Bandersnatch demo, the making of

After binge-watching all the possible endings for Bandersnatch in one sitting, I could not take this idea off my head, I had to recreate the game as something playable. You can play it online here

At first, I thought on doing it from scratch, creating a fake 3D engine similar to Akalabeth or the early Wizardry titles. After doing some research I opted instead to use proper 3D rendering, and adapt movement and appearance so it felt like a ZX-Spectrum game. I took our entry for the 2015 7DRL Challenge, Stygian Abyss, and started chipping off stuff and adding makeup until it felt decent enough.

One thing the engine didn’t have was support for interactive “prompts”, so that had to be added completely. Jucarave was up to the task and managed to do it during the last day of 2018.

Then came the question of designing all the game content; of course, the episode doesn’t directly reveal a lot of information about the game itself… however, there were some “design notes” scattered around Stefan’s ZX.

Stefan's crazy flows
Stefan’s crazy flows

I used them to recreate a possible game flow… which frankly doesn’t make a lot of sense 😛 but that’s what it is! I also incorporated some parts that were visible on the short gameplay clips shown in the episode.

(warning, spoilers below!)

flow
Reconstructed flow for Bandersnatch demo

Luckily, the engine had support for static maps, so I mapped out the flowchart into a level layout, with each choice being an interactive item.

Bandersnatch map

And that’s it, hope you like it! And by the way, you can check the source code here if you are interested.

3 thoughts on “Bandersnatch demo, the making of

  1. I think you missed out the “Meet the White Bear Event?”… which is an interesting Easter egg on its own. Thanks for posting the screen grab!

    Also it’s great that you took upon the challenge to make the game! Well done :).

  2. Thank you! yeah, I left out some stuff from the notes. I wish I had had more time to create a bigger, more cohesive and fun plot out of the tiny pieces of available information.

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