Dear Reader
I’m a level-designer and literary curator for the Apple Arcade launch game, Dear Reader by Local No 12.
The Game
Dear Reader is a game of wordplay, using all public domain literature, out now on Apple Arcade for iPhones, iPads, and the Apple TV. The game lets players puzzle their way through classic literature, using more than a dozen different game modes, like filling in the blanks and rearranging sentences to solving anagrams and unscrambling misspelled words. By successfully completing puzzles and progressing through books, players gain ink to purchase new books from the bookstore. Each week new books shuffle in and out of the bookstore, providing tons of content to play-through.
My Role
I am a level-designer and literary curator for the Dear Reader team, which means I help select titles to include in the game as well as actually edit the books down to playable sections. Literary level-design is one of the most interesting and complicated types of level-design work I’ve done! In the game, each book consists of a series of volumes. Each volume is in turn filled with 10 chapters. My job is to take the full text of a novel, play, poem, or short story and cut it down to fit into the chapter-volume-book structure of the game. When designing levels for this game I’m balancing pacing and difficulty progression like any other game, but also making sure there’s a cohesive narrative arc throughout each chapter, volume, and book.
In addition to selecting book passages to include in the game, for each chapter I write a chapter title and select a pull-quote from the selection to reinforce key themes, characters, or actions in that part of the book. Finally, for each volume of a book I write 2-4 “notes from the editor,” which is our way of adding commentary to our selections. Commentaries are super important to providing extra context to a story (for example if we have skipped ahead in a book or want to provide some biographical information about the author, explain the use of outdated language, etc), and give us, the literary curators some space to talk about why we chose the book, or provide contemporary takes on older pieces of literature.
Finally, as literary curator I work with a team who hopes to curate a beautiful blend of literary tastes, author perspectives, and variety of genre to our players. In fact, our inclusion of commentaries in the game comes from trying to explain some of those choices, teach players about authors and time periods they may be unfamiliar with, and point out parts of these works that stand out to us in various ways. The public domain contains a disproportionate number of straight, white, western male works, and we’ve been very intentional in seeking out works by as broad of group of authors as possible.
