Original Inspiration

Between 2013 and 2016 I worked for Plarium on a free-to-play mobile game, and among my duties as a narrative designer was designing daily and weekly challenges, and seasonal content. This design pattern was, and to a large extent still is, regarded as an afterthought: something that is required for player-retention in games with recurrent-user-spending, outside of the game's core experience and thus somehow "dirty" - a business-mandated layer of fat on top of the "real" game experience. But through working on it, a curiosity grew in me: how would daily levels and seasonal content look if they stemmed from a more honestly creative intent? What if a game was about this design pattern?

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A Year in the Maze

To try and answer these questions, I formed a small team in 2016 and began working on the "super-long-form" text-adventure A Year in the Maze. This is when the core concepts were formed: the game has 365 levels, one for each calendar day of the year; the game is cyclical, starting on whatever day the player downloads the game, and never formally ending; you can only play today's level, and if you missed a day, you can always return to it next year on the same date; players go deeper into the story like a spiral, by visiting levels year after year and with knowledge from other levels, to reveal more of their secrets. As the game was shaping up to be narrative-focused, I began looking to narrative traditions such as the religious lectionary as precursors to this kind of cyclical storytelling.  We presented a playable prototype of the game at Casual Connect, and a printed poster version at the Lippa Stopp project by Lady Liberty Press, cementing the project as having one foot in casual gaming, and the other in avant-garde art.  In 2017 some team members' life circumstances changed, and the collaboration had to be halted.

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Archipelago as a Thesis Project

In 2019, with the blessing of the original team members, I returned to work on the project as a solo developer, making it my thesis project at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts Game Design masters programme. The text-adventure format was scrapped in favor of 3D levels, and the maze metaphor was replaced by a series of islands, under the working title Archipelago. An overarching theme of "modern myths" is guiding the aesthetic and narrative design of the different islands, and the player character's journey is loosely inspired by my own experience of immigration. Currently the game offers a week out of the year: 7 islands, which can be revisited again and again for many weeks of bite-sized gameplay; it has 8 questlines, 13 characters, and ~2 hours of story content in total. The thesis was submitted in June 2020.

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Ongoing Development (Summer 2020 Update)

I am continuing to polish the thesis version of the game as I send it to several student showcases.

At the end of this summer I will begin planning the next phase: either a month-long-cycle, 30-island version of the game, or the full 365 islands. This will be a slow process, and depend on the kind of funding and support I can secure for the game.