Me
My name is Daniel Bernhoff. I’m a writer and game designer based in Malmö, Sweden.
Project Temporality
Minimum budget time-manipulating action puzzler with medium budget production values, produced by Niklas Hansson’s Defrost Games. I did the writing and designed half of the puzzles, give or take. No huge commercial success, but we got some stellar reviews. I wrote an article about the writing and got it featured on Gama Sutra.
Quiz Battle
Quiz game app with a boardgame component, produced by Martin Walfisz’ Planeto AB. I was involved in the game system design and made some of the premium game boards. The game was a huge hit in Denmark and an overall success. You can read about it here.
Quiz Battle boardgame
After the success of Quiz Battle in Denmark, I was tasked with designing a boardgame adaptation. The game was published exclusively in Danish by Game InVentorS in 2013.
Planeto Quiz
Social quiz game that drew inspiration from World of Warcraft and other MMORPG’s and CRPG’s. I was responsible for the loot, leveling and quest systems, but also wrote quest flavor texts and questions, and was involved in designing several minigames included in or planned for the game. At least 100 000 people played the game. Many of them spent the approximately 100 hours needed to reach the top level. The game is defunct now, but you can check it out on MobyGames.
Other things I’ve done
- Gave lectures as a guest teacher in storytelling and mission design for video games at Malmö University College from 2006 to 2012.
- Worked as a game designer at Massive Entertainment during the company’s most crisis-ridden time from 2000 to 2001.
- Have seen about a hundred of my poems, columns and short stories in print in magazines and papers.
- Have performed about a hundred times as a stage poet. Won a team gold medal in the Swedish Poetry Slam nationals in 2007 with Lovisa Eklund and Laura Wihlborg.
- Have toyed around with boardgame design since the mid 90’s.
- I started out with tabletop RPG design in the late 80’s. Made my debut with an article reforming a core game system in the Basic Roleplaying-derived Swedish RPG Drakar och Demoner Expert in 1990.
- I run my own tabletop RPG with two parallel groups since 2016. The system is built from the ground up according to my own tastes and goals, but is most closely inspired by Ars Magica. The setting is post post apocalyptic fantasy, in the vein of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa.
- Member of the Swedish tabletop RPG theory discussion group Fish Tank since 2015.
- Spent about eight years, mostly in the 90’s, piecing together a writer’s education (literature, creative writing classes and other helpful studies) from five universities and university colleges and two folk high schools.