KNOWLEDGE
TOWNSCAPER
W
hen it comes to island-building
game Townscaper, it’s the little
things. We plonk down colourful houses,
and mathematical magic works to shape
them into a place that looks lived-in. In
one click, Townscaper creates a balcony
with a tower viewer pointing out to sea. In
another, we extend a cottage – and the
game places a tiny pair of wellies outside
the new front door. We rarely set out with
a plan, instead following the game’s lead
in search of fresh delights.
Perhaps Townscaper is the latest in
a line of what late Nintendo president
Satoru Iwata once termed ‘non-games’:
software toys without goal or end, often
encouraging the player to invent their own
through self-expression – the original
SimCity, DS synthesiser
Electroplankton, and Jeff
Minter’s player-controlled
light show Psychedelia
among them. Or maybe it’s
something else altogether:
Shedworks co-founder
Gregorios Kythreotis
recently tweeted that he
feels it’s “a new kind of
‘architectural exploration’
game about discovering
the hidden configurations of spaces
available behind the algorithm.” In either
case, it is doing phenomenally well –
when we talk to creator Oskar Stålberg,
Townscaper is about to hit 100,000 early
access copies sold in just over two weeks.
Much like all the best things in this
singular game, the success is unexpected.
Stålberg was the artist behind strategy title
Bad North’s gorgeous procedural islands;
Townscaper was a much less resource-
intensive solo project built in the year
following its release, an aesthetic
experiment in using tile-placing algorithms
on an irregular quadrilateral grid to create
wonky, organic-looking structures. “When
you make more of a game-game, you
need to tone down the environments,
because it’s supposed to be more of a
canvas,” he explains. “You need to keep
track of all the units and what they’re up
to; it’s supposed to be beautiful, but not
crave your attention. Whereas with this, I
was like, ‘I want to make these nice,
colourful environments, and that’s going to
be priority number one. And if I don’t put
any game on top of it, then that’s fine.’”
But the desire we feel to seek out all of
the charming possibilities is almost game-
like, something Stålberg was hoping to
encourage. “I’ve gotten that kind of
feedback with the web tech demos I’ve
done, so I knew that thing was there.
I think this has quite a lot
in common with children’s
books like Where’s Waldo
or Sven Norquist’s Pettson,
which are filled with little
details. You want the
viewer to stand there for
a bit and discover new
things. And you can do
that with a lot of detail,
and a lot of subtlety.
Whereas in a game, it’s
the opposite – if you’re interacting with it,
you need to tell people immediately what
things are and how they work. But I had
thought about that – that people would
find the fun in trying to discover the rules
and all the little details.”
Indeed they have. Early access is
a chance for Stålberg to see how
people interact with his toy, and to
develop it accordingly. Those wishing
for more game-like mechanics will be
disappointed: Stålberg is mainly looking
to improve the UI, and also to add “more
subtle architectural things that keep
playing on what the game’s alreadydoing – a few more patterns you can
build that make special things happen.”
Townscaper, then, wobbles along
a boundary between digital painting tool
and hidden-object game; both sides are
supremely satisfying. “When you mature
as a game designer, you start realising
that you’re there to make the player feel
like they’re being challenged and
overcoming it – you’re not there to make it
difficult for the player,” he says. He takes
Portal as an example: “It makes you feel
clever when you’re solving the puzzles,
but it’s not you that’s clever, it’s the people
who designed the puzzles and gave you
all the hints. Townscaper is a bit like that:
you can do whatever you want, and it’s
going to look good anyway.”
Procedural generation as player
superpower, rather than a dev-controlled
obstacle to which they must adapt, is
surely a key part of Townscaper’s
success – and something we hope to see
more of in future. But we also wonder if
the current climate is particularly well-
suited to a new wave of non-games such
as this: things designed to run alongside
you, rather than test you. “At the early
stages of this, I was thinking, is there
a game mechanic I should go for here?”
Stålberg recalls. “But then I thought no,
because if you add a game mechanic,
you’re kind of necessarily adding limits,
and you’re giving the player something to
chase other than just the beauty of what
they’re building. A few people have
suggested rewarding people in some way
for building beautiful things. But then
I need to make an algorithm that decides
what’s beautiful or not, and people are
just catering to that algorithm rather than
figuring it out for themselves. And of
course, now there are a lot of really
interesting things people are building with
it that I wasn’t anticipating.” QToy town
Understanding the success of Townscaper,
the non-game breaking into the mainstream
PAWS FOR
THOUGHT
Townscaper’s early
access players are keen
to see more living
beings in the game
beyond the birds that
settle on the rooftops –
as is Stålberg. Residents
who wander the streets
are a popular request
already, but Stålberg is
worried about putting
too fine a point on their
design: “A thing I like
about this game is that
people tend to project
all kinds of things onto
it. If I add people, I
want to make sure that
it’s not too clear what
kind of place they’re
from.” One idea he’s
had is to give them
fantastical, surreal
animal heads; another
thought he’s had is to
add a cat NPC instead.
“People would only
walk around on the
ground, but cats could
go along the rooftops,
investigating the things
that you build. And
a cat’s behaviour
doesn’t have to make
that much sense.”Oskar Stålberg
was the artist
behind strategy
title Bad North’s
gorgeous
prodecural islands