Forest of Sleep is born out of a central collaboration between Ed and Nicolai Troshinsky, who have built a team around them, all of whom influence the design and development of the game. Forest of Sleep didn’t really come alive in its current form until Ed began to bounce ideas back and forth with Nicolai, grappling with the question of procedural generation in stories. Initially, he and Nicolai kept talking about ‘a roguelike in a forest’:
“We were talking about making a kind of game where you go through several encounters, it was a very glib description of it, but that was our thinking: a roguelike in a forest. Then there was some point at which Nicolai and I started talking about generating stories.” ~ Ed
This shift happened gradually over 2015, made up of design discussions, mockups, useful disagreements and several conceptual iterations until they reached a common and agreed upon understanding of what they were setting out to make. Something that Ed says is “more complicated but hopefully also more interesting than the original idea”. As the idea grew between Nicolai and Ed, it became more about stories, and creating a reflective space to play in, to create your own connections and meanings for things.
“That’s a question for procedurally generated content: how does it come to mean something for someone playing? This is a philosophical rabbit hole that I’m quite obsessed with: “how does meaning arise from partial randomness inside a system?” ~ Ed
It’s important to state, however, that at the heart of the Story System in Forest of Sleep isn’t an intention to replicate a human storyteller, but rather to make an instrument that the player plays with. We don’t want to build a game that can make up a story in the same way a human can, but rather to explore the player’s storytelling instincts through a system that allows story and meaning to emerge.
