This month we’re bidding a fond farewell to two of our co-owners: Hannah Nicklin and Douglas Wilson. The co-owners remain firm friends and grateful collaborators, the parting of ways is due to a natural parting of the ways as lives shift, and the pressures of the current state of the industry demand smaller teams working at different scales.

Farewell Friends

Douglas Wilson is part of the original trio following Nils’ founding of Die Gute Fabrik in the early 2010s. Now a full time Senior Lecturer at RMIT University in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, Douglas met Nils and Christoffer while studying at ITU Copenhagen. A key driver of the local multiplayer phase of the company’s output; from JS Joust to Sportsfriends; Douglas then was a key designer on Mutazione, including co-designing the procedural musical gardening systems with Alessandro Coronas. Douglas then co-led the development of Saltsea Chronicles’ brand new trick-taking game Spoils. Doug has always been an invaluable member of the DGF board and co-ownership team, helping steer, influence, design and build some of our most well-known and well-loved projects. Doug’s responsibilities, however, now rest more firmly in Australia, and he’s taken this opportunity to wrap up his relationship with Die Gute Fabrik alongside releasing Sportfriends as a free DRM-free download with our co-collaborators on that game.

Doug says:

Die Gute Fabrik has been a central focus of my professional life since at least 2011, so it is very bittersweet to be stepping away from the studio. I feel so honored to have worked together with so many talented and lovely collaborators over the years - not least of which include Nils, Christoffer, and Hannah. I am excited to see what Nils and the team make in the future, but in the meantime I am shifting my creative practice to my installation work - for example, my hanging controllers game Edgar Rice Journey, which I exhibited at A MAZE Festival 2024 - and also some interactive theater projects, together with my partner, comedian Melissa McGlensey.

Hannah Nicklin joined Die Gute Fabrik as a writer and narrative designer in 2017 to support the development of Mutazione, she quickly became a core member of the team, and also took over bizdev and production work to secure an Apple Arcade deal and sim ship the game across several platforms and in 17 languages. The Co-owners then invited her to join the leadership team as CEO and Creative Director after which she secured a full financing deal in 2020, before building a team to produce what’s now Saltsea Chronicles. Hannah worked hard to join the original Die Gute Fabrik principles of interdisciplinarity and excellence with her passion for equitable and accessible workplaces. She dedicated her leadership to further diversifying our teams and collaborators as well as investing in the development of diverse and marginalised talent through teaching, internships, and advocacy; supporting the Game Devs of Color conference, running entry level story internships, and producing a team which was majority gender marginalised, LGBTQ+ and people of colour. Hannah has chosen to hand Die Gute Fabrik’s creative leadership back to Nils Deneken and is now working as a Narrative Designer and Writer with Night School a Netflix Studio on an unannounced game.

Hannah says:

I’m grateful for the opportunity and trust that the co-owners offered me on inviting me to steward the reputation they had built as an innovative and interdisciplinary studio. I am so proud of the team we built who together made a game which pushed the boundaries of what it means to tell ensemble-cast stories. Saltsea Chronicles received glowing reviews, but in particular the processes we put in place; equal pay, entry-level internships, a four-day work week, and our carbon impact report; are things I will forever be proud to have led. I learned so much from leading Die Gute Fabrik, and I will remain firm friends and fond collaborators of Nils, Doug and Christoffer.

New Directions

Finally, some good news for fans of Die Gute Fabrik’s work. Nils Deneken, the original founder of DGF will stay with the company and make a return as CEO and Creative Director. Die Gute Fabrik will adjust to the current funding landscape for indie games, by keeping the team size smaller and searching funding opportunities for a new unannounced project with public Danish and European grants, art grants, as well as interested publishers.

Nils says:

I’m thankful to be able to look back over the past 15 years to see all the different directions we’ve taken with Die Gute Fabrik. The diversity of games we have in our back catalogue is owed to the partners I’ve worked with and from whom I learned so much.

Douglas was pivotal in shaping the understanding of local multiplayer and physical games at the time when we started working together in the early 2010, first on game jam projects, then on the crazy local multiplayer party game B.U.T.T.O.N. (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally Ok Now).I witnessed the birth of J.S. Joust and how it rippled through the gaming landscape, and I’m proud of having brought him on board at Die Gute Fabrik, both to get Sportsfriends to an audience and to collaborate with him on the design of Mutazione. I miss the intense discussions we had about design and music, often involving Alessandro (Mutazione composer and sound designer) and I hope that we’ll be able to work on something at some point when our life situations align again.

When Hannah joined us on the Mutazione team, she immediately began making herself indispensable. The quality of her work, both her writing, her design- and production sensibilities were central to get Mutazione out to the market, and putting the leadership of the company into her capable hands felt like a natural fit. It was amazing to see the company take on a different shape and life on its own, as she implemented her vision of what a workplace could be. Looking at my first illustrations of Die Gute Fabrik, that is something that was always meant to be at the heart of it: A place where collaborators would be able to come in, squat the old company buildings and repurpose them for their ideas.It felt privileged to be an employee at my own company for the duration of Saltsea Chronicles, and I was impressed by its smooth and well-organised development- and production cycle.

Both Hannah and Doug have left an important mark on Die Gute Fabrik.

While the situation in the games industry and DGF might look grim at the moment, I’m optimistic of what the future will bring for the company. Maybe that has something to do with a new project I’m working on, which I’m genuinely excited about. Or maybe it’s having the company buildings for myself again for a bit, which feels both new and familiar. Maybe other lovely people will move in and squat the halls again at some point, but right now it feels ok to just take some time to figure out what to do with this space. I have the feeling it will be good.

Stay tuned to our socials, where any future news will be announced.

The following is an announcement from Douglas Wilson, co-owner of Die Gute Fabrik, designer of Johann Sebastian Joust, and Producer of Sportsfriends, the local multiplayer compendium we published in 2014.

Hello Sportsfriends,

This May marks the 10 year anniversary of the initial Sportsfriends release on PS3 and PS4. All of our lives have changed quite a bit over the last decade. Because we're not in a position to support or update Sportsfriends moving forward, we've decided to make a few organizational changes:

1. Starting May 29, Sportsfriends will become a free download, on Steam, PlayStation Network, and on all other platforms on which the game available. We plan to keep it free for the foreseeable future. We want to make sure that Sportsfriends remains available to play in the future for as many people as possible.

2. To ensure long-term stewardship of the project, we're transferring ownership of Sportsfriends from Die Gute Fabrik LLC to Bennett Foddy (the designer of Super Pole Riders).

3. Supporting JS Joust is especially tricky given operating system limitations. Together with Sportsfriends programmer Jonathan Whiting, we will be open sourcing a version of JS Joust for Linux. We've been meaning to do this for years, and so this is a good excuse to finally get it done. Stay tuned for link and details - soon.

Big thank you to everyone who supported the project along the way - our Kickstarter backers, Die Gute Fabrik, Sony, popagenda for all their recent logistical support, friends and family, and all of you who purchased or played the game over these last 10 years. Here's hoping the game will remain playable for many more years.

Long live local multiplayer,

- Doug, Die Gute Fabrik, and The Sportsfriends -

We’re delighted to have received TWO nominations for Saltsea Chronicles in Spilprisen, the Danish game awards: Best Narrative & Best Visuals!

Spilprisen (spil = game/play, prisen = prizes/the prize) are annual awards celebrating games from Denmark, and you can find all of the wonderful nominees here. Spilprisen explains that their awards are "a tribute to the best Danish-developed games. Spilprisen is the gaming industry's own price. It is organized by The Danish Producers' Association, which is an industry organization for producers of film, television and games."

Hannah Nicklin, Creative Director welcomed the news:

"It's not been the easiest year for Die Gute Fabrik, as we recently made the decision to halt production and support our team in finding new roles. We hope Die Gute Fabrik will be back soon, but in the meantime it's an honour to be nominated for Best Visuals and Best Narrative in Spilprisen's 2024 awards. Denmark's game dev community, public funding and industry support has been instrumental in DGF's journey to this point, and it will be a joy to celebrate the team's wonderful work among friends at Spilprisen this spring."

Saltsea Chronicles is a story-driven adventure game where you navigate a mystery as a whole ship's crew. If you haven’t checked out the game yet head to saltseachronicles.com to find it on PC, Switch & PS5.

We’re sad to share with you all the news that Die Gute Fabrik is halting production.

The publishing and investment scene is so tough for companies and projects of our scale right now it's made it extremely difficult for Die Gute Fabrik to secure funding for our next project without a gap in income.

We halted production on the 19th Feb, and used our remaining runway to give the current team a month of paid time to catch their breaths. We will still try and seek funding to resume production, but wanted to announce this publicly in order that the team can share that they’re looking for new roles. We have also provided mentoring and career support in this period. Our leadership team (Nils & Hannah) will also be looking for new positions.

Die Gute Fabrik ApS will continue to operate to service our past IPs. Production may resume again under Nils Deneken as CEO should the company find funding in future years, and if so we hope to welcome back our excellent collaborators where possible.

We’ve been making games since 2008, and are so proud of the work we’ve put out and the people we’ve made it with. Thank you for playing our games.

Die Gute Fabrik.

Please check out this sheet of the current team members we are working with who are now looking for new opportunities. We've been honoured to collaborate with them, both on Saltsea Chronicles, and on our unannounced prototype. Jump at the chance to hire them!

This is a copy of an article first published in GameDeveloper.com in October 2023. We're sharing it here so it will remain in our archive.

Hannah Nicklin, Creative Director on Saltsea Chronicles does a deep dive on the process and design of the game. Saltsea Chronicles is a story with many middles and many key characters - how does Die Gute Fabrik’s new story-driven adventure game structure the storytelling so that all 10 characters can shine?

A Story-Driven Seed

I have a strong memory of the last year or so of working on our last game Mutazione.

It was back when I was transitioning from Narrative Director, to the Studio Lead and Creative Director on our next project. I remember sitting with Doug Wilson, one of the company co-founders, and agreeing that while we loved that Mutazione was a story about a community (and one we're extremely proud of) there was just one element that we wished we had more time to dig into.

We felt like there was an argument that the form it takes - the traditional adventure game form of ‘single character explores’ - clashed slightly with the content. Mutazione is a story about a community, where all of the characters are as important as one another. Doug and I wondered: what would a Mutazione look like if you could play each day of the game as a different member of the ensemble?

At the point we had this shared thought we were at a stage of development which would have never allowed such a pivot. Instead it remained a little seed in our minds: what would it be like to build a game from the ground up which allowed the player to not be asked to roleplay/guide one character, and instead to explore a story as a whole cast?

It would demand a whole new production approach, whole new exploration and navigation systems, and much more writing. But it would also allow us to further explore in form as well as content the themes of community and how we live together that we had begun to explore in Mutazione.

As we began planning for a new game, Nils, Doug and I decided to plant that seed - to begin to think through themes and storytelling within games through the eyes of a group (not a 'party', like in RPGs, but a playable ensemble cast in a story-driven game setting*), and how we could use that to thematically and politically underline the things we wanted to say about storytelling and the stories we tell ourselves about the world.

I have often talked about the politics and themes of Mutazione being best served by a 'multiple middles' narrative design. Saltsea Chronicles extends that principle to 'multiple heroes' or rather, no hero at all.

So, how did we do that?

* There's more to dig into here with regards to why RPGs aren't the same as what we're aiming for in terms of our ensemble-cast driven game, but that's another article's worth of thinking. I've already written a lot here. Let's not meander further.

Story Pillars

Saltsea Chronicles is a flooded-world story-driven adventure game where you play as a ship's whole crew. At the beginning of the game you discover that Maja - your captain - has gone missing, and together your ragtag crew set out to explore the islands of the archipelago in search of clues.

In each chapter of the game you will decide where to head next, who to explore with when you get there, and what you say to the people you meet. You can ‘play as’ every member of the crew at some point in the game, and the way choices are phrased and the manner in which you’re invited to engage with the game asks you to consider how you play for and with them as a whole community, as well as individuals.

Right from the outset, when I was drafting key pillars for the game and the game's process one of the key pillars was:

This is sociological not psychological storytelling

The pillar read thus:

Sociological vs psychological storytelling

• This is an ensemble cast driven game.
• Which is interested in distancing the player from 'role playing' in a traditional sense.
• Allowing the player to feel empowered to customise their crew's journey through the world, while still being surprised at the outcomes.
• Allowing room for characterisation to be authored, full and surprising - the agency is through exploration, the characterisation is authored.

Our storytelling, characterisation, narrator and ensemble cast revolve around two main influences here:

Key influence 1: The Quiet Year, by Buried Without Ceremony.

“We all have two roles to play in this game. The first is to speak for the members of this community, and to care about their individual and collective fates. The second is to dispassionately introduce dilemmas, to provoke difficult situations and see what comes of them. The Quiet Year asks us to move in between these two roles. [...] We shouldn’t feel that any single viewpoint belongs to any one of us, and are invited to speak for different community members throughout the course of the game. By explicitly calling out the actors and perspectives of the community, The Quiet Year allows us to explore how individuals shape communities, as well as how individuals are shaped by communities in turn. ”

The TTRPG The Quiet Year invites the player to consider the politics of community extremely effectively through this simple invitation. We will aim to issue a similar invitation in our game & narrative design.

Key influence 2: The sociological/psychological terminology drawn from this article by Zeynep Tufekci on Game of Thrones "The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones"

"In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life."

We therefore aim to shape a game where the player is:

• Not invited to inhabit, alter and reveal the inner landscape of a single character and a world solely shaped by that character's morals, journey and experiences.
• Is invited to shape the conditions through which the community of the crew navigate. In nudging their journey down different paths, the player will discover how the individuals in the community change how they relate to one another, and to the world around them. Characters are shaped by the different iterations of their society, and they shape it in turn with their actions.

There were other pillars besides (6 in total). But let's continue to consider this one, and how the game's design sets out to achieve it.  

Humane Design, Choice, and Careful Tuning

One of the things we wanted to preserve in the story was the complicated messy humanness of being a part of a community. Very early on in 2020 we had a prototype of a ‘mood’ system. Individual crew moods which contributed to the overall mood of the crew. And resulting conversations written alternately for the different moods.

But this quickly became obviously the wrong approach for our game. The temptation when we played was always to track and min/max the systems - this meant that as a player you stopped thinking about the characters as people. Messy creatures with a weight that couldn't be represented by integers or sliding rules.

What replaced this quite quickly in development was the Issues system. This was another piece of design influenced by The Quiet Year - in particular the 'Contempt' token mechanic. This is how the rulebook of TQY defines the use of Contempt tokens:

If ever you feel like you weren’t consulted or honoured in a decision-making process, you can take a piece of Contempt and place it in front of you. This is your outlet for expressing disagreement or tension. If someone starts a project that you don’t agree with, you don’t get to voice your objections or speak out of turn. You are instead invited to take a piece of Contempt.

Contempt will generally remain in front of players until the end of the game. It will act as a reminder of past contentions. Its primary role is as a social signifier. In addition, you can discard it back into the centre of the table in two ways: by acting selfishly and by diffusing tensions.

The effectiveness of this mechanic is that it is a nuanced, humane, and flexible act within a very structured game. Other players are not even supposed to speak while the current player acts. But they can communicate the friction of decisions on behalf of the community they're playing with in this way.

Just like in a game of The Quiet Year, in Saltsea Chronicles moments in the play of the game will cause tension and friction between characters. Sometimes positive and negative all at once! A choice to go to island A and not island B will please one person and disappoint another. The Issues are tracked and highlighted by the game. They can be solved (sometimes by single actions, sometimes by a cumulation of moments), but some might never be (and end up ‘scuppered’).

Your game is not systemically better or worse because of Issues, just as in a game of The Quiet Year a stack of contempt tokens can't cause you to 'fail' - but they do describe a path your community has charted. In a similar way our Issues reflect the imprint on the world and the characters’ relationships that your choices leave in their wake. They also represent a trust in our players to tell stories themselves, as well as have the story systems underline them. Issues are little descriptive seeds which the player can grow in how they reflect on their version of this story. Not ways to win or lose.

The design of choice within conversations was also something we long iterated on. You should see the extensive style guide I produced when I had a final design for it! But to summarise a key point for this deep dive on the pillar of 'ensemble cast storytelling': we phrase the choices in a way which is rarely character-explicit. We rarely offer choices which are 'X says this' and 'Y says this'. When you're on an expedition it will be more about the vibe of the response and part of the pleasure should be finding out who speaks when you guide that vibe.

This contributes to a sense of humane storytelling and not playing as ‘one’ character. You can choose between ‘Quietly’ or ‘Charge in’, and part of what we hope is the pleasure of play will be seeing how your choices play out - will ‘Charge in’ be the brash Iris, or a surprising character moment for the shy Kittick? It's also important that you're never choosing for people outside of the crew. The player is not all-powerful, they are guiding one group through a world.

But in all this we also needed to maintain a strong sense of character for each possible crew member, and give each of them a rewarding level of character development! Let's dive further into some of the strategies that helped us do that.

The Expedition Format

One of the big challenges was to balance authorship and agency within the thematic aims of the game. We needed to produce a storied experience which was built of multiple pathways, collective/community storytelling, a clear progression of the central plot, and the mutual development of each individual member of the crew.

This was a tough balancing act! We needed enough authorial control to make sure the player's experience is coherent, and well paced, but also wanted to offer choices which feel genuinely rewarding. One of the key pieces of design which supports this is the expedition format: it’s as though you’re in an episode of Star Trek TNG and Picard says ‘Number One: you lead the mission, form an away team’. We're the writers of the episode who have given you a crew of characters to choose from, and you're a devilishly handsome first officer who will decide who will explore the location.

To keep the storytelling coherent and to balance the character development throughout we have shaped the story of each community around a lead expedition character (usually because of their skills or history with a place), this means that we know every character gets a fairly balanced crack at the whip of being part of the story and to be developed by it - though your choice of locations to explore will also play into this. And it allows us to use genre-based storytelling to keep the world of the game approachable and comprehensible. So: if you choose X location, we know Y will lead, and it'll be in Z genre. As writers we therefore know the headline possibility space for each character's development. These knowns help us give you a strong storied experience.

Then, the secondary expedition character is your choice. There can be up to 4 possible secondary expedition characters (depending on who you onboard, and where you go). In the screen where you choose the secondary character you can compare the aptitude and motivations of them in the character select screen. None of the choices are wrong, but they are important, because they shape the story in the player's mind, and the crew themselves (in humane not min/max ways).

So, for example, in the first chapter Murl leads the expedition. We chose him as a writers room because he’s a loveable stuffy historian and the character & voice is very recognisable. It gives the story a strong first hook for a player new to the world. Then you can choose between: a local moody non-binary teen and radio specialist Iris; or a practiced diplomat and adventurer Stew (she/her), who is much richer in years and experience, but not a local. Neither will hinder the player's progress, but it will shape your experience and how people talk to you.

There's also the Boat as a place for careful character development. Island locations demand you select certain characters to develop, but we account for those choices by allowing you to re-balance your story on the boat where the whole crew is gathered. So don’t forget to explore how people are doing when you return to them!

The challenge of tuning a journey for all the characters which also rewards choices was a tough one - the boat aims to hold that together. It’s okay that you’ve preferred to focus on a couple of characters over others - that’s your playthrough - but the others’ journeys will hopefully still be strong ‘B’ character developments to the ‘A’ character decisions you made via the Boat scenes. This allows us to shape a story of 'multiple middles' which is both authored and built around the player being able to guide a crew (not just a single character).

For more on 'multiple middles' check out this blog post where I develop thoughts on it as a narrative design principle in the storytelling of Mutazione .

Finally, I've talked about how The Quiet Year impacted the design of the storytelling in the game. Then there’s the TNG/DS9 era of Star Trek and the masterful mix of monster-of-the-week and ensemble cast storytelling which has influenced how we thought about how we structured the story episodically through genre. Let me introduce a final aspect: our philosophy around NPC agency. One thing I did early on was to invite the story team to consider Avatar the Last Airbender in terms of how we approached the communities you visit as you travel. One of the biggest strengths of AtLA is that they are tending to others’ troubles as often as Ang and his pals try and further their own story. Then there's this brilliant Meghna Jayanth piece from a while back on NPC agency.

This idea of NPCs sometimes having problems you can't solve (or refusing to serve you) along with the AtLA principle of 'give as well as take' formed part of my ask for the writing team: that communities will have their own life, that time will move on and they will move and change regardless of your smaller actions, and that you will spend time helping people as well as moving the mystery forwards. Simple principles which formed the backbone of the structure of each chapter, defined how time works, and shaped the stories told in each location.

The Narrator

The presence of the narrator was also part in our statement of intent around 'community over individual'. The narrator's voice is part of shaping a distance from the crew and the player which allows you to see them as a whole discreet from any roleplaying tendencies you may have from other games.

We don't want you to care less about the characters, but we do want you to think about them as both community and community actors. We don't want you to immerse yourselves in one of them, we want you to interact with the complexities of them as a group. Immersion is a process of washing away your world and self and replacing it with another. There's nothing wrong with it as a storytelling tactic - but it's not useful in our case. The kind of interaction we're interested in is one which asks you to think about community as well as individual - and it's one that needs you to stay one step back; to think of system as well as systemic acts.

In those terms the presence of a narrator - positioned somewhere between the action of the story and the player - allows us to situate you in a place of interaction rather than immersion. Of course a good story of the kind we're trying to tell will always make the background of your life fade away as you get wrapped up in it (we hope!), but we never want you to pretend you are one of the people, we want you to guide these rich characters as yourself.

The narrator, it turned out, also allows for far more than that besides: both a 'show don't tell' level of visual detail - sudden tiny changes in people's faces, gentle touches of the arm, things we couldn't afford to animate could now be described - and a gentle extra level of humour. The narrator isn't far off Terry Pratchett's famous footnotes. There's a whole piece of documentation on the narrator voice too... it's a bit too extensive to include here but here's a sneak peek from my documentation as I tried to communicate my vision for the 'voice' of the narrator, via other examples/voices.

Replay by Design

In Saltsea Chronicles the theory of multiple middles retains many of the same principles seen in Mutazione. It’s important to us - for example - that the player isn’t cast as ‘god’ in the story and that the agency of the rest of the world is strong. Likewise, in Mutazione instead of multiple endings you’ll uncover multiple middles. Your path through it - who you get to know the most, who you meet, the way you colour your conversations - will be yours.

But in developing this further in Saltsea Chronicles a new aspect we explore is greater variability and possibility space for the storytelling. In that sense the mystery you uncover is the same mystery you’ll share with all players: you'll have 'watercooler moments' you can share with others. But your pathway through the mystery is yours - even down to who travels with you, and who makes it to the end. We hope you'll be excited by what you uncover, and how you uncover it. The former you'll share, the latter will be in your hands.

To support this, we've made that explicit in the design of our save systems and the tools we give you to play in those multiple middles. Instead of exploring the middles solely by exploring space and time as in Mutazione, we’ve dramatically increased the possibility space via the different scales of story acts you can take: of choosing a location and choosing an expedition character (before you get to individual conversations and space and time).

We wanted to surface this for the player visually. And also - because part of the pleasure of play is in exploring the possibility space - to make sure it was very easy to explore alternate pathways through the story. So we produced a save system which describes the headline choices you make (location and expedition character) as branches in a piece of seaweed, and made it so you can ‘branch’ your save journey from any chapter of a previous playthrough. You can see your pathway described, and retrace your path to try another branch.

If you finish a journey but wonder what it might have been like to make a different decision at the end of chapter 2, end up in a different place in chapter 3, then you can do it with a few taps in the save system, all without having to start a brand new save. We want to invite the player to delight in the possibility space we built for them; in exchange for locking you out of being 'god' in the world, we give you play.

Writers' Room

Finally, a thought on process: video games are not only made in design decisions, but in the design of the processes by which they are made too. One of the principles on which I built the studio under my leadership is ‘excellence, intentionality and care’ - and I like to be clear that’s not just in what we make but in how we make it, too.

It was clear to me that a story about a community - a story which I hoped would be rich and diverse - needed to be built by more than one person, one perspective. A core part of the design of this project therefore centred on bringing together a writers room, and over several different phases too - worldbuilding and story development, and two phases of writing. There were also entry-level paid internships built into the process so we could bring in experienced people from different disciplines and fresh voices and perspectives.

Every member of the writers room has left a mark on the story, world and characters - from Njarfie Roust bearing a resemblance to Josie Giles home island of Orkney, to Sharna Jackson’s experience of actually living on board a boat in Rotterdam, to Ida Hartmann’s wonderful and weird imagination giving us names like ‘Gertleshraub’. The room and process was led by the steady and experienced hand of Char Putney (The Divinity series, Nuts) and brought together people from poetry, young adult fiction, theatre, film, TV and more. We even have someone who won the Arthur C. Clarke award during the making of the game!

Building a world of collective solutions, and also taking time to not build into that world some of the unthought biases and assumptions of our world was something carefully and collectively done, and I hope that you see all of that hard work in the rich environments, wonderful characters and colourful locations you’ll discover as you play. And of course it’s been brilliantly brought to life by our art and animation team. You can read a perspective from one of our writers on our worldbuilding in this lovely blog post here.

We also needed all those people (around 10 story folks in total over the project) to produce this game. When you choose one expedition character over another, several other versions of that chapter is now no longer part of that playthrough. There are somewhere between 350 and 500,000 words in Saltsea Chronicles that make this possible. All carefully considered, tuned and crafted to serve a goal of collective storytelling.

There's a version of this game which could have been done with procedural systems, but another core principle was 'our key innovation is shit hot writing'. That means time for members of the story team to come on board, learn the ropes, write, rewrite, edit - and systems clear and simple enough for new folks to join and contribute - including people who hadn't worked on a game before (keeping our team, and the worlds we wrote, diverse and excellent). This necessitated a simple use of a writer-readable tool (Ink), super-thorough documentation, and clear structure for the storytelling - defined from the outset. We could therefore hire from a wider pool of writing talent (not just those with procedural/systemic experience or aptitude) and maximise our time to 'just write'.

Shout out to the careful work that was laid in the foundations by Katrin (our Programming Lead) and Char (Story Lead) who built a space for writers to write, and to the whole story team for the documentation that we all collaborated on to support it. We developed a workflow which was well-structured and well-understood. And made sure to build in reflection for us to work out when it was time to move on, to cut, or to pivot. We also clearly defined the roles each member of the story team took on; story techs who built the infrastructure of each episode, the story-definers who pulled together the specific parts of each chapter, the writers, editors, and QA. Not to mention all the art and animation, music, programming and production team whose efforts also brought it to life.

I won't trifle with your patience further by naming everyone from the team here, but do check out our People page which shows the main actors in our team.

A Story Without a Hero

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this deep dive into several angles on how we’ve tried to develop a means of telling a collective story with this new game. And rest assured it’s also in the content of our story too. Saltsea Chronicles doesn't tell a story about a hero, it's a story about a community, and how we navigate the world together. Form and content, people in context.

Each community you visit will be rich, wonderful, amusing and have its own things going on. There's plenty of laughs, but tough choices and meaningful moments too. Our writers room of award-winning storytellers have really woven some magic.

We’re so excited to discover what paths you chart when you play later this year.

In the meantime, please, buy the game on Steam, PlayStation 5, and/or Nintendo Switch!

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YouTube & Instagram will also feature episodes, excerpts and reminders.

About One Cool Thing

One Cool Thing is a podcast speaking with people in and around videogames about One Cool Thing not from games which is really fascinating them at the moment. One of the founding principles of Die Gute Fabrik is interdisciplinarity - collaborating with people from other art forms to bring fresh ideas to video games. And that’s also what’s at the heart of this podcast series: what not from games is shaping how people think about making games right now?

About This Episode

On this episode we meet Jill Murray who chats to Hannah Nicklin about skating.

Jill Murray is a Canadian narrative director is coming fresh from the launch of Invincible Presents: Atom Eve. She is a writer for indie and AAA games, best known for her work as Lead Writer on Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and a bunch of the Assassin's Creed games but other highlights of her credits include Moon Hunters, été, and Subnautica: Below Zero.

After starting out by studying theatre, she’s also worked in web development, and published two YA novels. She’s been working in games for an impressive amount of time, with credits going back to 2012, and has among her many awards the Writers Guild of America award for Excellence in Videogame Writing stands out as a particular highlight.

Have a listen below:

Or you can listen to the podcast on YouTube too:

Liner Notes

• elladjbalde
• Invincible Presents: Atom Eve
• http://discoglo.be/

Subscribe here.
YouTube & Instagram will also feature episodes, excerpts and reminders.

One Cool Thing Production Credits

One Cool Thing is hosted by Die Gute Fabrik's Studio Lead Hannah Nicklin and is produced, edited and sound designed by Tom Whalley. Additional production and research by Úna-Minh Kavanagh and our theme music by Nick Ellis who can be found on Bandcamp as tenby.

We've been receiving some great questions we’ve been getting from the community on our socials and we thought we’d share them here too. Saltsea Chronicles is a story-driven adventure game where (instead of guiding a hero) you guide a whole ship's whole crew as they investigate the mystery of their missing captain.

What platforms is Saltsea Chronicles available on?

We are delighted to announce that Saltsea Chronicles is out now on PlayStation 5, Steam, Itch.io, Mac, PC, Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch. The Steam version is also Steam Deck Verified, and can be played via the cloud using GeForce NOW. You can check out our Steam store page for the game’s minimum hardware specs.

Will Saltsea Chronicles be on mobile?

There are no current plans for iOS/Android. But if it's a version you can carry with you that you're after there we do have Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck support!

Will you have native Linux Support?

While we didn’t ship or support natively on Linux at launch the game is playable on Linux machines using Proton.

Note: Our ongoing support focus will primarily be for the Steam Deck, so we'll be unable to provide more general Linux platform support.

Does Saltsea Chronicles feature Localisation across different languages?

We're afraid that because of the word count (~500k words!), the cost of localising is ~30-50% of our entire budget, so it’s not something we could have launched with. But if the game is relatively successful it’s definitely top of our post-launch priorities.

Can you tell us more about the music in the game?

We worked with Eli Rainsberry (they/them) on the music for Saltsea Chronicles, they’re a brilliant and prolific composer - you might know their work from Wilmot’s Warehouse and No Longer Home.

Take a look at Eli's contribution to this year's Save&Sound music festival where they talk about creating the music for Saltsea.

Is the game identical on all platforms? including an in-game achievement system for platforms that don’t have the infrastructure for it?

The game has feature-parity across all platforms – including achievements/trophies, which we implemented on the Switch version using an in-game achievements system. The PlayStation 5 version has a platinum trophy which is unique to that platform, and that is the only difference.

The only other exceptions to the cross-platform parity are a handful of Nintendo Switch-specific optimisations on some of our shaders and animation, and occasional temporary differences that might appear as a result of when patches are delivered (some platforms take longer than others).

Are there any bonuses for having save data from a different video game?

No, the game is entirely standalone.

Is there anything permanently missable, even rewards for fulfilling specific conditions?

In Saltsea Chronicles, you may make choices as a player that lead you down different pathways through the same mystery — you will be investigating the same overall mystery as other players, but you will make choices that focus on different characters, and in certain chapters take you to different locations. You will need to replay a few times to see everything and to fill out your Almanac sticker-book.

However, we’ve built a custom save branching system and multiple save slots which makes it very easy for you to branch a new save from any existing and already-played chapter, so the game is designed to not just support replaying but to encourage exploring the possibility space of the story.

What is Saltsea’s ESRB rating?

Our ESRB rating is Everyone 10+ / PEGI 7.

Find out more in our press kit on our dedicated Saltsea Chronicles website here.

Saltsea Chronicles is out now on Steam, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch.

Set in a post-flood world, Saltsea Chronicles allows you to guide a misfit crew in search of their missing captain. The investigation and the decisions you make will see you explore a series of beautiful and intriguing islands, meet different communities, and see the lives of people built on the ruins of what came before – all as you unravel the mystery at the heart of the game.

We are delighted to announce the release of the original soundtrack for our story-driven adventure game Saltsea Chronicles!

An Original Soundtrack by Eli Rainsberry

IGF-nominated composer and sound artist Eli Rainsberry (No Longer Home, A Monster's Expedition) presents a musically hybrid score and soundscape guided by the spaces and characters of Saltsea Chronicles.

The Original Soundtrack is out now across music platforms including Steam, Bandcamp, Spotify, Itch.io, Ko-Fi and Apple Music and retails at £9.99 GBP / $11.99 USD.

Saltsea Chronicles’ score is an atmospheric blend of traditional instruments and synthetic arrangements that help tell the story of a crew voyaging to find their missing captain.

The music, like the game and its storytelling, takes inspiration from TV compositional tradition: leaning into genre-based moments such as homecomings, spooky locations, romantic moments; as well as using recurring cues to help set location, tone and reinforce episodic structures.

Each chapter in the game wraps up with a TV-inspired animated sequence accompanied by a brand new original theme composed and arranged by Eli Rainsberry. They sought inspiration from a mix of animated TV show openings, and jazz artists such as DOMi & JD Beck, Chick Corea and Yoko Kanno. The Saltsea Chronicles title theme also features performances from musicians M Gewehr (drum arrangement, bass), TV-MA (flute), and Tyler Mire (trumpet).

Buy now on Steam, Bandcamp, Itch.io, Ko-Fi and Apple Music.

Below is a preview of excerpts from the original soundtrack:

Saltsea Chronicles is out now on Steam, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch.

Set in a post-flood world, Saltsea Chronicles allows you to guide a misfit crew in search of their missing captain. The investigation and the decisions you make will see you explore a series of beautiful and intriguing islands, meet different communities, and see the lives of people built on the ruins of what came before – all as you unravel the mystery at the heart of the game.

We’re thrilled to share that Die Gute Fabrik’s Saltsea Chronicles is now available to buy on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch & PC!

We’re doing a special discounted MUTAZIONE and Saltsea Chronicles bundle to celebrate.

The DGF team are so excited for you to play the game. It marks a real step forward in their storytelling ambitions following MUTAZIONE and we’re delighted to celebrate the launch of Saltsea Chronicles with the exclusive game bundle. If you already have and enjoyed MUTAZIONE share the bundle with your pals!

Buy either one or both games on Steam right now!

Saltsea Chronicles

Set in a post-flood world, Saltsea Chronicles allows you to guide a misfit crew in search of their missing captain. The investigation and the decisions you make will see you explore a series of beautiful and intriguing islands, meet different communities, and see the lives of people built on the ruins of what came before – all as you unravel the mystery at the heart of the game.

What pathway will you trace through the story?

Mutazione

Mutazione is a mutant soap opera where small-town gossip meets the supernatural. Discover magical gardens, new friends & old secrets as you try to survive both an apocalyptic meteor strike and the stress of small-town drama.

We are delighted to announce that Saltsea Chronicles is OUT NOW on PlayStation 5, Steam (Mac, PC, Steam Deck and GeForce NOW) and Nintendo Switch.

Saltsea Chronicles is a brand new title from the IGF and Indiecade Grand Prize award-winning studio Die Gute Fabrik (Mutazione, 2019). Saltsea Chronicles is a story-driven adventure game where (instead of guiding a hero) you guide a whole ship's whole crew as they investigate the mystery of their missing captain.

Set on a flooded world, spanning communities built on the mysterious remains of the world that came before, Saltsea Chronicles paints a world of gently radical possibility; beautiful risograph print-inspired artwork; thrilling storytelling from an award-winning writers' room; and an original soundtrack from Eli Rainsberry.

Head on over to Steam right now to buy the game, or read on to find out more!

More About Saltsea Chronicles

Captain Maja’s misfit crew must heist their impounded ship and mount a rescue! Guide the crew across islands of a post-flood world known as ‘Saltsea’. Explore strange and wonderful communities, uncover a deep conspiracy, choose where to go and which crew members to investigate with, and chart a journey through twists and turns, difficulties and delights.

View the Presskit on our standalone Saltsea Chronicles site for store links, and more.

A Post-Flood World

Visit different island communities as you investigate the mystery at the heart of the game. Each built on pre-flood ruins – in beautiful and beguiling ways.

As you explore you will uncover different pathways through a rich and varied series of islands. This flooded world, betrayed by the so-called Hoarders, barely remembers a time before the Flood. They rebuilt on the ruins of what came before, and new talents and technologies took the place of the old. Many surprises await!

Choose Your Priorities

In Saltsea Chronicles you guide the entire crew through the story. As well as investigating the mystery of your captain’s disappearance, you will uncover secrets, create and resolve tensions between the crew, and add to your number as you meet others who ask to join you.

Each chapter, you pick which island to visit and who to send on the expedition. Your choices will unlock different content, develop relationships, and give you a chance to resolve (and create) tensions within the crew.

With a lightning-fast navigation system, you’re free to hop around the islands as you explore. Choose between short and snappy observations, or dig deep into conversations with your crewmate or the locals, exploring the islands across different times of day.

Uncover A Conspiracy

Was your captain kidnapped? Or did she leave of her own free will? Keep track of the mystery in Murl’s Log and collect records of your encounters as stickers in the Almanac.

Different playthroughs will take you to different islands, introduce different characters and have dramatic consequences for your crew. You can replay from any chapter and branch your save file to meet new crew members, explore different communities and trace alternative pathways through the rich and gripping story.

Themes

From an award-winning and diverse writers' room – with experience in Young Adult fiction, film, theatre, poetry and games – Saltsea Chronicles imagines a rich world where communities have rebuilt in the aftermath of disaster, creating a new society of connection, resilience and hope—but one still troubled by the universal questions of how to live together through conflict and change. This wide-reaching story game traces meaningful themes with humour, lightness of touch, and care.

Features

• Distinctive print-inspired art style - A unique art style inspired by risograph print techniques brings a storybook aesthetic to the fantasy-tinged world of Saltsea Chronicles, brought to life with beautiful bespoke animation.
• Try your hand at Spoils - Spoils is a trick-taking card game from the world of Saltsea Chronicles. Play cards with each local community, but watch out – some islands have their own house rules!
• An original score by Eli Rainsberry - IGF-nominated composer and sound artist Eli Rainsberry (No Longer Home, A Monster's Expedition) presents a musically hybrid score and soundscape guided by the spaces and characters of Saltsea Chronicles.
• Navigate the drama as well as the seas - Tensions between crew members are represented by Issues, small ‘relationships quests’ you can track, resolve, or, sometimes, just have to leave unsolved.

Buy Saltsea Chronicles today on PlayStation 5, Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Game Director Hannah Nicklin introduces an independent report into the climate impact of the development of Saltsea Chronicles.

Read the full report and its findings and methodology here.

As well as launching the world-premiere of our story-driven adventure game Saltsea Chronicles this week we also shared (what we believe is) another world-first: a detailed impact report into the climate impact of the game’s development.

Our game is set on a flooded world after a great disaster. Saltsea Chronicles is not precisely our world, although it could be. The collapse of the Thwaites Glacier – sometimes called the Doomsday Glacier – could cause a sudden rise of sea levels by 1 metre which would absolutely put the place I come from in the UK (Lincolnshire) underwater. That’s even before we get to the rise in sea levels already impacting many island nations, and that will continue as we fail to curtail our carbon emissions.

Part of that is why I’m really proud to share this report. We commissioned Benjamin Abraham the author of Digital Games After Climate Change to produce it, and as well as tracking our impact and suggesting mitigations and changes we can make in future projects it also advocates for other studios to do the same, offering methodology, resources, and key actions.

There are no videogames on a dead planet. Net zero is an urgent target not just for big companies, but to reach it, smaller companies like ours need to act too. The report makes a number of recommendations for other indies, and shares resources for them to track their own impact, set targets, and track their progress.

It also proposes a climate impact rating system that could sit along age ratings, keeping players aware of our efforts, and keeping game makers accountable as we all strive to hit net zero.

I’m really proud to have been able to support such an extensive assessment of the impact of Saltsea Chronicles’ production process. I hope this report offers means for smaller game organisations to find a hand-hold in how to begin to take action. Our survival depends on it.

Read the full report and its findings and methodology here.

About Saltsea Chronicles

Set in a post-flood world, Saltsea Chronicles allows you to guide a misfit crew in search of their missing captain. The investigation and the decisions you make will see you explore a series of beautiful and intriguing islands, meet different communities, and see the lives of people built on the ruins of what came before – all as you unravel the mystery at the heart of the game.

What pathway will you trace through the story?

We're delighted to announce Saltsea Chronicles comes out on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch & PC/Mac (including Steam Deck) on... 12th October, 2023!

We're so proud of all of the wonderful folks who worked with us on the game and careful, thoughtful and excellent contributions they all made. Saltsea Chronicles is a carefully radical vision of a future world where you play as a whole crew - exploring with the community rather than as a hero, in a story rich with possibilities, and a world full of intrigue and delight.

We've released a brand new trailer to celebrate, watch it now below, and wishlist the game on Steam so you won't miss it!

Wishlist the game on Steam right now!

About Saltsea Chronicles

Set in a post-flood world, Saltsea Chronicles allows you to guide a crew of misfits in search of their missing captain. The investigation and the decisions you make will see you explore a series of beautiful and intriguing islands, meet different communities, and see the lives of people built on the ruins of what came before – all as you unravel the mystery at the heart of the game.

Saltsea Chronicles - coming 12th October, 2023 to PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch & PC/Mac (including Steam Deck).

In this video, Ben Wilson (Creative Producer), Daria Radu (Card Game Programmer) and Doug Wilson (Card Game Design) sit down to talk about a part of Saltsea Chronicles they all worked on together: Spoils (the card game set in the world of Saltsea).

Take a look at the video below to hear Ben, Doug and Daria explain how to play Spoils and offer a deep dive into the development process of how the card game came to be.

You can also read their development retrospective blog post here.

Wishlist Saltsea Chronicles on Steam here.

Set in a post-flood world, Saltsea Chronicles allows you to guide a misfit crew in search of their missing captain. The investigation and the decisions you make will see you explore a series of beautiful and intriguing islands, meet different communities, and see the lives of people built on the ruins of what came before – all as you unravel the mystery at the heart of the game.

Saltsea Chronicles will be coming to PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and PC.

To find out more about the game head to the dedicated website saltseachronicles.com. And follow us on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok as we share more about the game in the run up to launch.

In this post, Ben Wilson (Creative Producer), Daria Radu (Card Game Programmer) and Doug Wilson (Card Game Design) sit down to talk about a part of Saltsea Chronicles they all worked on together: Spoils (the card game set in the world of Saltsea).

Creative Producer Ben Wilson invites programmer Daria Radu, and designer Doug Wilson, to tell the in-depth story of how Spoils came to be, and share some insights into the development process.

Ben: Doug, as the person who’s been here at the studio the longest of the three of us, can you recall where the initial idea for including a card game within Saltsea came from? What were the earliest influences?

Doug: I teach a non-digital games class, so obviously I’m personally invested in card games, both in terms of my own playing history but also professionally. I was really inspired by Zachtronics, who design a custom designed Solitaire game for each of their games.

I certainly grew up with a number of trick-taking card game classics, including Hearts and a Dutch and South African game called Klaverjas. Thinking about the long history of card games like Whist, Euchre, Bridge, etc., I might posit that the “trick” is the single most important tabletop mechanic of all time. So it felt like a natural genre for us to explore.

Then, during COVID lockdowns, my partner and I got really into the recent co-op trick-taking game The Crew, playing our own custom implementation via playingcards.io, together with our friends Nina and Nico. That was a really formative experience for me, especially since the game continues to add new rules, variations, etc. (Ben and I also recorded an Eggplant podcast episode about that game, here).

Compared to more traditional competitive trick-taking games, The Crew intensifies this feeling of solving a puzzle, which I knew would be relevant for our game, in which you’d be playing alone against AI opponents.

Ben: And why did it feel like it was so important to include a minigame in Saltsea Chronicles?

Doug: I was mindful that the game we were pitching would centre around reading text. In those kinds of games, I feel like it’s useful to change up the pacing and provide an alternative activity that tickles another part of the brain.

Ben: Daria, before you fully joined DGF as a part of the programming team you originally came on board as one of two ITU placement collaborators, working on a thesis project. What was your early impression of Saltsea when you arrived?

Daria: I joined Die Gute Fabrik at a very exciting time for Saltsea Chronicles, as it was somewhere between the early prototypes and the development of the very first chapter which meant there was still so much creative freedom.

The world building for Saltsea Chronicles had always been extremely robust and detailed thanks to the work of our great writers’ room, and joining felt like being immersed into a whole new world of beautifully crafted communities. And these communities needed a card game!

For me, this was my first dive into the real-life development of a commercial game that would be released to real players. This meant I needed to learn the ropes of the game’s production cycle, and also take more responsibility over decisions that were to be made in this project.

Ben: When you came on board, we thought that having both of you assigned to a relatively self-contained part of the game would be the best way to give you some space on the project, and it would let things move on a different schedule to the rest of the game (which by that point was moving into Vertical Slice production). Was there anything in particular that appealed to you about being involved in this particular part of the project?

Daria: I have always been very interested in working with artificial intelligence in games, and doing that inside a card game was instantly appealing to me. The main reason is that, unlike a lot of other types of board games, card games are games of “imperfect information”.

Chess is, for example, a game of perfect information - you always know the full game state by just looking at the board, and that information is available to all players at all times. In card games however, one does not have access to the hidden hands of the other players, making that an unknown variable of the game state. Hence the imperfect information.

The best part about joining at such an early stage was that the card game was merely an idea - so there was so much room for experimenting.

My placement was together with game designer Alexandra Labusová, so we worked together a lot in defining the final rules of the card game, and by building lots of prototypes.

Note: Daria and Alexandra both wrote blog posts for the site to introduce themselves when they joined in 2021!

Ben: Speaking of the game as just the seed of an idea, now seems like a good time to talk about the initial design and prototyping process. Do either of you want to talk about how we went about paper prototyping and iterating on the original ruleset?

Doug: The process started with Ben and I researching, playing, and discussing famous trick-taking games. I believe we tried Hearts, Bridge, Oh Hell, Bourré, 500, The Crew, and more. The studio works fully remotely, so we used playingcards.io (what a godsend!) to play as a group.

At some point, Ben and I started brainstorming our own ideas for core mechanics. At that early stage, we weren’t really looking to draft full rulesets, we were searching for just one overarching idea that would catch fire.

Looking over my notes from the time, I proposed some half-baked ideas like:

• If you break from the Lead suit, *everyone* has to stick with that suit if possible
• Anti-trump suit? Clubs always *loses*, even as a Lead suit
• Alt win condition: you *lose* if you win too many Jacks?

Ben: One of the advantages to making a card game that became immediately clear to me is that it was so easy to just boot up a virtual card game table, deal out a deck of regular playing cards and try out a new ruleset.

This was definitely the fastest turnaround I’ve had working in games, to take an idea from paper design to playable form. It meant we could try basically anything, so long as we had the time to get together and playtest it.

Doug: We also knew pretty quickly that we wanted to make a 2v2 game like Bridge or 500. The 2v2 format perfectly matches the expedition structure of the game, where you bring exactly two of your crew members to each chapter’s location. I’ve also long been a fan of 2v2 games since publishing Hokra as part of our local multiplayer compendium, Sportsfriends.

Ben eventually proposed the winning idea, inspired by the cultural politics and history of Saltsea Chronicles: when you win a trick, the winning card is scored by the other team.

Immediately, it was clear that this was a pretty brilliant idea, on two different accounts: first, it echoed the values of the in-game world, in which more collectivist societies are very aware of the greed and hoarding that led to cataclysm; second, the idea just felt novel and brain-bending, in a way that fit the puzzle-solving vibes we were aiming for.

As it turns out, there was a trick-taking game published in 1997, David & Goliath, that uses a similar mechanic. I only discovered this much later doing more research into trick-taking games.

Once we had the core mechanic in place, it almost felt like the rest of the game “designed itself”, in that we could pretty readily address all the immediate questions by adopting ideas from other trick-taking games.

First, in order for the mechanic to make sense, we knew that different cards or different combinations would need different point values, like in games such as Pinochle or Briscola Chiamata.

Actually, Briscola Chiamata was probably the most important touchstone here, in that the relationship between rank and value is purposefully erratic. For instance, a Three is worth 10 points, whereas a King is only worth 4 points.

This was perfect for our game, Spoils, in which we knew it should sometimes be dangerous to play a high card. In Spoils, the King and Queen are high ranking cards that are worth 0 points, and are therefore “safe” to win a trick with.

But the Jack is worth 11 points, and so you have to be very careful around that card, otherwise you might give your opponents those points! Meanwhile, the lowest ranked card, the Ace, is worth 10 points. We knew we wanted to incentivise partner play, i.e. feeding a low-ranked, high-value card to your partner.

Ben: For me, the day you suggested playing with the relationship between card rank and point value was the moment it all slid into place in my head and I could see the potential of what we could do with Spoils as a novel puzzle-y game experience. It playtested really well too.

While this was going on, Daria and Alexandra were working in parallel on the problem of how to represent all of this as a digital game, and all of the design considerations attached to that.

Making a video game version of a card game means having to think about unique issues around UI, game flow, legibility, and making an interface that supports multiple input methods.

On the positive side though, there are also certain affordances that the video game format offers, such as automatic scorekeeping and the resolving of who wins each trick. These are elements that the team knew would take some of the burden off of the job of tutorialising the game, as the player would be able to, at the very least, learn the flow of the game just by watching it in motion.

Daria: Our role was to build upon Ben and Doug’s ideas, and see how they would translate into a practical space - that meant breaking down the game into smaller pieces, figuring out which parts of the game we can convey to players more easily by using tooltips, tutorials or table placement.

It was very important to us to make the game’s rules accessible to players, so Alexandra’s work was more geared towards “tutorialisation” of the card game. That is why it was important to have guest players in our playtesting sessions.

For me, my angle was more towards how it would be best to translate a 2v2 game into one that is played by only one human player. We explored a lot the possibility of the player controlling two hands at once - which ended up not being a very successful approach in playtesting - and as that fell, prototyping was a lot about figuring out how to evoke the team feeling into the digital space as well.

Ben: The last major design problem we had was the question of how to control for randomness. Players always need to have valid strategic options no matter the hand they’ve been dealt.

In many of the games we researched, this problem is solved through a bidding phase where each player bids on how well they think they’ll do, and their winnings or score are adjusted based on that initial bet. For Spoils, we settled on a phase where each team bids on a suit to be the more valuable “sweeper” suit. This phase is important, as it gives players a way to influence how good or bad their randomly dealt hand is.

Doug: But wagering isn’t the only way to control for randomness. Some games add alternative win conditions. Hearts is a great example - in that game, you can do what’s called “shooting the moon” if you play perfectly badly and manage to win all the bad cards. In other words, if you draw really unlucky cards, you can sometimes go all in on trying to lose badly enough to win.

Another example of this solution is the two-player trick-taking game The Fox in the Forest, which has a “Greedy” mechanic where your opponent scores points if you win too many tricks.

Inspired by that mechanic, we added a “Hoarding” mechanic to Spoils, named after the myth of the Hoarders who brought the cataclysm that flooded the world. In Spoils, if you score over 100 points, points are swapped and your team actually loses.

Daria: For me, the most difficult part to figure out design-wise was the bidding phase of Spoils.

Bidding is extremely complex in most trick-taking card games, and it’s usually the phase that players use to communicate hints towards their partners. This phase can sometimes last for several rounds, and it can get very strategic.

The first hurdle we faced in our bidding AI development was “how can we make your partner convey to you its current strongest suit, without it being too obvious for the opponents?”.

The rules for the bidding phase took the most time for us to settle on, after trying out myriads of rules and variations inspired by other trick taking card games. And even afterwards, building the AI model that powers it proved to be even more challenging from the logical perspective - especially factoring each of the variants. We even had to scrap a full iteration of the model!

But the final product is definitely one that we are proud of, and we hope players enjoy the bidding phase of Spoils just as much as the rest of the round.

Ben: Just to add on to that, one of the priorities we had when it came to designing the bidding phase was to make something that had a similar flow to it to the rest of the game. We thought Spoils would be more legible and easy to learn if the action we were asking the player to take in this phase was the same action we ask of the player during the rest of the game i.e choosing a single card to play from your hand.

Throughout the design process, I worried a lot about the cognitive weight of constantly presenting the player with drastically new elements and flows. We were already intending to introduce twists to the base rules with the game variants, so we didn’t want to overload and overwhelm players.

My internal guideline was that we should keep the flow of the game as consistent as possible, to make more cognitive room for the rule variants. The aim was for players to be occupied with the strategic puzzling, and not distracted with unsureness over what they should be clicking on at any given time.

Ben: Do either of you remember anything notable from those early stages that didn’t make the cut? There were so many directions we ended up not going in, and variants that didn’t work out for one reason or another.

Doug: Very early on we brainstormed lots and lots of half-baked ideas. But of all the initial more fleshed out variants we proposed, only one was fully cut. I had called it “Sink or Swim”, and the idea is, points would go to individuals instead of the team. Then, at the end of all three rounds, the team with the lowest-scoring player would lose. So, unlike in regular Spoils, you’d now have to be concerned about splitting points evenly.

The only other bit of work I’d like to shout out is The Deck of the Flood - a world-building document written by one of our writers, Harry Josephine Giles. The document was actually written before we designed Spoils, and it proposes the history, mechanics, and meanings for a tarot deck commonly used within the world of Saltsea Chronicles.

Josie’s document is so rich and I wish we could have used more of it, but time was short and there were just too many gameplay demands on the Spoils idea as we had developed it.

Ben: We went through several phases of playtesting for Spoils. I remember at a certain point we were sending around special builds of the game that only had the card game in it, so that we could gather more feedback to help steer the latter half of development. What was your reaction to the playtests? What were you most eager to hear about from the folks who tested for us?

Daria: One lesson that we learned repeatedly as we playtested was that people have very different levels of experience with trick taking card games. Some may have never played one, some may have limited experience, and some may be avid trick taking card game players. And all of these players approached our game in a different way, and had different learning curves.

Our main priority was to work as much as possible towards easing the learning process of Spoils - to the best of our resources. We hope that the tutorials - which are always available in-game for players to revisit - are a good way to encourage as many players to try out Spoils as possible.

Ben: The layered approach we took to our tutorial was pretty much entirely a result of observing this, and trying to come up with something that gave players of different experience levels an appropriate onramp to start playing.

Doug: One of the main things I personally was looking for from the playtests was feedback on how it feels to play the game with an AI partner. It’s one thing to play against AI opponents, but in a pairs game, it’s even more critical to feel like you can puzzle out each trick together with your partner.

In retrospect, this was a very tall order, and way more scope that we had initially appreciated. We’re very fortunate to have had Daria on the team, who did such a good job with it. All the AI players are controlled by hand-authored machine learning algorithms, and so based on the playtest feedback, Daria and I talked through how we should tweak some of the system rules, especially around bidding.

Daria: An interesting find from the playtests was that players will more often than not pay the most attention to their partner and how they are playing, and this was an important point that we developed further into our model. It was important for us that the game felt strategic, and that your AI partner was seen as an enhancement, not an impediment to your efforts.

Doug: Another lesson we took away from the playtests was that the character “barks” were important in terms of making the AI players feel more natural. Occasionally, one of the AI players will utter a short sentence or reaction (via a text bubble) based on a whole bunch of game situations we identified and parameterised.

Even these short texts help provide some narrative reasons for why a player may have chosen the card they did. Even if you feel like it’s clear that your partner made a mistake and played an inadvisable card, that can feel like part of the intended challenge if you get the sense that your partner is kind of a goofball.

Ben: Outside of designing the rules and implementing the game logic, there was also attention paid to the theming of Spoils, which influenced a lot of our decisions such as ideas for variants, the visual design of the deck and more. Talk a bit about this process, and maybe some highlight moments of making the card game fit within the world of Saltsea.

Daria: This part of the process was the most fascinating to me as it required a lot of cross-disciplinary work from our teams, from writing to art to programming. It was very important that Spoils reflected the world in which it is played, and that can be seen already from its rules. One of the core rules of Spoils is “Hoarding” - if you accumulate too many points, you lose the round. This ties in to the way communities work in Saltsea Chronicles, in which resources are spread to the people and hoarding is viewed in a negative light.

Then you get to the deck, which builds upon the standard 52-card deck, but instead its suits are new symbols that represent various common objects that are part of the world (fish, stars, anchors and shells).

Doug: Beyond the game itself, early on I knew early on that game design itself could be a key site where we could do world-building. As part of my PhD, which I did as a New Jersey raised kid living in Copenhagen, I got really interested in how games reflect their cultural contexts.

Living in Denmark, I learned that in collectivist cultures, traditional games are often played to have one loser, rather than one winner. For example, compare Synd, Danish Liar’s Dice, against Liar’s Poker as played in the USA. It’s kind of the same game, but with opposite endgames. Which is to say, our very ideas of “winning” and “losing” are highly situated (this is not surprising to any sociologist, of course).

The practice of “house rules” is a big idea I discuss in my intro game making class, and is obviously a conceptual cornerstone of party games I’ve worked on like J.S. Joust and B.U.T.T.O.N.

The archipelago setting of Saltsea Chronicles lends itself to the idea that different islands might play this common card game slightly differently. The closest parallel I could think of is Triple Triad in Final Fantasy 8, but we wanted to take some of those ideas even further, politically and intellectually. We definitely wanted to play up this idea that the “puzzle” of the card game would change on each island you visited, and that hopefully this would help drive home the realisation that these communities evolve their own unique values.

Ben: What part of Spoils are you most excited about for people to experience when Saltsea Chronicles releases to the public?

Daria: I am very excited to see how people approach the game, and what strategies they come up with! Spoils is a fascinating game to me, and I know that people will find so many different ways to play it (some maybe even more competitively than others).

And I hope the AI we have created will help enhance that! It’s very important to know that it’s not meant to be the “absolute opponent” - but instead it’s there to create an enjoyable, casual gaming experience for all players.

Doug: Most of all, I hope some people try the game with their friends, outside of Saltsea Chronicles! Very intentionally, Spoils is based on a standard 52 card, four-suit deck that is widely available.

As good a job as Daria did with the AI, it’s even more rewarding to play this kind of partner game with old friends, in person or even remotely on playingcards.io.

Wishlist Saltsea Chronicles on Steam here.

Set in a post-flood world, Saltsea Chronicles allows you to guide a misfit crew in search of their missing captain. The investigation and the decisions you make will see you explore a series of beautiful and intriguing islands, meet different communities, and see the lives of people built on the ruins of what came before – all as you unravel the mystery at the heart of the game.

Saltsea Chronicles will be coming to PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and PC later this year. Watch our reveal trailer right here!

To find out more about the game head to the dedicated website saltseachronicles.com. And follow us on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok as we begin to share more about the game in the run up to launch.

We're excited to announce that Saltsea Chronicles has been selected to be part of the online music festival Save & Sound which takes place on September 11th - 14th.

The 3-day live (online) event will showcase original content made just for Save & Sound and feature exclusive content from composer Eli Rainsberry (they/them) on the music of Saltsea Chronicles.

Save & Sound features concerts, deep dives, and mashups from 70+ games from around the world.

Saltsea Chronicles composer, Eli Rainsberry has prepared a special video just for the event which will be showcased live and online at 8pm CET / 11am PDT.

Eli is an IGF-nominated composer, sound artist and audio designer, specialising in music and sounds for animated, interactive, and interdisciplinary works. They have been making music and sounds for games and animation since 2015. Eli explains that:

"It felt important to me that because these island communities had different, but strong visual identities and unique cultures, that my compositions were also different per community,"

"Inspiration for the music of Saltsea was sought by exploring the small stories being told by members of those communities, whether it be through their day to day activities, or how they communicate to each other."

"I’ve really enjoyed using my music as a framework to help build up and support the story being told in the game; I try to be sure to support the stories and experiences of the characters and communities the best I can."

The show will be streamed on the Save & Sound website, YouTube, and Twitch. Check out all the games part of the event on saveandsound.io

You can watch back on Day 1 of Save & Sound below:

Wishlist Saltsea Chronicles on Steam here.

Set in a post-flood world, Saltsea Chronicles allows you to guide a misfit crew in search of their missing captain. The investigation and the decisions you make will see you explore a series of beautiful and intriguing islands, meet different communities, and see the lives of people built on the ruins of what came before – all as you unravel the mystery at the heart of the game.

Saltsea Chronicles will be coming to PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and PC later this year. Watch our reveal trailer right here!

To find out more about the game head to the dedicated website saltseachronicles.com. And follow us on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok as we begin to share more about the game in the run up to launch.

Wishlist Saltsea Chronicles on Steam here.