When Dan Pearce was in primary school, he told his friends that he had won a competition to have one of his ideas made into a video game by an international video game publisher. It was a lie, but one Pearce coolly upheld, inviting his friends to pitch in ideas for how the game could be improved. “It basically turned into a two-year exercise in designing as a group and getting feedback on my ideas,” he recalls today. “That said, I do still feel very guilty about maintaining the lie for so long.”
Thanks to this formative experience, by the age of 10, Pearce, who lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire, knew that he wanted to become a game designer. The following year he bought a copy of RPG Maker, a simple game-making tool for Sony’s PlayStation. The first game he made was a pastiche of his favourite Nintendo games – The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and Pokémon. “It was basically just me taking aesthetic elements that I liked in various pieces of media,” he says. “There was an island floating in the sky because I liked a Gorillaz music video. I once bunked off school for two weeks so that I could just work on that game.”
Despite his investment, Pearce eventually scrapped the project and began learning how to program games in earnest. Ten Second Ninja was the first fruit of his study, a platform game in which each level requires you to defeat all of the on-screen enemies within 10 seconds. The diminutive ninja you control has just two attacks, one of which, a hurled shuriken, can be used only thee times per level, forcing players to make snapshot, yet crucial, decisions. “One half of my brain is obsessed with systems and pure, gameplay-focused design,” he says. “This is the kind of design that I end up doing the most, and find the easiest: spatial games that are essentially just maths problems in disguise.”
In 2013, Pearce released a different kind of game, one that he says comes from a different part of his design sensibility. Castles in the Sky is a simple, wistful game (Pearce describes it as an “interactive storybook”), in which you play a young boy who leaves the Earth by leaping between clouds. The game lasts only a few minutes and is sound-tracked by a melancholic piano score, written and performed by Pearce’s collaborator, Jack de Quidt. It is, to Pearce’s mind, a rumination on growing up.
“I find this kind of work a lot more emotionally exhausting,” says Pearce. “It requires a lot of self-assessment and contemplation. The game was a way of trying to evoke the awe and energy of being a kid. In a way, it helped me let go of childhood. It’s made me much happier and a lot more comfortable about turning into an adult.”
