Each-uisge Afterword

Hi all. Thank you to everyone for making the first year I’ve entered IFComp a good one. There’s a friendly and supportive atmosphere to this comp which is wonderful. I am really grateful to all the people who took the time to read Each-uisge, and particularly to those who helped beta test and left reviews or feedback through the comp on both the game and the artwork. It was fantastic (and very encouraging) to hear what different players liked, and also what they thought could be improved so I can take it on board and hopefully keep improving in the future.

I picked water horses as a subject to explore something a bit different. Although I’m always up for reading stories about dragons, unicorns and the like with the best of them, there are so many other creatures from mythology and folklore that rarely get a look in despite being interesting in their own right. After all, as some reviewers have pointed out, imagining that that innocent looking horse by the stream could really be a terrifying shape-shifting, water-dwelling, carnivorous fae creature might seem to be quite the leap to us, but they turn up in various guises in the folklore of a number of countries and actually seem to be surprisingly common in certain parts of the world!

I also wanted to try and play a bit with the “what ifs” of motivations of creatures that are traditionally seen as malevolent, and whether certain situations may be more complex that first imagined. I had a number of other influences, included an unfortunate encounter with a horse who (accidentally) broke some of my bones this year, which I suspect probably had a high likelihood of influencing my choice of creature for this story. (The horse in question is fine for anyone wondering, and I’m fairly sure he’s not a kelpie. Wrong colour :sweat_smile::horse:)

Like some of the other authors from IFComp, I do have an entry in Ectocomp (and we’d all love you to visit and play some of the games if you have time,) although this one is seriously lacking in water horses of any kind.

Anyway, that’s all from me for now I think. Thanks for reading my post comp ramblings and have a great day :smile:

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