IN News towerSundays are everything. Developer Sparrow Night's newspaper management game gives the player one week to write a report, print and distribute a weekly newspaper, and do everything in between, be it decorating an office with plants, managing a city power struggle, or optimizing workstations. All of this matters when determining what role your newspaper will play in a fictional version of New York in the 1930s.
Although Sparrow Night was founded in 2019 by Jan-Marten Nachtegeller and Stefan Reismus, Nachtegeller found inspiration for News tower in 2016 after reading Mashable feature for photos in the New York Times of the 1940s, where dozens of black-and-white photographs showed the news-making process of the time. Reporters smoke cigarettes at dirty desks in a crowded newsroom. People at typewriters write down messages received by wire from all over the world. Paper falls from the printers onto the floor, which is no longer visible under the white sheets. Typesetters make molds to make newspaper plates for printing.
It's a complex process that's perfect for a video game. However, it wasn't until 2017 that Nachtegeller began conceptualizing what the game could look like after playing with Weappy Studio. This is the Police. “I immediately thought of a newspaper project,” he said.
Reissmus and Nachtegeller began work on News tower at the end of 2018–2019. Bart van de Sande joined the team in 2020, serving as both developer and composer. News towermusic. Other team members later joined the process, including support from publisher Twin Sails Interactive. Over the past six years, Sparrow Night has iterated on the game's core premise, drawing on the newspaper processes of companies like the New York Times to create a compelling management game.
“What attracts me to News tower it’s that there’s a little bit of everything,” van de Sande said. “If you're really a history fan, you'll love the game. But if you like to drive the conveyor belt, so to speak, then that’s what it comes down to.”
IN News towerthe player takes control of a struggling newspaper and rebuilds it virtually from scratch. They must update both the office and the paper's ethical standards, balancing the need to publish accurate, newsworthy stories about world events with salacious material that attracts masses of attention. Then there are advertising, which takes up precious newspaper space, and various groups lobbying for good coverage. You need to keep your employees, readers, and the looming mob happy to succeed. It's quite a challenging action, which makes it an exciting management simulator.
“We're just a couple of guys messing around. For the next projects we will become a little more structured, more orderly, but we must not lose our looseness.”
At the time, Sparrow Night spent a lot of time balancing the actual process of making newspapers with fun game mechanics. News tower should have been fairly accurate, but some of the accuracy got in the way of simple, clear gameplay. Nachtgeller pointed out that the role of editors in this process needs to be reduced. “The editor's role usually plays a much larger role, and that's something we've always struggled with,” he said. This made the game too long in the weeds.
During development, News tower went through several iterations. “We did a lot of iterations of different game concepts,” van de Sande said. “We're making a game about running a newspaper. But how do you actually translate this into a game? It is very difficult to establish specific rules.”
News tower was originally released in Early Access in February 2024, allowing Sparrow Night to continue working while receiving feedback from players. Van de Sande said the process is as much a financial decision as it is a creative one.
The team had been working independently for years, tweaking systems and cutting and deleting content. Nachtgeller said the news system was one of those parts of the game that went through a lot of changes before ultimately arriving at an “elegant solution.” But that meant removing some of the complexity they had built into the details in the first place. Van de Sande said there are six or seven versions of this system.
“In the beginning, what we had was that the newspaper was almost Tetris the game itself, as if you had to fit something in,” Nachtgeller said. “You had to fit things in, and there was too much emphasis on the arcade element. This has been removed. We also had a full power supply system with cords that had to be run all the way up to the tower, but that took up too much time making newspapers.”
But early access offered a chance to recoup some costs and get direct feedback from more players. This was a way to ease the release of a new game, which Nachtgeller explained can be quite difficult.
“I don’t know how people do this without public testing,” he said. “Releasing a game without feedback is even scarier. It already seems very scary, but at least you know that quite a lot of people had fun in Early Access, so you can count on it.”
In the meantime, Sparrow Night will spend some time observing. News towerreleasing and fixing any bugs or problems that arise. When they are ready to move on to a new project, the team will take some lessons with them. According to Nachtgeller, the first thing they'll do is hone the core gameplay early on.
“There's almost no project that's exactly the same as it started, but tighter boundaries do help,” Nachtgeller said, while noting that Sparrow Night wants to keep the structure of its development loose enough to allow for experimentation. “Everything was quite free-flowing and that's one of our strengths,” van de Sande said. “We're just a couple of guys messing around. For the next projects we will become a little more structured, a little more streamlined, but we must not lose our looseness, because that is also what makes it fun, and what makes News tower stand out because we're not your average game development studio.”
