Fairside Novels are choice-driven narrative adventures in Fairside Stories, a library of narrative games for kids 7-12 created under my design leadership. There are three distinct game styles - combat, strategy, and Fairside Novels. The game style was reskinned eleven times to create multiple narratives. (More on Fairside Stories here)

In Fairside Novels players can be battling pirates, saving dogs from fires, and even doing mundane things like going for sleepovers. The situations are equal parts relatable and exciting. The player’s actions are based on character archetypes, and lead to branching stories culminate in one of three distinct endings.

The core mechanics are:

• Branching Narratives: Every choice leads down a different path, making each playthrough unique. This is standard visual novel

• Trait Framework: This is what sets these visual novels apart. Decisions reflect the traits of four classic archetypes, The Monk, The Knight, The Friend, The Rogue aka The Monk, The Palladin, The Cleric, The Rogue. These form the emotional core of the characters’ journeys.

I was involved in creating this game from 0-1. Like with the other game styles in Fairside Stories, I was Creator, Game Director, Narrative Designer, and evangelizer.

• Game Design: Developed the game's structure, balancing a complex trait system with a standard visual novel format.

• Narrative Creation: Set the tone and style, ensuring that choices had meaningful consequences. We iterated on this throughout the creation of narrative reskins - writing shorter and more interactive visual novels as time went on and player feedback came in.

• World Building: Developed the Fairside world and the trait framework IP, the backbone of the novels and the product (more here).

• Player Collaboration: The most exciting thing of all was a month-long immersive co-design with 550 kids in Dubai. Thanks to them we have wild ideas like pushing pirates, pushing people off lifeboats, and long-lost tribes! I loved some of these ideas so much that I incorporated them into visual novels I wrote myself, like the pirate-themed "Fairside at Sea."

The novels have worked well with the audience and definitely got them talking. One time we had kids debate the ending of Fairside on Fire (it gets dark). The only thing they like better than a happy ending is pushing people off boats.

Fairside Stories 101: All of the Fairside games feature the same IP & underlying character framework, which get kids to explore kindness, integrity, and resilience. More about the parent app Fairside Stories and my work on it here here.

Fairside Stories was launched in 2021. The most popular game in it, Detention Disaster, was co-designed with kids and has more than 50,000 plays around the world. The game is currently on production hiatus because we ran out of money, but you can still download and play it on Android and iOS. I’d love to hear what you think