In The Sailor’s Dream, you find memories stored within objects, as small written stories. By the end of each memory, is a mysterious printer button. When touching it, players can print out a pencil drawing. These drawings do not only depict the memories themselves, but play a part in the story, as one of the characters draws them. We thought that there would be an almost magical sensation to these drawings were not visible on the screen in digital format, but instead manifested themselves as physical objects in the player’s reality; and so we came up with the idea that these could only be aquired if you print them out via an AirPrint enabled printer. We knew this was going to be an unconventional and uncompromising concept, but we thought the element of surprise and wonder would be so strong enough for those who could experience it, that we decided to go for it.

For this concept to feel magical, it was important for us that the illustrations weren’t drawn digitally. We contacted our friend Johanna Meijer, an illustrator in Copenhagen, and she kindly agreed to make them. When we had wrapped up the project, Johanna gave us a folder with every single version of the drawing which led up to the final version, along with concepts, early style tests and unused art as well.

Later, Apple changed iOS so you can preview what is about to print before printing, but in the original release, players would press a button, and drawings from the game world would appear in their world without a preview, which added to the element of wonder.