By Joost Vervoort – Science and Impact Director
These last two weeks have been so exciting. We’ve finally launched our Kickstarter campaign for All Will Rise, and managed to get 10K support in the first 24 hours, reaching our basic funding goal. Even more encouraging is the response to our public demo. Players everywhere have responded with lots of positive reflections and praise, in a way that shows that they really get what we are trying to do, such as praising the integration of deckbuilding strategy with dialogue, the worldbuilding and writing, and making comparisons to Disco Elysium if it was a more hopeful and change-oriented game.
All Will Rise is here, it’s alive, it’s resonating.
I’ve been in communication about all of this with the good folks over at Fossielvrij, a Dutch activist group who are the original inspiration for the game. They’re very excited that we have reached this point, because they’ve been with us since the beginning.
All the way back in 2021, just when things opened up a bit here and there under COVID, I participated in Fossielvrij’s first meeting to organize a court case against one of the world’s biggest pension funds, ABP, the Dutch civil servants’ pension fund. I’d been inspired by previous cases against Royal Dutch Shell by Milieudefensie and against the Dutch government by Urgenda, seeing the potential in using the court to help pressure big corporations and governments toward a more sustainable future. But this case seemed particularly powerful.
Because whereas companies like Shell are very committed to fossil fuel extraction, their investors are more interested in returns. Shell and others often point to investors like pension funds when asked why they don’t change their policies. ‘People want this, it’s about their pensions.' So if the pension funds could be swayed, this would have a big impact on the fossil fuel regime.
As soon as the meeting started, with about 40 people live and about 100 people online, I was extremely impressed by the Fossielvrij crew. The meeting was professional, powerful, passionate and clear-headed. I got a strong sense that these people were standing in the heart of the transformation, and could help get important parts of the system to move, even with such a small group (4 people at the time!).
As a game designer, I thought – what can games do to help such an initiative? Phoenix Wright and the Ace Attorney series immediately came to mind, and I proposed the idea of a wild and playful court drama game like that, but about climate and eco-cases. A 16-year-old high school student immediately jumped up and shouted, ‘I LOVE PHOENIX WRIGHT!!’, and that cemented the idea for me. I wrote a blog post about the concept, and it didn’t take us long to assemble a team of talented and experienced game industry people. All Will Rise was becoming a reality.
Shortly after that, Fossielvrij had a shocking and incredible victory – ABP decided to divest all of its 15 billion Euros that were invested in fossil fuels. I was in the online meeting when this was announced, because, next to the game development, I was helping out with the English translation of the case and with international contacts, together with a friend. People couldn’t believe their ears. They were expecting to have to fight for years for this. The drama and unexpected wild joy of this meeting stayed with me as we went into the development of All Will Rise.
Since that time, our game’s setting became more local, focused on a river. This was inspired by the work of lawyer Bénédicte Ficq who said it’s best to work on cases that people find easy to imagine. Our narrative director Meghna Jayanth was enthusiastic about setting our first chapter in India, and we all thought this would offer great possibilities, and this prompted our lead artist Yuvraj Jha to work with us on the project as well. As a result, we ended up speaking with many activists, NGO folks and lawyers in India, giving us many specific insights. We started working together with climate and eco court case expert Loes van Dijk who has a huge network of folks working on cases, including amazing people in India, and we are in fact again in the middle of a series of dialogues. One of the main inspirations has been the winning of legal person rights for the Ganges and Yamuna rivers.
Picture: The BBC reports on how the Ganges and Yamuna rivers were granted legal person rights, based on their status as sacred rivers.
Despite this change in setting, when we played an early version of the demo with Fossielvrij, they regularly burst out laughing at how many things were familiar to them in terms of heated discussions in the team, little frustrations and unexpected challenges. Marianna van der Stel, director of communications for Fossielvrij, emailed me recently that she’d played the newest demo and found it, once again, very relatable to her actual work.
This is so cool to hear. Our producer Niels Monshouwer has a long history in the games industry and one of the things he loves the most about working on All Will Rise is that we draw this kind of inspiration from the exciting, wild realities of real life, instead, as so often happens, only from other games. One of my favorite bits of inspiration was from a lawyer who told us that you have to have a great love and enthusiasm for chaos if you want to be a lawyer in the Indian system. A Dutch laywer we spoke to recently said something similar: the most exciting moments are when you just have to drop everything and run to the courthouse to deal with an emergency. That love of chaos shines through in Kuyili, our protagonist, who sees possibilities everywhere where others just get frustrated. And this is, perhaps, the main thing we hope to instill in players. We are not interested in evangelizing to people about how important taking care of the environment is. Rather, we hope to make people excited about the chaotic, intense, but important work of getting involved with society and actually making a better world. It can be tough, it can be exhausting, but as Fossielvrij and our many connections from around the world show, it can also be joyous, rewarding, and funny as hell.
In the meantime, Fossielvrij and many others around the world keep fighting legal battles for our future. They’ve won a number of court cases more recently against misinformation and greenwashing by corporates. This is happening all around the world. At a global level, climate lawyers are organizing through networks such as ClientEarth to get real collective legal power. We hope that All Will Rise can do its part to support these real-life heroes and show how important their work is.
All Will Rise involves a lot of clashes with people who don’t believe in your strategies, such as Oomanakuttan who has been in the system for decades and is very distrustful of any grandiose claims.