Annotated Ludography
Here’s a list of games I’ve either completely designed or played a significant role in designing, in reverse chronological order.
Pigeons in the Park (November 2007)
Sometime in 2006, I decided I wanted to write a game that essentially consisted of one conversation between two people. This is the end result of that concept, a short, sweet, and personal slice of life. [1]
Chivalry is Not Dead (October 2007)
By far my most ambitious project of 2007, this is the project that I really worked hard to make into a true interactive narrative, where the story really could change based on the player’s actions. As I wanted it to be predominantly about people rather than objects, I wound up putting far less emphasis than before on inventory puzzles and far more on interactive conversations with characters. This is also the first project whose creation I systematically documented in a series of articles at Adventure Gamers.
When We Were Kids (February 2007)
This is a short game I wrote about school bullying. [2] It also has the honour of being a Flash program, which means it’s playable within a web browser. I thought it turned out rather well, though I’m a little unhappy with the interface, which I couldn’t change due to engine limitations.
Facetious Nonsense: An Adventure in Text (November 2006)
I wrote this little Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style tale over a period of about one month, because I wanted to try my hand at writing a branching narrative where the trouble of developing art assets didn’t have to be involved. Written while I was living in San Rafael, California working as an intern for Telltale Games, I see this largely as a capsule of sorts of the time I spent there. [3]
The Game That Takes Place on a Cruise Ship (March 2006)
This is the game I wrote that suffered horribly from the second-system effect, [4] meaning that after having successfully created a first game that a lot of people liked, I went on to try and design a far more ambitious project of titanic [5] proportions, which I also considered selling for money. Needless to say, Real Life⢠caught up with me, and the scope I had envisioned for the game wound up being far more than I could handle. The finished product is a bit more rough around the edges than I really wanted it to be, but on the bright side, it does represent my first foray into interactive narrative, as it features four different branching story paths.
The Interview (December 2003)
This was meant to be a demo of TGTTPOACS back when I was thinking of making it a commercial project, though in retrospect I think it’s a reasonably fun short game in its own right, with a little feminist commentary thrown in for good measure. [6]
Cubert Badbone, P.I. (August 2002)
This is my first finished game, which I first became inspired to create at age thirteen and finally completed at age sixteen, after a couple of different iterations. It’s pretty much a bog-standard classic adventure game, which nevertheless ended up being rather well-received at the time of its release, winning a Best Game of 2002 award from The Crow’s Nest, a now-defunct fan adventure game site.
- It also happens to feature a collaborative piece of music, with trumpet performed by my friend Rikard Peterson in Sweden and all other instruments performed by yours truly in Canada. Cool, huh? ↩
- Based somewhat loosely on personal experiences of mine, of course. ↩
- The office itself makes a cameo appearance, as does a farmer’s market I used to frequent regularly. ↩
- As described by Frederick P. Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month. ↩
- Pun intended. ↩
- Random trivia: the interviewer, who also plays the receptionist in TGTTPOACS, is based on a much-feared high school teacher of mine, who will most likely never play any of my games. ↩
