In News Tower, Sundays are everything. Developer Sparrow Night’s newspaper management game gives the player one week to report out, print, and distribute the weekly paper—and do everything in between, be it decorating the office with plants, managing power struggles across the city, or optimizing workstations. It all matters in determining what role your newspaper will play in a fictional ’30s version of New York City.
Though Sparrow Night was formed in 2019 by Jan-Maarten Nachtegeller and Stefan Rijsmus, Nachtegeller found the inspiration for News Tower in 2016 after reading a Mashable photo feature on the New York Times in the ’40s, in which dozens of black-and-white photos showcased the news-making process from the time. Reporters smoke cigarettes at messy desks in a crowded newsroom. People at typewriters record messages received over wires from around the world. Paper falls from printers and onto the floor, which is no longer visible under the white sheets. Typersetters build out molds to create newspaper plates for printing.
It’s a complicated process—and perfect to translate into a video game. It wasn’t until 2017, though, when Nachtegeller started to conceptualize what a game could look like, after playing Weappy Studio’s This Is The Police. “I instantly thought about the newspaper project,” he said.
Rijsmus and Nachtegeller began working on News Tower in late 2018 into 2019. Bart van de Sande joined the team in 2020, contributing as both a developer and the composer behind News Tower’s music. More team members joined later in the process, including support from publisher Twin Sails Interactive. Over the past six years, Sparrow Night has been iterating on the core idea of the game—based on the newspaper processes of companies like the New York Times—to create a compelling management game.
“What appeals to me about News Tower is that it’s a little bit of everything,” van de Sande said. “If you’re really a history freak, you will like the game. But if you like managing a conveyor belt, so to speak, that’s what it boils down to.”
In News Tower, the player takes over a struggling newspaper and rebuilds it nearly from scratch. They must renovate both the office and the ethical standards of the newspaper—balancing the need to publish accurate, newsworthy stories about world events with salacious pieces that bring in tons of eyeballs. Then there’s advertising—which takes up precious space in the paper—and different groups lobbying for good coverage. You need to keep your employees, readers, and the looming mafia happy to succeed. It’s quite the highwire act, which makes it a compelling management simulator.
“We’re just a couple of guys goofing around. We will get a bit more structured for the next projects, more streamlined, but we shouldn’t lose our looseness”
Sparrow Night spent a lot of time balancing the real process of newspaper-making during that time with compelling gameplay mechanics. News Tower needed to be fairly accurate, but some accuracy got in the way of simple, clear cut gameplay. Nachtgeller pointed to the role of editors in the process as something that needed to be cut. “The editor normally has a way bigger role, and that’s something we always struggled with,” he said. It made the game too much in the weeds.
Over the course of development, News Tower went through several iterations. “We’ve done many iterations on different concepts in the game,” van de Sande said. “We’re making a game about running a newspaper. But how do you actually translate that to a game? It’s a very difficult subject to make concrete rules.”
News Tower was originally released as an early access title in February 2024, which let Sparrow Night keep iterating while receiving feedback from the playerbase. Van de Sande said that process was as much a financial decision as a creative one.
The team had already been toiling away on its own for years, tweaking systems and cutting and removing content. Nachtgeller said the news items system is one of those pieces of the game that went through a lot of changes before they eventually landed on “an elegant solution.”, But it meant removing some of the complexities they originally fleshed out. Van de Sande said there were six or seven versions of that system.
“Something we had at the beginning was that the newspaper was almost a Tetris game in itself, like you had to fit stuff in,” Nachtgeller said. “You had to fit stuff, and there was too much emphasis on being an arcade element. That got taken out. We also had a fully functional power system with cords that you had to bring all the way to the tower, but that took away too much from the newspaper making.”
But early access was a chance to recoup some costs and get direct feedback from more players. It was a way to ease into the release of a new game, which Nachtgeller explained can be quite daunting.
“I don’t know how people do it without the community test,” he said. “Without having the feedback, it’s even scarier to release a game. It already feels very scary, but you at least know that quite a lot of people had fun in the early access, so you can bank on that.”
For now, Sparrow Night will spend some time monitoring News Tower’s release and fixing any bugs and issues that arise. When they’re ready to move onto a new project, there are some learnings the team will take with them. The first thing that they’ll do, Nachtgeller said, is hone into the core gameplay early on.
“There’s almost no project that’s exactly like how it started, but having more strict boundaries does help,” Nachtgeller said, while noting thatSparrow Night wants to keep its development structure loose enough to allow for experimentation. “It’s been quite loose, and that’s one of our strengths,” van de Sande said. “We’re just a couple of guys goofing around. We will get a bit more structured for the next projects, more streamlined, but we shouldn’t lose our looseness, because it’s also what makes it fun, and what makes News Tower stand out, because we’re not your ordinary game development studio.”