New games: Food truck in the Garden of Earthly Delights (and two other Alone hacks)

I've just finished my first three solo RPGs: Food Truck in the Garden of Earthly Delights (and two other Alone hacks). They are solo journaling games about cooking for demons, speedrunning your dreams, and the wrestling with the moon. They are all  hacks of Takuma Okada’s Alone Among the Stars, and were created for the… Continue reading New games: Food truck in the Garden of Earthly Delights (and two other Alone hacks)

Making Phenomena

Phenomena began, like most creative things I do, with my favorite obsession/puzzle, the film Last Year at Marienbad. I was reading articles from BAMPFA’s CineFiles database, and came across this passage from an analysis by Freddy Sweet: "The key to understanding Marienbad is the realization that the very structure of the film is consciously designed… Continue reading Making Phenomena

There are robots in this rabbit hole, also interactive fiction

As part of a new project I'm working on, I’ve been exploring the structure of Last Year at Marienbad and The Invention of Morel in terms of a branching narrative--or perhaps more accurately, a kind of fractured narrative. I hope to write more about that later. But first, I wanted to do a little bit… Continue reading There are robots in this rabbit hole, also interactive fiction

A Clock in its walls

Source: https://lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2015/12/meet-me-in-st-louis-1944.html My annual Christmas re-watching of Meet Me in St. Louis, coupled with, well, all of 2020, has gotten me thinking a lot about time, and the way that the passage of time is both communicated and experienced in choice-based interactive fiction (for a great discussion of time in parser games, see this). Specifically,… Continue reading A Clock in its walls

My favorite Bitsy games

I am fortunate to be employed and able to work from home. Since our shutdown began in late March, I’ve spent my weekends looking at prepper-adjacent product reviews (backpacks, camping percolators) on the internet, and trying to learn Bitsy (Adam Le Doux’s “little editor for little games or worlds”) by making small Bitsy games. I’ve… Continue reading My favorite Bitsy games

Cement is the flour, concrete is the bread: making So Are the Days

By the time the SNES came out, I had pretty much stopped playing videogames. This is why So Are the Days’s overall conceit is based on games from 30+ years ago: besides Twine games, those games (e.g., StarTropics, Bubble Bobble, Super Contra, Duke Nukem, DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?) are… Continue reading Cement is the flour, concrete is the bread: making So Are the Days