On Restless Tides
It’s funny how creativity never moves in a straight line. For me it seems to come in phases, shifting constantly not just between individual projects but across entire mediums. One month I’m deep into writing fiction, the next all I can think about is music, and then without warning I’m back into game design. It’s like my brain refuses to follow a single path, darting between different creative expressions depending on some internal tide that I’ve never quite managed to predict.
That restlessness is present even within a single medium. In games specifically, I’ve spent the last few years immersed in traditional fantasy adventures and dungeon design. But this year I’ve suddenly found myself returning to a form I stepped away from years ago and once again becoming interested in solo journaling games.
There’s something uniquely intimate about creating a game meant for one person and their thoughts. When I wrote my first journalling games I was fascinated by the quiet conversation between player, page, and prompts. It’s like leaving notes for strangers to find, never knowing what stories they might tell in response. Working on ‘Blood In The Margins’ has been a process of both familiarity and discovery, like revisiting your childhood home to find that everything seems smaller, but the rooms somehow contain new corners you’ve never noticed before. (Incidentally my partner and I did visit my childhood home a few weeks ago. That was a very surreal experience.)
Creative evolution isn’t always about moving forward into uncharted territory. Sometimes - often, in fact - it’s about returning to old haunts with new eyes, about looking at what you’ve done in the past and bringing the experience of the new, present you to bear on it. The Wretched, like many solo games, contains prompts that are relatively lose. Blood In The Margins is a creature of specificity and focus. You can still tell the story you want to tell, but the sandbox is smaller, the toys within it crafted with more care. This is what I’ve learned from writing dungeon games; that the specific and the concrete are the tools the imagination needs to create something truly surprising of its own. We never truly abandon our past creative selves. We just fold them into who we’re becoming.
Projects & Updates
- Blood In The Margins is in its final 24 hours, and closing in on £8,000. I released a big preview of the game to backers a couple of days ago that will let you play through the opening Act. You should go and play it.
- The final PDF of Down In Yongardy is now available. All that remains now is for the physical book to be produced, which Space Penguin Ink are kindly handling for me.
- Weird Hope Engines was a rousing success. The team behind the show did an amazing job of bringing Directive 92A to life in the physical space, and it was an incredible experience getting to see people actually play it and to read what they were creating. The show runs until the 10th of May and I hope you’ll get a chance to see it. I’m working on a website to archive all of the writing people are doing when it’s over, and I’ll say more about that when it’s ready.
- Speaking of Directive 92A, I wrote nearly 2 hours of weird ambient soundscapes and glitched-out beats to go with it. It’s on Bandcamp for a fiver.
- I’ve been enjoying writing fiction again, and I have two stories published on my itch page. The Knight of Rot is a short, sad grimdark tale set in the world of Mörk Borg. The Interview is a slice of dark academic murder fiction. They’re both free to read, and you can get a limited edition physical chapbook of The Interview as an add-on with Blood In The Margins.
Things I’ve Been Enjoying
Reading: I’m about halfway through I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan and I adore it. It’s funny, it’s well-written, it resonates on a very personal level, and there’s this slow creeping horror that’s starting to mount. I can’t wait to see where it goes.
Listening: I’ve been in an ambient and electronic mood of late, and in particular I’ve been really enoying Throwing Snow’s 2016 album ‘Axioms’. Here’s my March playlist.
Watching: I’ve been going through a Hitchcock phase and finally convinced Steph to watch Rope (1948). It’s still incredible.
As always, here’s a photo of Lucky. He’s enjoying the fact that the sun is out again, though my asthma isn’t enjoying my house being covered in his fur.
