Saltsea Chronicles (Game Design)

Background Traditional story-driven videogames tend to use small minigames to deepen engagement and vary the pace of the gameplay. Saltsea Chronicles attempts to push the genre forward by asking: how can we use minigames more ambitiously, to do worldbuilding. What if used fictional (but playable) rulesets to convey deep sociological truths about different in-game communities? Contribution Saltsea Chronicles is a story-driven adventure videogame about community and post-disaster society, published on a variety of commercial platforms. Wilson was a lead Designer on the in-world card game, and did Game Design more generally, in collaboration with 'Die Gute Fabrik' team. Significance Saltsea Chronicles features an in-game trick-taking card game called Spoils. Most videogames, if they include minigames at all, use them to break up pacing and provide additional hours of gameplay. Saltsea Chronicles innovates on how minigames can be used for loftier storytelling aims. Games, like any cultural form, inevitably tell us something about the people who play them. Saltsea Chronicles leverages this fact by using the in-game card game to enrich the world building of the fictional island communities, each of whom play Spoils with slightly different culturally symbolic house rules. Not unlike the play within the play in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Spoils uses the logic of games to tell sociological stories through gameplay itself. Significance Saltsea Chronicles was released commercially in 2023 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and home computers. The game has received glowing praise from leading intentional outlets and magazines, including The Guardian, Polygon, Eurogamer Rock Paper Shotgun, and more. The game made Paste Magazine’s list for Top 10 videogames of 2023. Multiple reviews specifically praise the in-game card game.