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Quintana Quest received the “App of the Month” award

I am very happy to announce that the German Academy for Children’s and Young Adult Literature has awarded “Quintana – Jäger des verlorenen Schatzes” as App of the Month!

I was responsible for creating the game- and narrative design in cooperation with crushed eyes media.

Quintana Quest is a browser-based visual novel / Point-and-Click-Adventure developed as part of the interdisciplinary educational project “Abenteuer Donaulimes,” aimed at making the largely invisible Danube Limes World Heritage Site in Bavaria accessible to young learners. Designed for students aged 10-12, the game combines storytelling, historical accuracy , and interactive gameplay to foster engagement with Roman frontier history. By embedding real archaeological sites, museum artifacts, and historically informed characters into a narrative-driven format, Quintana Quest offers a compelling example of game-based learning in heritage education. The project links digital exploration with museum visits, providing teachers with curriculum-aligned materials and promoting meaningful interaction with cultural heritage. This case study illustrates how digital tools can bridge gaps in visibility, understanding, and emotional connection in the interpretation of World Heritage.

The full case study can be found here.

“Vibe Coding” Handelsblatt interview

I recently talked to Lina Sophie Knees of Handelsblatt about the opportunities and risks of “Vibe Coding”. The article is in German, but hey, who cares about language barriers these days?

I have been coding with LLMs since GPT-3.5; using it initially for relatively simple data analysis tasks in Python. Then GPT-4 came along and its coding capabilities improved remarkably. Gone was the spaghetti code, bug-fixing loops became shorter and suddenly I was able to build data wrangling solutions in Google Apps Script and Python that dramatically improved my game design workflows.

Then came the o1 preview model last year, which changed the game again. It enabled me to develop an entire AI chatbot web app prototype for a client – from scratch to deployment – in just a few days.

And now I am using the o3 model in the ChatGPT app and the agent mode in VS Code to create tools for Unity – and it just works and solves my problems! Beyond that I am experimenting with agent frameworks to find new ways to interact with the vast datasets of our F2P games. This is the science-fiction stuff I was dreaming about 40 years ago creating and playing games on my C64.

AI Use Case: Untangle quest chains

I am currently recycling quest chains from our 12 year old game The Fishing Club 3D into our new game: Fishing Friends 3D. The quests are stored in a database and are linked by using previous_quest_id fields. There a lot of quests spread over several quest chains and the order is all over the place. So it would be really nice to have all the separate quest chains laid out in a flowchart.

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Let’s see if OpenAI’s o1-model can do the trick by providing a pretty rough-shot prompt and pasting in the the “quests” table.

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After “reasoning” for 3 minutes and 7 seconds the model returns some Mermaid code and let’s me know that some previous quests IDs are missing.

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A minute later and I have my flowchart (excerpt):

I am a mentor for “Games London – Game Changer 2024”

Games London selected me as a mentor for the Game Changer 2024 cohort. I will share my experience in game design, product management and business strategy.

Breaking into the games industry is tough – especially if you’re a founder from an underrepresented background. That’s where Games London’s “Game Changer” programme comes in. Running from August to December each year, it’s a government-funded accelerator designed to help London-based game companies sharpen their business strategy, secure investment, and connect with global opportunities. It sits under the broader Games London umbrella (which also runs the London Games Festival) and is backed by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.

Game Changer isn’t a casual incubator – it’s a competitive programme tailored for founders ready to grow. Participants gain access to a mix of workshops, masterclasses, and one-to-one mentoring, covering everything from business vision and finance to legal frameworks and marketing. Alongside this training, founders develop their investor pitch and test it in front of real funders at the Game Changer Finance Market. The programme also takes participants abroad – past cohorts have travelled to major events like Slush in Helsinki – giving London studios direct access to international investors and publishers.

The impact is designed to be long-term. Across its first cohorts, Game Changer has supported dozens of London studios spanning console, mobile, VR, wellbeing, and edtech. Over two years, it aims to back 80 companies in total, equipping them not just with funding opportunities but also with the confidence, networks, and practical tools to scale. For many founders who lack connections to traditional investor networks, this can be transformative.

Still, it’s not for everyone. Places are limited, and the programme demands real commitment. But for London-based studios led by founders who are often overlooked, Game Changer represents exactly what its name suggests – a rare chance to level the playing field in a global industry.

“Viking Survivor: Thor vs Hel” is live on Google Play and Apple’s App Store

Our latest game “Viking Survivor: Thor vs Hel” is now available free-to-play on Google Play and the iOS App Store.

Viking Raider: Hordes from Hel is a roguelike survival RPG set in a dark Norse world. You play as a fallen warrior reclaiming lost powers while fighting endless waves of undead Viking hordes. Each realm brings unique challenges, from the icy wastelands of Niflheim to the fiery depths of Muspelheim, with powerful bosses and magical enemies testing your survival.

The game lets you craft your path to victory with a wide range of weapons, armour, and spells. You can upgrade gear, fuse items for stronger abilities, and even call on another player through the Fusion system to turn the tide of battle. Simple controls, daily quests, and loot-filled chests keep progress rewarding, while optional ads provide extra gems without interrupting gameplay.

“Quintana Quest” has launched

UPDATE: Quintana Quest received the “App of the Month” award!

I am pleased to announce the launch of “Quintana Quest“, one of the projects I have worked on this year. This browser-based Visual Novel/Point & Click Adventure is set in 173 CE, at the frontier of the Roman Empire along the Danube River in Bavaria.

Commissioned by the Museum Quintana in Künzing, “Quintana Quest” was developed by crushed eyes media. Game art was created by Sasanpix. My role involved developing the game’s concept and narrative, turning the archaeologists’ input into a storyline that brings historical characters, events, and places to life. 

The game is designed for use in secondary school history curriculums, offering a new way for students to engage with history.

As a history nerd, working on this project with archaeologists and diving deep into research was an incredible opportunity and great fun. I learned a lot. History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Many thanks to Roman Weindl, the director of Museum Quintana, for making “Quintana Quest” a reality.

The Fishing Club 3D – how to build an indie Game-as-a-Service

“The Fishing Club 3D” is the game I have been involved with from scratch since early 2013. I created the initial concept, UI design, system design, monetisation design, balanced the whole thing and then launched our baby on Facebook Canvas in late 2013 together with the other guys at Robot Riot. After launch I had to become a Facebook marketing expert. Armed with a $40 Facebook Ad-voucher I started to grow the player base, while also looking after the community and making sense of a whole lot of data. In between I also designed many new features we came up with after launch, which really made the game what it is today.

I gave the following presentation at the Digital Shoreditch festival in 2015. It gives a brief overview about how we managed to develop, launch, run and grow a successful f2p online game with no external funding.

Agile game design documentation – best practices

Game-as-a-service game design is ongoing and iterative by nature: the launch version usually only contains a core set of features. Based on your predictions and the feedback you receive from players you want to add or extend features later on. This leads to many small game design documents. A certain fractality is added by the fact that single features can also come with their own release roadmaps. This approach calls for a certain way of documentation that boils down into three steps:

Documenting the future

At this stage the feature or the whole game exists only in your head. You use written vision summaries, player stories, mockups/wireframes, flow charts and if required Machinations diagrams to communicate what the feature is all about. Documenting the future gets the development process going, which brings the feature into the present.

Instead of creating a Google document or a Wiki page for the initial documentation, start with creating a new issue in the issue tracking tool of your choice. I usually work with Jira/Greenhopper and hence will use it as an example. The issue can contain the initial feature description as detailed as necessary. Embed screenshots or link to external documents if required. The advantage is that the initial documentation does not live in a remote place somewhere in your knowledge base but right in the centre of your development and planning process – the agile planning board. Simply put the issue on the backlog, assign it to the team member you need feedback from and add others as watchers if necessary.

Initial feedback, questions and answers can be added in form of comments to get things going and to pull the feature from the future into the present. Other team members can create sub-tasks and request additional documentation. The fractality comes into play where you use Jira to create a roadmap for the feature itself and not only for the game as a whole. The issue works likes a documentation hub: step by step the issue can link to additional external documents like Google documents or spreadsheets where more detailed information can be found.

Documenting the present

When the feature enters the present it means development has started. This is also the point in time when your theories might fall apart because no plan survives contact with reality. Again it makes a lot of sense to add your findings and decisions in form of comments to the issue. Six weeks down the road someone might ask you why you went for solution A and not solution B or C. Answering that question might actually be quite difficult. Using the issue as a documentation hub can help by reading through the comments to understand the flow of thoughts at that stage.

Here are some reasons why documenting using a issue tracking tool helps the team to stay on the same level of knowledge:

  • The feature is accessible straight from the agile planning board, including its documentation and external links. That helps to keep things in focus.
  • You can add sub-tasks to the issue or turn it into an Epic. Again, the essential information follows the issue through the development process. There is no separation between information and process. In my experience some developers simply forget where to look for the information they need. They forget that you put that document on Google Drive a couple of weeks ago. What they do not forget is the issue they are currently working on!
  • You can change the priority of the issue, add or remove watchers, assign it to other team members, resolve, reopen, and do other useful things with it. An issue works much better as an information radiator because it is more “in everyone’s face” than a Google doc or Wiki page somewhere else. This is especially helpful when you work in a distributed/remote team setup.
  • Issues are also a good place to iterate over graphics and UI designs. It might take a bit of persuasion at the beginning to convince graphic artists that using an issue tracking system is helpful. The advantages become obvious quite quickly: No more searching for e-mails with feedback and screenshots. Instead everyone can follow the whole evolution of an asset via the comment stream of an issue.

Documenting the past

Congratulations! The feature has been released. Now it is time to wrap it up and finally put the documentation in a central Google Doc or on a Wiki page. Now the game design documentation turns from being a process assistant into a lore keeper. A game-as-a-service might be live for many years, so if the job of nurturing the experience moves to someone else further down the road, having a documentation of the past helps a lot. Setting up a documentation structure that makes information accessible instead of hiding it is a challenge in itself, though. While issues are volatile (they want to be closed eventually) the documentation on Google Drive or another online knowledge base is there to stay.