The Idea
In the fall of 2021, I was assigned by my employer, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/33626/lucky-duck-games“>Lucky Duck games, the task of designing a new digital hybrid game for children. The perspective of creating a game from scratch, within a setting of my choice, got me truly excited.
Moreover, since I also became a game director and a writer for the project, I enjoyed big creative freedom. The next three years were an amazing adventure for me, which resulted in Toriki: The Castaway Island. Eventually the design ended up being a family game, not a children’s one as planned, after early tests showed that adults had a great time playing it as well.
As I look back, I believe the reason I chose the 19th century deserted island setting was because of the books I read as a child: Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and, of course, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. These are all pretty old and rarely read nowadays, but their influence on popular culture can’t be overstated. In fact, gameplay in Toriki relies heavily on the assumption that even though none of us have been marooned on a deserted island, we all have at least a vague idea of how to kindle a fire, build a raft, or make a spear thanks to us reading and watching countless castaway stories. The playtest results confirmed this assumption, and I could scatter different resources over the island, confident that players (even relatively young ones) would know how to combine them into useful items.
I personally enjoy all the “primitive technology” stuff. Knapping tiny spearheads like the one below and hafting them on a stick is one of my favorite summer holiday lying-on-a-beach activities. Maybe if I were more into sandcastles, you’d be reading a designer’s diary for a game about a medieval city siege…
Clearly, I’m not the only one who loves crafting. Being able to choose the proper two item cards and combine them by scanning their QR codes to create a new item became one of the most satisfying moments for players — and the young generation raised on Minecraft proved to be pretty good at it.
One of Toriki‘s core concepts was to provide relaxing, leisurely gameplay. The game is fully co-operative, and players are never encouraged to compete with one another. It’s technically impossible for a player character to die or to make an irreversible mistake. If you feel stuck and don’t know what to do, you can always return to the main camp and ask the professor for advice. The ultimate goal, of course, is to leave the island, but players are encouraged not to hurry too much and to spend as much time exploring the island as they wish.
Initially, I didn’t even want to have a final score, but many playtesters requested it as both an incentive for not using the professor’s hints too often (since hints lower your score) and the “Well done!” message that would acknowledge their accomplishments once they finish the game. Eventually, we decided to display the score on the final screen on a scale from 1-10 adorable starfishes, but the Toriki experience is much more about the journey than the destination.
The Name
For most of the duration of this project, the game was known internally as “Young Castaways”. (To this day, all the QR codes in the game start with “YC”.) Our colleagues from the sales and marketing team made a valid point, though, suggesting that for the sake of recognizability it would be better to use the name of the island in the title since it wouldn’t be translated in localized versions of the game. Hence, I had to give an official name to the no man’s land where these teenage castaways were stranded.
I decided the Māori word “tōriki” — which means “to be small” or “to be distant” — made perfect sense since the island in the game is both. The name was short, and I liked the sound of it. I also believed it felt like a proper island name. Later, I learned that the unforgettable Robert Zemeckis film Cast Away with Tom Hanks was shot on a Melanesian island named Monuriki…which proved at least that the -riki part was legit.
As Toriki was meant to be an uncharted island, we didn’t want it to be placed in a specific area on the map or associated with any particular nation. We therefore removed the dash from above the “ō”. As a result, one can’t tell now whether the island derives its name from the Māori term or from the identically spelled (in a Latin alphabet) Japanese word describing a bonsai cultivation technique. Thus, if you ever wonder where exactly Toriki is on a world map, I’d say somewhere between Japan and New Zealand.
The Map
Every sea adventure starts with a map, and from the beginning I wanted it to be the centerpiece of the game. Aside from its obvious function as a hexagonal grid through which the meeples could move, it had two major functions: to draw the players’ attention to the table rather than to the app, and to provide them with important visual clues. Because of that, even the first playtests had to be done on a map with all of the elements already drawn. Therefore, early players had a unique opportunity to have direct contact with art created by me, like the piece below.
Luckily, an extremely talented illustrator, Kary Jane, soon joined the project and brought into being stunning scenery for our adventure.
As you can see below, we eventually decided to remove the QR codes from the map and have players enter a location number into the app instead. Not only did this make gameplay smoother, but it also allowed us to better showcase the beautiful artwork. I wish I could present the whole map here, but that would be a spoiler, so all I can share is the first module out of four.
The Species
Initially I planned to populate Toriki island with real-life plants and animals. Finding the right species to have all the properties needed for the story and mechanisms turned out to be a real struggle, though, especially since my biologist’s conscience wouldn’t allow me to deviate from the truth too much. The solution was to invent new species that could be tailored to the gameplay’s needs. It was great fun to freely create plants and animals previously unknown to science, but a careful observer would spot many real-life inspirations.
Since we needed to highlight the look of the island’s unique flora and fauna, the idea of the Wildlife Catalog emerged and another extremely talented illustrator working with us, Tomek Larek, made sure all the species looked stunning. The first animal he drew for us was the chubby flightless bird with madness in its eyes that you see here:
Introducing the Wildlife Catalog also enabled us to have players give scientific names of their choice to the newly discovered species, which turned out to be a lot of fun, especially for children. After each playtest, I would collect the Wildlife Catalog to see what creative names the players came up with this time. They ranged from fake Latin terms to clever wordplay to affectionate pet names.
The Coins and The Treasure
Needless to say, a hidden pirate’s treasure is a must when telling a story of a deserted island. There’s not much I can say without spoilers, but I remembered to bury one for you on Toriki.
What I didn’t plan for initially, though, were gold coins hidden in various places on the map. The idea came to me once I struggled with designing a location where a player could perform an additional action on top of the usual “use an item” action. At that time, only that additional action gave any benefit, but I knew a player would always want to use an item, too, and the specificity of this particular location seemed to encourage digging. Initially, I added custom text along the lines of “After a couple of hours digging through the mud, you discover…more mud”, but I believed a player would expect their effort to be rewarded with something more than a bad joke, so I hid a coin there.
And since I did it once, why not place more coins on the island?
That’s how we ended up with the coin tokens and the coin board, with visual clues drawn on it by yet another talented artist, Ania Przybyłko. The coin itself is inspired by a 19th century British sovereign with the coat of arms changed to a fictional one. You might notice that among other symbols there’s a duck on it, making it a truly lucky coin. The early tests showed that even though the coin hunt didn’t contribute to the castaways’ survival on Toriki, it was great fun for young players.
The Mystery
For players to feel the thrill of discovering the unknown, we needed to keep numerous components secret until they entered gameplay. In the game, the castaways can initially explore only a small part of the island limited by the ocean shore, impassable mountains, and a rushing river. Only once they figure out how to pass each of these barriers is a new map module removed from its envelope and put into play.
Similarly, no peeking at the cards is allowed until the app instructs you to take a specific one from the deck. There’s also a mysterious diary you can unfold and read only once you find it somewhere on the island.
On top of that, we wanted a set of stickers that players would put on the camp board and on the map to mark how they change as a result of the players’ actions or world events. The stickers needed to remain hidden until mentioned by the app, so we had to come up with a clever way of storing them. We wanted them to be arranged into something resembling an advent calendar: a sheet of stickers hidden in a card-stock envelope with perforated “windows” you would open to remove the respective sticker once the app tells you to do so.
Sounded easy, didn’t work. After ordering several calendar samples from the factory, we concluded that we couldn’t have a sticker solution that was convenient, durable, and cost-effective at the same time.
Luckily, we came up with an alternative: a triple-layer punchboard from which you can remove tokens and place them on the map or camp board. Not only did this work great and turn out to be cheaper to manufacture than the stickers, but it also was fully reusable. Once you finish the game, you can insert the tokens back into the board, then have another go trying a different path to victory — or wait a couple of months until you forget much of your adventures and are ready to relive them. This way, the only component that gets used up during the game is the Wildlife Catalog in which you take notes (although you can download it in PDF format from our website and print it).
The Narrative
All of the games I’ve worked on at Lucky Duck games were narrative ones, with Toriki being the first one aimed at families. Since I also write children’s books as my other job, it was interesting to have these two professional areas overlap in this project — and having finished it, I must say I’d love to do more games like this!
I do like a good crime story, so I had fun writing for <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/60545/game-chronicles-of-crime”>Chronicles of Crime, and as a Greek mythology fan I enjoyed writing for Divinus, but nothing compares to the peacefulness of creating your own deserted island. Designing murder-mystery scenarios meant that for long months all I did was write dialogue full of lies, envy, hate, and grief, while working on Toriki had me mentally sunbathing on a beach surrounded by the undisturbed peace of nature for a couple of hours each day.
Later in development, when the software had implemented the background sounds created by the unfailing Barry Doublet, I could also enjoy the crashing of waves, rustling of leaves, and cackling of my favorite chubby birds.
The main reason I enjoy writing interactive fiction so much is that during playtests I can observe how people experience the narrative. With Toriki, I saw what excited them, what they were curious about, and what they wanted to do — and if the game didn’t allow them to do it, I could add such a possibility in the next iteration. I wish I could have the same experience with my books: listening to how parents read them to their children, discovering at which points they’re laughing and what they find interesting.
I think it’s obvious at this point that while working on Toriki, I was truly happy that I could do such cool things for my job. I hope that the fun I had somehow permeated the game itself, and you’ll have a good time playing it, too. Let me know!
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