Game Of Thrones: Tale Of Crows is a narrative idle game set in the frozen north of Westeros, 8000 years before the events of Game Of Thrones. Players take on the role of a series of Lord Commanders of the Night's Watch and guide Castle Black and the Watch through the turning seasons of history.

It was an Apple Arcade exclusive and while available on that platform was playable on all Apple devices.

I was responsible for gameplay design and narrative design, developing both the systems and mechanics of the game but also the high level narrative design, leading the team of writers in developing hundreds of stories with thousands of individual interactions.

Players respond to events within Castle Black itself and also send expeditions North of The Wall and respond to ravens those expeditions send back. These are all presented as text prompts with several reply options, some unlocked based on player actions or the situation in game.

As an idle game Tale Of Crows is designed to be played at a slow pace, checked in on occasionally, not binged continually. Expeditions and ravens take time, which you can track on the map screen, and sometimes no new events will occur for a while, and the game will let you know to go away and come back later.

The major challenge for the design of Tale Of Crows was simply the need to balance a calm idle experience with enough interest to keep players returning to find out what happens next. We crafted our systems to funnel players towards play where they had multiple simultaneous story threads going at once, so that even when one thread resolved there were still other things going on that they remained curious about. This meant that once they had completed a few interactions we could encourage the players to leave the game and return back later to find out what happens next.

Tale Of Crows was successful according to Apple and Devolver, despite launching in the year after the show's disastrously recieved final season, and despite being designed for commuter play and launching into a global pandemic lockdown. In retrospect the desire to keep players interacting with the game through an interactive fiction lense meant that parts of the gamestate weren't exposed to the players as clearly as they needed to be and some players felt that it wasn't obvious how their choices affected the outcomes of stories. Ultimately though the game was beautiful and we proved that the structure of the narrative idle game, which hadn't been tried in this way before, could work and work extremely well.

https://www.devolverdigital.com/games/game-of-thrones-tale-of-crows