Maybe the primary inspiration for Castle Balderstone was a book I wrote called ‘MOTORCYCLUS’ and Other Extremely Scary Stories.
The main thing I wanted to do with Castle Balderstone was make an anthology game. Long before I wrote the first installment of the series, I programmed the system for switching between the vignettes, and then I abandoned the project for a while, because I hadn’t actually thought of any vignettes.
I think it was a whole year later that I was inspired to write “Don’t Dive Into Blood, Kids,” and then I tried to very quickly write enough other tiny games to round out the anthology. I designed and maybe wrote part of “Where We Can Hear the Whispering Dark” at that time, but I couldn’t finish it before the EctoComp deadline.
So I knew I had to do another installment where I could include that story! And that meant I had to come up with several other stories, and their authors, and more of the surrounding culture, and all of this tends toward the possibility of making a third game, and then…
The vignettes were originally supposed to be too small to work as standalone games. They’re supposed to be attempts at writing things that I-as-myself-Ryan would never write. The point of the frame story is to make sure you know that Elmir Divkovic wrote “The Inquisitor Vultrine” so you can consider what the story says about Divkovic. I’m not sure if all the stories and all the authors really stand up to this sort of analysis, though.
The stories in the latest installment are all big enough to work as standalone games, but the same principle applies, or is supposed to apply.
There are some more things I’d like to do in the Castle Balderstone series. I have a Balderstone 2022 folder here on my computer. That folder contains a single text file. That text file is 137 bytes long.