NORTHERN LIGHTS

Inside the dioramic mind of Oskar Stålberg, creator of TOWNSCAPER

- Jeremy Peel

Oskar Stålberg joined UsTwo Games for two reasons. Firstly, the pay was better than he could get at Ubisoft. And secondly, like 26 million others with a mobile phone, he'd been wowed by Monument Valley-the mesmeric, Escher-like puzzle game about manipulating miniature dioramas.

As it turned out, however, Monument Valley was the business of UsTwo's London office. Working in Malmö, Stålberg was stuck instead with a Play-Doh project-not the kind of snowglobe worldbuilding he'd hoped for.

Since going indie, Stålberg has made up for lost time-making a name for himself as a developer of exquisite, shrunken worlds. "I've always been fascinated by those kinds of things," he says. "I've always liked looking at maps." Since Google Earth came out 20 years ago, Stålberg has spent many happy hours flying around its facsimile planet, appreciating the geological and manmade patterns that can only be observed from a great height.

His first attempt to tap into that joy was, you might say, Monument Valley-esque: a maze game about picking a path across a tiny urban environment. "You were maybe going to be a cat jumping around," he says. "Maybe delivering mail or something. But I didn't manage to make that fun."