more will roll out over the next few months…
Very awesome. With the DreadBall Playbook looking extra cool hopefully there will be one for Deadzone too! The first digital release will be coming on 27th of January and will feature all existing DreadBall rulebooks and the Azure Forest one.
Nice one chaps!
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I think Mantic’s new motto should be “if GW did this they wouldn’t have lost 25% of their share value”…
This, from the description, is near as dammit the perfect way to do digital rules IMO, no huge delay for one operating system, flexibility of the drive space taken up etc rather than the frankly half-assed way GW runs with iOS as a primary platform and everyone else the redheaded stepchild.
Yep that’ was my first though when i’d read that, is senseless to make a product platform dependent or even one version for each platform rather than making a responsive webapp when you don’t need to run native in order to work fast.
GW does what it does with digital books because they aren’t developing the publishing tools. They’re using the tools provided by Apple, which is why ios is the primary platform. Mantic is lucky that they were approached by a third party who already had publishing tools they wanted to use for this purpose, and apparently were willing to do so at a fair price. Without that, Mantic would probably have to result to existing tools as well or hack up a done-on-a-budget collection of compromises like PP did with War Room. People don’t appreciate how hard digital publishing on multiple… Read more »
Actually very true! Purple Guerrilla deserve the credit – if they hadn’t thrown themselves at us and demanded that we let them do this, it wouldn’t be happening. They’re an awesome bunch of people with some incredible ideas, and I can’t wait to see what everyone thinks of the finished product!
By the way, they’re doing a Google+ Hangout tomorrow at 6pm (GMT) so people can get any questions answered. I’ll be there, too! Hooray. Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/1f3Nx6m
Certainly looks nice and I’m always in favour of digital content saving space on my bookshelves and in my gaming bag. Will have to grab this!
I had a play with this at the last Mantic open day and was mighty impressed. I don’t own a fondleslab but this is exactly the sort of thing that’d make me think of getting one.
Looking forward to these. Love having a full bookshelf but for travelling to work or going on trips an ipad/kindle full of digital versions is pretty handy too.
Given I have a basic kindle, and no interest a tablet – digital releases do nothing for me. Looks pretty but lets hope they don’t start treading that digital exclusivity route.
This is a good point, if at any point they start to do any exclusive digital products they are moving away from what makes them better than the competition and that’s being the cheaper alternative, because not everyone owns a tablet, its all well saying it will run on Smartphone’s, but things like this will only ever look best on big screened tablets.
We really, really won’t 🙂
that’s good.
I was reading an article the other day which talked about the digital revolution of books etc. It stated whilst there was sense in items such as newspapers and other very short term items moving digital that magazines (monthly subs) and books needed to remain physical as well. A publisher was stating the distribution of the physical magazine and book had not diminished since release of the digital versions even though a large drop had been seen on the newspaper front.
Might screen shot that, because in the future when Mantic are a big evil company, ill post that up and go “HAHA!!” 😛
I hope there’ll be a Deadzone version in the future…. Otherwise I might have to start playing Dreadball just so I can us this!
Wow this is fantastic news! Love the ideas for them and especially the playbook – not only does it sound really cool and useful but it fits the feel and fluff of the game so well to me!