Vinterljus

Släck stadsbranden (put out the city fire) was commissioned by Linköping Municipality for Vinterljus, its 2023 winter light festival. In 1700 an overturned stable lantern burned down half of Linköping, and the game puts players back there to fight it, projected four storeys up the side of Central Palatset on Stora Torget. It was built in collaboration with other companies and freelancers; I architected the system and owned the backend, the web app and the live installation.

No app, no install, no instructions

The audience is whoever happens to walk past on a winter evening, and their patience is about ten seconds. So the join flow is a QR code straight into a browser, and the controls are a web page: Next.js and TypeScript on Vercel. Nothing to download, nothing to sign up for, nothing to explain.

Twenty strangers, one wall, no perceptible lag

The backend runs on AWS, provisioned with Terraform, with secure MQTT carrying the real-time multiplayer traffic between every phone and the projection. Ten to twenty-plus people play at once and several hundred pass through on an evening, and the thing they are all looking at is four storeys tall, which makes any latency very easy to see.

At once

10-20+ players

Per evening

Several hundred

Live

One month

Rigging a shipping container is also the job

The projector and the control laptop spent the festival inside a shipping container parked on the square, aimed at the building opposite. Fixed-price delivery of a public installation means the deliverable is not a repository. It is a game running on a wall in the cold, night after night, for a month. I did the on-site deployment and supported it through the run.