Spatial Delivery: An ode to classic text adventures

Nostalgia is a funny thing, especially when it comes to technology. Our smartphones are faster than yesteryear’s computers. Digital cameras give us sharp images instantly, but Instagram filters mimic the grain of Polaroid photos. Everything is better, but that doesn’t always seem like what people want.

With our hearts and minds firmly fixed in the early aughts, Romy Koch, Sander de Jong and I set out to create an old-school text adventure for mobile phones. We called it Spatial Delivery.

The story

The game, designed for iOS and Android devices, invites users to explore a world not unlike their own. On the way to school, everything seems familiar, but when the player starts receiving strange text messages from an unknown source, the appearance of normality gives way to an adventure that zigzags through time lines and dimensions.

Players can collect items to unlock new paths in the story (many of which are also firmly rooted in 80s/90s/00s nostalgia), and the longer they play, the more perilous and fragmented the journey can become.

The game

The game was programmed with the Xamarin framework for C#. Sander led the programming with support from me, Romy created the visual design and contributed to the story, while I wrote the story line, item descriptions and mapped the game’s flow.