Haphazard thoughts on game design and narrative.
This is what it says on the tin: a game about birding. (I started properly birding a year and change back, which is the surest sign I have become middle-aged. The link to ebird.org in this game shows up in Continue reading
It s once again IF Comp season; I ll be doing some reviews. (Disclosure: I m married to the lead organiser of the competition.) This is Graham Walmsey s adaptation of Buchan s much-adapted novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, a mystery thriller of a man accidentally Continue reading
Goat Game is a tightly-crafted piece about complicity and corporate careers, the difficulty of effecting change, and how this intersects with how you relate to people. The characters are all anthropomorphic goats. There isn t really any reason for or against Continue reading
The Last Night of Alexisgrad is a choice-based game for two players. This is an unusual but venerable format the first I m aware of is the Duel Master series, first published 1986, which were sold as boxed sets of Continue reading
This game is not in any way a reference to Vonnegut s The Sirens of Titan; rather, it s a straightforward space-adventure story that has, y know, actual space mermaids in it. It s divided into chapters; each chapter takes place in a different Continue reading
Cloud Gardens is a game by any definition. If you re someone who thinks that games describes something that s inherently and centrally about challenge, progression, and victory states then we are never going to agree on this, first of all. Continue reading
In its initial development, before I showed it to anybody at all, Scents Semiosis was really just a pretty text-generating toy. I make a lot of cool text-gen toys, and I wanted this to be a bit more than that, Continue reading
I made a game. It s called Scents Semiosis. It s a piece of interactive fiction about perfume, memory, and the process of assigning or re-evaluating personal symbolic associations with things: semiosis, the creation of meaning. I ve been working on it Continue reading
The good people (Pseudavid, Twine) is a piece of horror, or of horrific magic realism. A couple, Alice and Daniel, take their first holiday together; they are from different cultures, and the relationship is coming under its first real strain. They Continue reading
Black Sheep (Nic Barkdull and Matt Borgard, Twine) is a cyberpunk mystery. Your father head of a Singularity-focused corporation with a cult following has died, and your sister has been kidnapped. The protagonist, Irene, is (despite a fake-out Continue reading