Schoolday's End

Schoolday's End is a self-playing 2D game, whereby a miner slowly works his way around a cave extracting coal and relaying lyrics from an Ewan MacColl song.

I made this game in response to both the mainstream success of Bitcoin, the surplus and popularity of mining games amongst youths and my own experiences in South Wales.

Bitcoin can be simplified as a self-playing game; hugely powerful computers run programmes that slowly ‘mine’ cryptocurrency. The typical Bitcoin user has grown from early-adopter pizza purchasers to money laundering, gangsters, and other illegal activities. I wanted to make my game about Bitcoin, but instead of mining for something morally dubious, I aimed to produce a game that mined for something culturally beneficial. In this case, song lyrics.

MacColl’s lyrics speak about leaving school at a young age to go down into the pit, and I felt that this worked well in the theme with my game of youthful nostalgia. I'm in the process of having the lyrics translated into Welsh, inspired after hearing American country singer Steve Earle remark that his mining song, The Mountian, had received such a translation.

Shown here are two 1 hour extracts of a typical playthrough.