overview

The Sartrean Knight is a short interactive story blending medieval fantasy with existential philosophy. Inspired by Sartre's writing on radical freedom and bad faith, the game asks whether any choice is truly free — and lets the knight answer for himself.

You play as a weary knight facing a mysterious gatekeeper. Through dialogue and memories, you will determine your own path and conclusion, featuring multiple unique endings and full support for both English and Portuguese.

I developed The Sartrean Knight in one week during the initial phase of my experience at the Apple Developer Academy. The project was an opportunity to explore interactive storytelling and the design of meaningful choices.

I learned a lot about using JSON to build a game's narrative structure, as well as improving my skills in SwiftUI and Combine. It was also a rudimentary way to implement localization for an app, paving the way for me to later learn about using string catalogs.

code snippets

private func loadStory() {
    guard let url = Bundle.main.url(forResource: "story", withExtension: "json"),
          let data = try? Data(contentsOf: url) else { return }
    do {
        let decoded = try JSONDecoder().decode(StoryData.self, from: data)
        for page in decoded.screens {
            pages[page.id] = page
        }
        orderedPages = decoded.screens
        currentPageID = decoded.screens.first?.id
    } catch {
        print("Failed to decode story.json: \(error)")
    }
}

design choices

palette

typography

rationale

credits