"Consciously everything I make is about to tip over": Precarious creativity and Bulwark's evolving demo

In a shed behind his house, Tomas Sala is building an ocean. Oceans are his thing, of course, and he's built them before. But the shed is new. Last time I saw Sala on a Zoom screen he was working on his debut game, The Falconeer, and working from an attic whose floors were strewn with toys discarded by Sala's newborn baby. Today, he's working on a follow-up, Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles. Bulwark is set in the same watery world as The Falconeer but instead of being an airborne action game it's something more city-builderish. Emphasis on the ish. Genre is a wonderful problem here. But anyway, that shed!

'I'm living the Roald Dahl lifestyle,' Sala tells me. 'Working from my garden. Which is just smashing.'

The game Sala's building isn't just a very different genre to The Falconeer. It's a very different way of putting a game out into the world. That's very much on purpose. Rather than aiming for a distant release date, Sala's already put Bulwark up on Steam in the form of what he calls an 'Evolving demo'. It's free to play. It changes over time. Sala adds and subtracts and can explore feedback.

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