#1 - The Making of Tick Tock: A Tale for Two

Tanja Lind Tankred and Mira Dorthe met as students at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Both came from a bachelor’s literary background. Tankred a bachelor in comparative literature, Dorthe a bachelor in creative writing and linguistics. At uni in Copenhagen, they both studied a masters in game design. It’s there they first meet at a Magic The Gathering event.

“I remember coming over to Mira very carefully, a little nervous, saying, ‘should we maybe write a thesis together?’ because we were interested in the same things, we both really loved narrative in games,” says Tankred.

Adds Dorthe: “I wasn’t so sure at the start. None of us had written anything with anyone else before. Very lone wolf people in that regard, so we were just like, ‘okay, we should just try this’ and then we just had the same vision from the start which was really cool that we came up with the idea of the game we just released.”

In the mid 2010s, two women met at uni and worked on a joint thesis on how to make a game featuring narrative that allowed for two players to share within the same narrative without being online across two devices. What it turned into was Tick Tock: A Tale for Two, a game designed around two players that could be played on two devices and inspired by escape rooms as well as the fairytale stories of Hans Christian Anderson.

This is the story of how Other Tales Interactive found its footing with Tick Tock and how it was learning to make a game as it went on.