Tocko: Two Taps

Somewhere above the ceiling, something goes THUMP. You tap the cold pipe with a wooden spoon, wait for the hum to fade, and tap twice. A bed scrapes overhead. Then, from upstairs: TOCK. TOCK. Somebody heard you.

Tocko is a tall old building, and you never leave it. Every sound in it is a fixed fact: the eleventh stair squeaks, the lift takes nine seconds between floors, the roof tank gulps twice. Pim, who is four and a half, hears the one thing nobody else heard. Hod from upstairs can stand still longer than anyone, and then crash louder than anything. Pim's mum is the best listener in the building. The neighbours are only ever sounds behind their doors, and Tocko itself never speaks, but it always answers.

Each round is one of the Tocko stories played as a game. "Here it comes." A sound plays from somewhere you cannot see, and you find it by tapping places on the map of the building and listening until one answers clearly. Pim says the rule. Your finger is Pim's hand and spoon, and you play the rule in up to three goes, with Hod or Pim's mum taking a turn, until somebody wins or loses. Then a blank brass tapper appears. You rub its face until a picture scratches in, choose who it is for, and hang it on the board in the Hall.

Listening is the game, because the picture never tells: the screen shows where you are and what you can touch, never what is making a sound behind a door or above a ceiling. And every round ends the same way. Tap twice on the screen, or lay the tablet flat and knock twice on the table, then wait. After 1.8 seconds, the building taps back. The tablet feels your knock through its motion sensor; it never uses a microphone. In Be Tocko, a grown-up or a brother or sister plays the building instead and answers with two knocks of their own.

The first release has 16 games across nine places in the building, from the Stairs and the lift to the Drying Roof and the Under, using all eight kinds of rule: make it answer, beat it, do it backwards, get it to say your word, don't wake it, only one may, name it from the sound, and find the odd one. Three updates add the rest of the 52 written games. There are no words on the play screens, nothing to read and no numbers to count, so a child who cannot read yet can play alone after the first tap.

There is no currency and nothing to grind. What grows is the board: one tapper for every game, hung on 72 hooks, and the board is an instrument too. Tap a tapper to hear it ring, clink two together, or run the spoon along a row. Every game also adds a neighbour's noise to the map, behind a door you never open. There are no stars, scores, streaks, notifications or ads, and nothing about your child is collected. A bedtime switch plays only the quiet games, then lets the room fade out.

Based on Tocko, 52 short stories about Pim and the building she lives in. Every game here is one of those stories, with its own fact, its own rule, its tapper, and the two-tap ending the stories share.

Tocko: Two Taps is a complete game design for iPad. Development has not started.