Category Archives: cyoa
The ‘semiosis’ part
In its initial development, before I showed it to anybody at all, Scents & Semiosis was really just a pretty text-generating toy. I make a lot of cool text-gen toys, and I wanted this to be a bit more than that, … Continue reading
Scents & Semiosis
I made a game. It’s called Scents & Semiosis. It’s a piece of interactive fiction about perfume, memory, and the process of assigning or re-evaluating personal symbolic associations with things: semiosis, the creation of meaning. I’ve been working on it … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: The good people
The good people (Pseudavid, Twine) is a piece of horror, or of horrific magic realism. A couple, Alice and Daniel, take their first holiday together; they are from different cultures, and the relationship is coming under its first real strain. They … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: Black Sheep
Black Sheep (Nic Barkdull and Matt Borgard, Twine) is a cyberpunk mystery. Your father – head of a Singularity-focused corporation with a cult following – has died, and your sister has been kidnapped. The protagonist, Irene, is (despite a fake-out … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: Saint City Sinners
Saint City Sinners (dgallagher, Twine) is a hardboiled-detective parody, explicitly after the style of Clickhole’s Clickventures series. I know some real good writers who just goddamn love Clickventures. I always felt as though they were fine, but the ratio of wackiness to wittiness didn’t … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: A Blue Like No Other
A Blue Like No Other (Dan Cox, web) is a short piece told through an education game. The idea is that you’re doing digital archaeology on an old piece of unpublished language-teaching software, but All Is Not As It Seems.
IF Comp 2019: Valand
Valand (Ann Hugo, Twine) is a young adult fantasy adventure. The protagonist is washed up on a tropical island and finds themselves adopted by witches and also there’s a tiger and a mermaid?
IF Comp 2019: Dull Grey
Dull Grey (Provodnik Games, web) is a choice-based game about restricted choices. The protagonist, Kir, is a youth on the verge of adulthood, living in a remote and frozen region of a vaguely-defined but very Soviet-feeling future society. The time has … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: Slugocalypse
Slugocalypse (Charlotte Blatchford, Twine) is a disaster story told with Twine. The cover pretty much gives you the setup: giant slugs are attacking small-town Britain. (Although that’s a duck, not an untitled goose. It’s a giant duck and you ride it.) The … Continue reading
IF Comp 2019: The Sweetest Honey
The Sweetest Honey (Mauro Couto, Twine) is a choice-based story about depression and fear, originally written for a Spanish-language game jam and translated into English. Anima, the protagonist, is middle-aged and divorced; his ex-wife dislikes him and his son openly loathes … Continue reading
