Shelf Life - save your local library!
Shelf Life is an interactive library simulation management game.
It's also a love letter to libraries and the people who run them. It's a game about empathy, third spaces, connection, and learning how to love a community that might not always love you back.
Players take on the role of a librarian working in a fractured community where events and dialogue throughout the game highlight the critical role of libraries as a space for education, empathy, and human connection.
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What's Shelf Life about?
Shelf Life is an online single-player game about books, public services, and community. Players assume the role of an interim librarian tasked with revitalizing a run-down public library. Starting with a crumbling infrastructure and disengaged patrons, players must navigate the challenges of library management, community engagement, and governmental relations to breathe new life into this vital public institution. Players' decisions shape the library’s future, highlighting the importance of civic participation, political efficacy, and agentic empowerment. Within the existing indie game market, Shelf Life offers a unique blend of strategic management, interactivity, narrative depth, and community engagement. With a diverse cast of characters, comprehensive book collection, and customizable library, Shelf Life delivers an engaging and educational gaming experience that highlights the importance of public libraries in fostering community and learning, as well as the importance of choice and agency.
Why libraries though?
Libraries no longer serve as a receptacle for books alone; in the age of surveillance, hostile architecture, and late state capitalism, these are one of the few remaining spaces where human beings can exist without an entry fee or required labor. In the library, citizens can gather to share not only knowledge but also community and resources in what sociologists call a vital ‘third space’.
Research suggests that taking an active role in video games can generate empathy and shape real-world perceptions, making it easier for players to understand and relate to others’ experiences (Sources: 1,2,3). Our vision for Shelf Life is to create the opportunity for players to sense this new reality by taking the role of a librarian in a fractured community.
This game isn’t about filling shelves or stamping library cards (although that’s definitely satisfying), but instead becoming an integral part of this endangered service and realizing that education, empathy, attention, patience, and love are always political.
The Research
These institutions are the cornerstone of democracy, knowledge, culture, and history, and they’re on the financial chopping block for a plethora of reasons.
At best, it’s the simple fact that libraries don’t make money; at worst, it’s the threat presented by a space where citizens can get organized, share information, and take care of each other. Take a look at these stats around the world to see what we mean:
This may seem like a hopeless situation, but the people these libraries serve are fighting back, and winning. New York City citizens protested and reversed $58 million in library budget cuts in June 2024.
We hope Shelf Life has the potential to inspire a similar brand of brave organization in pursuit of a world where everyone has an equal opportunity to learn.
Who made this?
Shelf Life was developed by Bad Librarian Studios, a Dublin-based development team originally formed at Trinity College Dublin. We're a small team comprised of individuals of female, POC, and queer experience. Diverse and nuanced perspectives are deeply important to us; we're excited about bringing them to our narrative design.
Ksenia Anokhina
Lead Developer
Art Director
Project Manager
I’m passionate about building complex backend and frontend architectures, finding most efficient ways to display and abstract data. My interests also extend to interactive data visualization, particularly projects with a social impact, and game development, where I enjoy highlighting important narratives through play. When I'm not deep in code, I enjoy making clothes, creating illustrations, and walking around in Google maps.
Sofia Meis
Lead Writer
Lead Narrative Designer
Concept Artist
So-called writer Sofia Meis grew up in Bangkok, studied Journalism and Political Science in Los Angeles, and worked for various humanitarian nonprofits in Washington DC before coming to Dublin. She specialises in interactive game design, program management, and mixed-methods applied research. Interests include SBCC, dim sum, and science fiction.
C. Cahill
Product Manager
Lead Sound & Environment Engineer
Product Designer
Wearer of many hats, I was born in Ireland and raised in the great state of New Jersey. Before returning to Dublin for postgrad, I completed a B.S in Media Studies at Boston University. It was here that a lifelong love of RPGs morphed from a nerdy hobby to an academic fixation. I spend a LOT of time imagining realities, trying to digitize the human experience without compromising organic emotion, and thinking about ways to develop the gaming industry’s answer to the Great American Novel. I also make indie rock, which came in handy while developing the soundtrack for this game!
Emily Pan
Lead UI/UX Designer
Creative Director
Concept Artist
With a background in Illustration for the Entertainment Industry, I focus on designing art that is both impactful and memorable. Outside of work, I enjoy cozy games, scribbling story ideas, and watching films. My love for cats and passion for traveling inspire my creative process. I thrive in aesthetic spaces that encourage creativity and innovation.
Goda Vertelkaite
Environmental Storyteller
From my bachelor study origins in Communications and Media, to my master’s in Interactive Digital Media, I am both a storyteller and open book by heart. From observing what’s out there, to thinking instead what “could be”—I enjoy telling stories through unconventional and compelling means. I love to collaborate and share my thoughts with others, and contribute to the design of narrative-rich experiences, evoking the need for exploration and inspiring the user to uncover hidden details through experiencing the world in new and enriching ways.
Development
Shelf Life was developed between June and August 2024 and took a lot of love, hard work, and snack breaks. We have close to 100 pages of planning documentation, narrative writing, and project requirements documents. The original kernel of this project was to marry three concepts we all cared about:
- Social progress and mutual aid
- Thoughtful, narratively rich games
- Really good books, and where you find them.
We broke down into a few natural teams, with some overlap along the way:
UI/UX
The UI team, led by Emily Pan, defined the feel and look of this game. We wanted to nail down a consistent achievable and scalable aesthetic, taking inspiration from games like Stardew Valley, Gourdlets, Fish Bowl, Half Past Fate, and many many more.
Initial sketches came to life with color, followed by a pixelization treatment in an online application called Piskel. from characters to buttons to backgrounds, this team worked hard to build the world of Shelf Life. You would not believe how big our Figma board was by the time we wrapped. Seriously, it's huge.
Development
Our one-man coding (Ksenia Anokhina) team brings this 2D Unity game to life, focusing on delivering a full-bodied narrative experience within a two-hour gameplay window. Working closely with the narrative and UI/UX teams, our developer ensured that the game's mechanics seamlessly integrated with its rich storytelling.
Our game environment runs smoothly on WebGL, making it accessible directly through the browser without the need for downloads. From scripting the interactions to fine-tuning the gameplay, every aspect of Shelf Life was meticulously crafted to provide players with a memorable and immersive experience, complete with responsive controls and a world that feels alive.
Narrative Design
The narrative team, led by Sofia Meis with Goda Vertelkaite, created the heart and soul of this game. While the mechanics and graphics are a visual delight Shelf Life comes alive in the conversations players have with their library's patrons. The narrative team transformed the nebulous idea of a broken community into twenty two richly developed characters (not counting those who were cut for time) players will love, hate, or hate to love.
This team began working in Twine, a branching story-writing software, where they wrote over 80,000 words. That writing was turned into in-game dialogue by Unity coder and alchemist Ksenia on the Coding Team.
Atmosphere
Major influences for the soundtrack of this game include Mort Garson's Plantasia (1976), Aphex Twin's ambient works, and Ricky Eat Acid's Three Love Songs (2014). All the songs in this game are original compositions by the sound team under C. Cahill. Listen to the soundtrack here:
Want to know more?
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