It’s November! We have some exciting things going on this month, not least of which is our second game from author Jac Colvin, whose Russalka game “Lost Ones” we published back in March. This month’s game, “Ocean’s Call,” features a different kind of supernatural water creature, and one that’s just as steeped in mythology as […]

Anna Anthropy is a game designer, author and educator. She teaches game design as DePaul University’s Game Designer in Residence. Her next book, Make Your Own Video Games with Twine!, is out in January. She lives in Chicago with a little black cat named Encyclopedia Frown. She is the author of our October game, Queers […]

This month’s game on our website, Anna Anthropy’s “Queers in Love at the End of the World,” gives you only 10 seconds per playthrough to make your choices and see what happens. That unusual design choice is part of what gives the game such a forceful, compelling impact—a sense of urgency and hopelessness and hopefulness […]

Branching stories run naturally into the problem of combinatorial explosion. If you keep writing different variants for each choice the player could make, eventually you end up with too many branches to write or manage. Sam Kabo Ashwell calls this structure the “time cave,” and while it has been used in the past, the amount […]

Up here in the northern hemisphere, October heralds the onset of fall—shorter days, longer nights, a crisp coldness to the air that speaks of the coming of winter. One of the reasons I like fall so much is the reaction that gathering dark pulls out of people. There’s a tendency to gather, to light fires, […]