I’m really excited that the work I’ve done for Red Bull’s special gaming culture magazine, Gamepop, is now out in the world! If you haven’t seen the magazine around stores, you can buy it online. Despite being a paper magazine, it’s a very interactive one, with character creation, flowcharts, dance move instructions, and a choose your own adventure game – my own contribution! (Apparently there were also limited editions with a playable version of Tetris on the cover, too, though I haven’t seen those myself.)
In it, I wrote an article is about interactive fiction – what it is, some of its history and standout games, and how to get started creating your own. However, it’s much easier to understand something when you play it, so running throughout the magazine is a choose your own adventure, with multiple endings, puzzles, items, achievements… and maybe even some meta elements. I tried to add a lot of what makes interactive fiction special while making a story that’s fun and accessible even for people who are not used to games.
Making Renmare Island was a really enjoyable challenge! It was part of a print magazine, so layout became its own puzzle. Most of the story runs along a bar at the bottom of the page, with a very limited word count, so a lot of creativity went into designing the adventure to work in small bites. (Though as you can see above, we did have a few full pages to dedicate to the beginning of the story, and a few of the more complex or impactful sections shared a page). It’s so good to see it in print, although I’m not quite ready to play through it myself yet!
On a separate note, I also took part in the Global Game Jam this year, a challenge which has you creating a game from scratch in 48 hours following a theme – this year’s theme was Mask. I participated by myself rather than joining a team, and made a Twine game called Fur, Bone, Wood, Skin, which explores the masks we wear and how they affect our relationships. You can find it here (it takes 5-10 minutes to play) alongside my other small games on Itch. Game jams are a great way to make a small, self-contained game as a break from longer work (like Elemental Flow). It’s not something I do all the time, and often I opt for week- or month-long jams instead, but I enjoyed working on this, and chatting to other people who were doing the same.
Would you like some tea with that?