This week we discuss the peculiarities of the transmedia production of The Day I Became A Bird, a children's book being adapted into game form by Scotland's Hyper Luminal Studios. Author Ingrid Chabbert and art manager James Law explain how the project came to fruition.

We also talk to Playing For The Planet about its new toolkit for studios to better embed environmental themes into game stories, and how that can contribute to players becoming agents of change.

"Transmediality" has become something of a topic du jour, thanks in no small part to the continuing horrors of the game industry's myriad financial and employment woes. With the carnage surrounding western developers and publishers continuing, as evidenced this week by Epic discarding 1,000 staff, multi-team, multimedia deals are an obvious goal for those seeking to maximise IPs both in terms of reach and revenue. Arkane, the celebrated Netflix League Of Legends cartoon produced by French studio Fortiche Production in conjunction with Riot, is a good example of the power of the transmedial approach.

But not every IP owner arrives at this situation intentionally, nor is transmediality reserved for huge productions based on market-leading products.

The Day I Became A Bird, written by French author Ingrid Chabbert and illustrated by Raúl Nieto Guridi, is one such example. Originally published in 2015, this poetic children's picture book has since been adapted into an animated short directed by Oscar winner Andrew Ruhemann and London-based Passion Pictures, and is now being developed into a cozy game by Dundee's Hyper Luminal Studios. Far from the measured strategising of larger IP holders such as Riot, Chabbert had no idea of the transmedial potential of her book. She couldn't even get it published at first.

"No publisher wanted this story," she tells Knowledge. "We sent it everywhere. It was a tiny Spanish publisher that gave it its chance."

The book follows Frank, a young boy struggling with his first love for a classmate, Sylvia, who is obsessed with birds. He decides to start behaving like a bird in order to attract her attention, building a nest and wearing feathers. It's a touching story of love, identity and transformation.

A first edition, released by A Buen Paso, a Barcelona-based independent book publisher, was the start of a long, ongoing journey for Chabbert's story. Overseas rights were sold by her agent, with the book being translated for "every continent." At this stage, literary publishers weren't the only media businesses taking note.

"We had a proposition from Passion Pictures," says Chabbert. "It was completely unexpected. And after that was the videogame. It's a waking dream, as we say in French. It's beautiful revenge for a story that no one would believe in apart from Raúl and I. It's awesome, incredible."

When the idea of a videogame was initially proposed, however, Chabbert had reservations.

"At first, to be honest, I was very doubtful when I was told, 'We want to turn it into a videogame.' I didn’t understand. I was like, 'Why this book? It's not Super Mario.'

"Then they explained to me what cozy games were, and I saw the first attempts and I was just, 'Wow.' I didn’t actually realise that people could enjoy that kind of game."

While the author may not have immediately realised the interactive potential of The Day I Became A Bird, Hyper Luminal Games quickly saw it as a close fit to the studio's culture. The developer had already shown its commitment to gentler games with 2024's Pine Hearts, an unashamedly cozy title that forcibly eschews combat. 

"We make stuff with real heart, and we're genuinely trying to use games that aren't too gory or too scary," says Hyper Luminal art manager James Law. 

"But they're still powerful, right? They can pack an emotional punch. Bird was like a perfect marriage. We felt it could be really mechanically deep. And it was just kind of a beautiful little story by itself." 

Interactivity is, of course, the principle addition afforded by any game adaptation, and Hyper Luminal faced base questions in that regard. Delivering a unique take on Chabbert's whimsical narrative intentions while preserving its message was always at the centre of the game's conception. 

"How can you use mechanics, interactivity and lingering in space to tell the same sort of emotions? How do you make storybook rules apply to a game world?" 

While Hyper Luminal took great care to deliver on the promises of the book – making Frank stumble every time he walks to display his awkwardness, for example, and aiming for a resolutely hand-drawn aesthetic – the development's transmedial aspect underlined the fashion in which partners in this type of set-up interact. Or not. 

"I've not even spoken to her or met her, unfortunately," says Law when asked about the studio's relationship with Chabbert. "But we heard about midway through that we had her blessing, that she'd seen the progress and was really, really happy."

Passion project 

Hyper Luminal's main point of contact in the development process was Passion Pictures, which had created the animated short in Unreal Engine and had therefore already transferred the book's concept to 3D. The game developer had no rights to use anything directly from the book, including its illustrations, accentuating the potential restraints involved in this type of work. Hyper Luminal, however, understands perfectly the intention of transmedial development. 

"The game was like the third leg of a stool," says Law. "It didn't replace either of the other legs, but could enrich them. You could watch any leg, and each one of them can overlap and help the other, like three tunes that harmonise." 

The final track of this particular harmony is about to be sung. The Day I Became A Bird doesn't have a firm release date as yet, but we're assured publisher Numskull Games will announce one "quite soon." The game will be in the official selection at the London Games Festival, on April 13–19, and will eventually release on PC (a demo is available via Steam), PS5 and Switch. 

Despite the closing of this chapter of Chabbert's "little" story – one that became a globe-spanning book, an internationally recognised animated short and a cross-platform videogame – the author has clearly been marked by the experience. Writing will always be her focus, but the transmedia concept has widened her outlook. 

"There are some big gamers among my colleagues, so they're very familiar with videogames and what's going on in that space," she says. 

"That wasn't the case for me, so I'm a bit like a bird fallen out of the nest when it comes to this. But at the same time it’s wonderful, because it means I can bring a slightly innocent perspective to it, almost like I'm discovering it with a child's eyes. Which works well, since we're talking about children. 

"So, yeah, it really amazes me to be part of all this. And that's why it makes me want to ask, if I ever have this opportunity again: 'Please, could I be a bit more involved?'"

French-English translation by Patrick Garratt.

For the past seven years, UN-backed Playing for the Planet has steered the industry towards more environmentally conscious approaches, from its annual game jam to decarbonisation plans. With over 50 members committed to its mission to champion ecology in game creation, from major triple-A studios to trade organisations, the organisation has now published a guide about embedding environmental themes into game stories. 

Called Beyond the Endgame: How Climate and Nature Enhance Game Narrative, it was written in collaboration with Context Collaborative (behind the Hollywood Climate Summit) and NRDC's Rewrite the Future. 

"The opportunity is really [strong] for games when it comes to exploring this topic in a way that film and TV are limited from, just due to the [interactive] nature of the medium," project manager Alex Avard tells Knowledge. 

The guidance is rooted in Playing for the Planet's highly popular Green Game Jam, which encourages studios to create "green activations": a new piece in the game to engage playerbases with environmental topics. 

"In speaking to our members, I felt there was an opportunity to do more beyond green game design – storytelling came up quite a lot," Avard explains. "This was twinned with the fact that, in film and TV, a lot of work is going on looking at how to explore, depict, reflect, and engage on climate topics in a way that's healthy and good practice. You're already seeing the fruits of that in things like Don't Look Up. There have been good examples in games that come up organically, but nothing particularly tangible. So we felt like that was a good area for us to step into as an evolution of our mission."

Primarily, the guide targets storytellers – writers, narrative designers, creative directors – to help them understand the questions they can ask themselves about what their game is saying about the environment. The idea isn't to push climate themes into an unrelated narrative, but to land on a depiction that's organic and aligned with the existing creative vision. 

Avard compares the approach to the Bechdel test: simple questions you can ask yourself about how your story presents the topic in an authentic way (which you can easily find in the guidance's executive summary). 

"It's about looking at the 'green areas' in their game and thinking about what they can do to present them in a more holistic way. The first [aspect] is world building. We've noticed that a lot of games – particularly future-facing speculative fiction – present the future as an inevitable dystopia. Not only that, they trivialise the dystopia to the point where it's just a playground to be enjoyed rather than feared. This approach can be a good alarm bell to get people to wake up to our current trajectory as a planet, but when they're over-abundant, people feel like they have no power to change that trajectory. 

"What we recommend is getting people to start thinking about the futures that we want to live in, and how we can put players in them in a way that makes them feel like they can be agents toward generating those futures. That's a profound and ambitious suggestion for developers, but we wanted to put it out there for those in the early conceptualisation stages of their games."

At a smaller scale, the guidance encourages developers to scrutinise their systems and mechanics, as well as how they support underlying narrative about their world. One example given by Avard is Another Crab's Treasure, which uses microplastics as in-game currency.  

"There's not a huge deal made about it – it’s just there. I think that is what can bypass the idea of being preachy, when you just have a system in the game that supports the world. This gets people thinking: 'What does it say about that world if the most abundant item to be used as a currency is microplastics?' 

"We try to have this sliding scale of ambition: from really big-picture stuff that can inspire others to feel like they're agents of change in the real world, to the micro-systems that can help nudge people and get them thinking about the world around them." 

Avard highlights common assumptions about climate fiction not being commercially viable. This has of course been proven wrong in the game space by successes such as Sony's Horizon franchise, or Final Fantasy VII – which Avard describes as "the most explicitly environmentally charged game," with 15 million units sold. 

"[Another] example is Wooga, a Berlin-based studio that made June's Journey," Avard adds. "[It] ostensibly doesn't have anything to do with [climate change] but they participated in the jam last year and the activation did really well for them, to the point where they pointed to it as a key driver of revenue in their quarterly results." 

Playing for the Planet also wants to dispel the misconception that if studios want to say something about climate in their games, it has to be explicit eco-fiction. 

"Our hope is that we destigmatise climate storytelling in games. I feel like there is this sense that it's a risk for studios to engage in this work, but we want it to feel commonplace. There are so many games saying something about climate and nature, without even meaning to. All it requires is awareness on the studio's part to amplify that. There’s an untapped audience we could be accessing – and film and TV are proving that it's ready to see more of those stories."

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Highlights from industry chat channels

If Control Resonant was a typical sequel, perhaps the game's title would be Control 2 instead. But that's not what Helsinki studio Remedy set out to create. "With Control, we always wanted it to be different," creative director Mikael Kasurinen tells us. "It's not the story of a single person who goes from one game to another. It's all about the world, [a setting] that feels like it existed before you entered it, that contains not just one story, but a lot of different types of stories." In the cover feature of Edge 422, available now, we look at how this manifests in new protagonist Dylan Faden, the sequel's emphasis on melee combat, its unique vision of New York, and much more.  

Elsewhere in features, we meet with Bennett Foddy to discover what drives him to push us over the edge with the twisted delights of Getting Over It and Baby Steps, and also investigate how games are getting better at virtual romance. In The Making Of, we talk to IO Interactive about switching from the stealth of Hitman to the squad-based shooting of Freedom Fighters, and in Studio Profile meet with the founders of Bad Viking, the team behind the critically acclaimed Strange Horticulture and Strange Antiquities. In Knowledge, we look at how fan remakes are being driven by previously unseen levels of ambition, and fire up the uncommonly durable Ages Of Empires II once more for Time Extend.  

Aphelion, Genigods: Nezha and Stupid Never Dies lead our preview section, and in Play we run the rule over new releases including Resident Evil Requiem, John Carpenter's Toxic Commando, Planet Of Lana II: Children Of The Leaf, Mario Tennis Fever and Monster Hunter Stories 3. Naturally, there is lots more, too, including Alex Spencer's tour of Meta's Horizon Worlds, just as the company rethinks its approach to this whole metaverse thing. 

Edge 422 is available from UK newsagents now, and online here. If you're in a subscribing kind of mood, for a limited time you can get your first three issues for £5.

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, don't forget to share your feedback with us by email ([email protected]), and follow us via Bluesky and LinkedIn.