Happy New Year!
2017 has been an exciting year for me. I’ve finally started producing new work again after a years-long hiatus during which I feared I was burned out for good. The nature of my work has also changed: rather than writing stories and novels, I’m now mostly writing text-based games using Twine. I’m still hoping to finish a second novel someday, but for the moment I’ve put it on the back burner in order to concentrate on games. I think games are more suited to my talents and I’m excited to have found an area where I can shine.
2017 retrospective
This year I decided to start releasing Twine games and fund them through Patreon. I’d release the games for free, but people could chip in to support me if they wanted to. My support has grown slowly over the course of the year, and as I’m writing this I have 49 patrons. The fact that people are enthusiastic enough about my work to support me financially is immensely encouraging.
In March I released my first Patreon-funded Twine game, Seedship. It was an attempt at procedural story generation, about an AI ship that must travel to various randomly-generated planets and decide whether to found a colony or move on in the hope of finding a better one. I expected it to be a drop in the ocean of free Twine games, but it went a bit viral, with a write-up on BoingBoing and tens of thousands of plays within a few weeks.
I think Seedship is going to be a career-defining game for me. Its popularity has shown me that there’s an audience for randomly-generated text-based games, and for science fiction games that try for a hard-sf, real-science feel rather than sf pop culture references. It’s made me want to make similar games in the future (more on that later), and more generally it’s made me trust that my creative instincts could lead to something that appeals to people other than me.
After Seedship I decided to write a different kind of game in order to stretch myself and demonstrate my versatility as a developer. Rage Quest: Disciple of Peace is a more conventional interactive story, in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure gamebook, although does some things under the hood that wouldn’t be possible in a physical book. After I’d started writing it, I realised that the 2017 IFComp would be happening at about the time I was planning to release it, so I decided to enter it.
I found Rage Quest more difficult to write than I’d expected. I had thought that the kind of story design I had done for RuneScape, combined with my novel-writing experience, would make a game like this easy, but I found myself overwhelmed and lost at times and it took multiple drafts with major changes before I got a story structure I was happy with. It’s been a learning experience, and when I write games like this in future I’ll approach them with more confidence and understanding.
Rage Quest eventually placed 19th out of 79 games, which blew me away–I had hoped to place in the top half but hadn’t imagined my first entry and second ever Twine game would place in the top 20. The IFComp forum and Twitter also helped me connect with other developers, and now I and feel like I’m part of an interactive fiction community rather than a lone dabbler.
In October I released an Android version of Seedship. Even more so than the original web version, I was astonished by how well the app did. As I write this it’s been downloaded more than 200,000 times, and has generally positive reviews.
My final game this year was Industrial Accident, a short game I wrote to a self-imposed deadline as my personal NaNoWriMo variant (not aiming for a particular word count, but challenging myself to develop and release a complete game in a month). It’s an interactive story like Rage Quest, but in a different style: a terse black comedy, using colour and sound to compliment the text, and with hyperlinks usually changing the text of the passage displayed rather than leading to new passages.
Besides Twine games, the only thing I’ve created has been a Twitter bot that wants to destroy the world. I made it in a few hours as an exercise in procedural text generation using Tracery. It’s not much, but it was fun and an interesting learning experience.
2018 Plans
My first task for 2018 is the iOS version of Seedship. I haven’t forgotten! It’s just that getting an app on the Apple Store is more complicated than getting one on Google Play, especially because some steps require a Mac and I have to borrow one.
After that, I plan to start work on a new game that’s larger than anything I’ve made so far. It’ll be a space exploration game somewhat similar to Seedship, but more elaborate, and where you keep exploring rather than end the game where you find a good planet. My working title is Beyond the Chiron Gate, and I’ll post more information on my Patreon soon. I expect this game to take at least the first half of 2018, and quite possibly longer.
Because Beyond the Chiron Gate will be such a big project, I might take breaks from it to write smaller games if I have good ideas for them.
Entering the IFComp was a good experience for me this year, so I’m planning to write a new game for it in 2018. Nineteenth place was a very good result, but pushing myself to do better might be a way to improve my development skills. I have a vague idea for a game but I’m not sure if that’s the idea I will use.
Thank you all
Many thanks for your support and interest. Knowing that I have an audience is very encouraging and helps me stay focused on my work.
Wishing you all a happy new year!