Black Mirror: Thronglets

Night School hadn’t made a game with mechanics as dense and dynamic as those in Thronglets before. But we had the game from the Black Mirror episode as a guiding light. We took inspiration from it, other life sim games of the 90’s like Populous and SimCity, as well as newer, more subversive games like Outlanders to stitch together a unique but familiar city builder. We wanted the gameplay to drive the story rather than the other way around—so the growth (and decline) of your Thronglet population is what thrusts the story forward. I spearheaded the narrative systems design early on, and guided the team through crafting something unique, weird, and ambiguous.

We repeated often that we wanted the game to feel like an artifact from the Black Mirror episode Plaything—as if the exact game binary that players saw Cameron (played by Peter Capaldi and Lewis Gribben) discover in the episode was in the player’s hands. Our narrative designer, my co-director and I worked directly with Charlie Brooker—the Black Mirror showrunner and writer—to develop the game alongside the episode, which launched day and date with the game. Charlie’s feedback was invaluable to get the tone and pacing of the game just right, and our back-and-forth even influenced the episode’s visual and audio design.

Even though we wanted real game systems to drive the game forward, we still wanted to tell a story collaboratively with the player. Using well-known text adventure systems like rich text and dialogue choices, we wove a tale of the thronglets’ evolution from benign game characters to a real-world threat—or savior?—that the player’s actions shaped in surprising and unexpected ways.

The 2-hour experience concludes with a personality test that judges you based on your gameplay actions. I worked closely with our narrative designer, Hannah Nicklin, and our UI designer, Ena Kim, to balance the personality trait logic and visual layout of the final shareable piece. We wanted the ten personalities to be relatively evenly distributed, each one poking fun at the player’s flaws rather than their admirable traits, keeping on theme for the game’s satirical tone. The shareable art was featured in Game Maker’s Sketchbook 2025.

My tech art contribution to this project was a realistic dot-matrix CRT effect. If you take a magnifying glass to your phone screen, you can see the colors split into RGB values. This took a bit of experimenting and tuning, since I had to make this work for multiple screen resolutions without causing a moiré pattern or destroying the artists’ intentions. In the end, it keeps the colors from looking too clean and cut-and-dry, keeping the player subconsciously aware that they’re playing a game within a game.