It’d be reeeeeaaaaaally nice if I could release Silverbacks this year. 
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Working on a game at the intersection of “The Super Friends Hour” and an Agatha Christie Who-Done-It. I was inspired by the Topic and Link mechanics of “Color the Truth” by Mathbrush. However, since I’m more comfortable with Twine and Javascript, I’ve written a drag and drop feature to facilitate topic linking. I’ve got the basic game engine written, and the first twenty minutes of a story, along with a solid plan (but incompletely implemented) middle and end game. Should be ready in time for IF comp 2026.
I submitted some song titles to shuffle comp, and had in mind an escape room game based on “Listen to your Heart” by Roxette, about a middle aged nun who leaves her convent to be with a man who volunteers at the orphanage where she works. I know that sounds like a ridiculous jumble of ideas, and I couldn’t really get it to work together in way that excited me enough to keep me from going back to my long term project, which I described in the top paragraph. Like Roxette says in the song:
Oh, listen to your heart
When he’s calling for you
Listen to your heart
There’s nothing else you can do
I don’t know where you’re going
And I don’t know why
But listen to your heart
Before you tell him goodbye
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I haven’t been productively writing for a couple of years due to schedule and life changes, my bad. But I found it’s actually beneficial to never limit yourself to one single work in progress. Some people are great at focusing on one thing and that’s awesome if you’re so motivated, but sometimes you’ll experience writer’s block or get hung up in the middle of something.
The Stove Metaphor
I always described my process like working on an imaginary kitchen stove with an unlimited number of hobs/burners where pots and pans can go. The front burner is the official work in progress and gets the most attention. If properly-inspired, I can just furiously work on one project, but occasionally have stray ideas that don’t fit the WIP and instead of the usual reaction “no, not now, the WIP!” I find it’s better to not stifle any idea flow. Instead, I metaphorically throw that idea in a new pan and let it simmer on the back burner in mind - giving it a mental “yes, possibly” instead of refusal. In the course of writing or just daydreaming, little ideas for back burners will happen and I can throw them in like metaphorical ingredients even if I don’t quite understand what it will be yet.
I find that sort of visualization gives mental permission to mull other ideas and subconscious brainstorming I may not even be aware of. If something distracts you, it’s okay to take some time away from the front burner and season a peripheral side dish. Or move the pot with the distracting idea to the front and put a lid on the grand masterwork to stew for a while. I often have 3-4 projects in mind in this construct.
The advantage of that is if you have writer’s block or get stuck, you don’t have to sit and tap your foot waiting for inspiration with growing anxiety that you won’t do it - there’s three other things you can switch to temporarily and allow your main idea simmer a while in back to develop. You can take breaks from a main project and still be productive without stifling the natural, sometimes random creative flow.
The other advantage is your brain (or my brain at least) has best interests in mind, and suddenly I’ll have a flash of inspiration that the hole in my front-burner WIP I’ve not known what to fill with could actually benefit from that side-plot of Béchamel sauce from an unmoored idea in the saucepan right behind it that’s been developing and didn’t seem remotely connected before. I can merge them since both ideas were allowed time to simmer organically and develop concurrently without saying “no” to any of them.
Both Cannery Vale and robotsexpartymurder happened through combining multiple unrelated back burner projects when none of them would work alone.
End of annoying metaphor
I’m trying to get back in the writing swing. Right now I have crowded back burners but nothing developed yet because I said ‘not now’ to the Muse too many times since I’ve spent most of my time being a creative night-owl who now starts work at 5am.
- I really want to use ChronicleHub to make a QBN but those require a lot of high-level plot and mechanics development which is not as simple as writing normal plot and dialog. I’m also trying to learn exactly how it works and have had a few frustrating “why doesn’t this work the way I expect?” issues which @Randozart has graciously helped with and taken feedback from, but I need to make some successes in that system to inspire me to lay into it.
- I’ve also toyed with making an Inform 7 parser game, but knowing historically those don’t do well outside the IF community as my quasi-erotic choice narratives[1].
- I’ve got another hotel game, but I need to stop going back to the “hotel with a creepy elevator” well.
- I’ve got another parody sex game in mind, and I’ve had follower-requests on itch for this type of game, but issues abound.
- I have lots of great titles, and I am not above starting with an intriguing title with multiple meanings and playing on those, but these are difficult and need lots of stove time.
- My main problem was I was all-in on AXMA and had basically mastered how to make my weird brand of narrative in it, but it was abandoned and no longer works. I’ve experimented a lot with Twine Chapbook and just need to figure out a story I can complete in it. I have trouble conceiving short projects with higher success rates.
The one thing I’ve been trying to do is get back into reading fiction more. My attention span and early bedtime has made it hard to play a lot of everyone else’s IF and that’s my bad. I did get a Kindle and primed the pump with a mid-level Stephen King novel and am trying to refill my own idea well spoonful-by-spoonful on the stove.
which have in the last year become an issue with promotion on monetized platforms even when not monetized ↩︎
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This is how I work best, and it’s making it very difficult to finish chapters of my thesis one at a time in linear order to send to my committee. I need to be finishing chapter 3, but I just found a really fascinating new source that will help immensely with chapter 9…
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My IF projects planned for 2026 (so far!) are:
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Finishing the second installment in my Fantasy Opera series for submission to Spring Thing. I finished writing the beta last fall; my next tasks are to paint illustrations, playtest, and revise!
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Starting my first ChoiceScript game (working title Bestiary), which I currently intend to publish chapter-by-chapter as a WIP. I have no particular timeline in mind right now; my priority is to continue preparatory work (research, concept development, and outlining) for a while before I start drafting in earnest. If I see it through, the concept I’m exploring will be my largest IF project to date.
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I hope to get around to making post-comp remasters of my three IFComp 2025 games with the new-and-improved ink interface @jeresig has developed for me.
There are also a couple of looser goals I’d like to explore this year:
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I have some thematic ingredients for a new ink game, which would revolve around hiking and making art. I’m excited about this one but my ideas have yet to cohere into a solid plan. Going to just let that continue marinating in the back of mind. This might be for next IFComp, if the timeline works out.
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I’d like to publish my first (short) parser game this year. Maybe for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam. I started dabbling in Inform 7 last November and wrote my first game as a learning exercise (and a gift for my partner); now I’m interested in tackling a more substantial project meant for public consumption.
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I spend so much time and energy starting new dishes, that all I have are dozens and dozens of back burners.
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I have many active IF projects, and I was extremely envigorated by the fact that I managed to release one in 2025 (Den lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne). That was my resolution for 2025.
I hope to at least release my Danish and Norwegian language bundles for Inform 7. Most of my current projects are Inform adjacent tooling (an Inform 7 template, a Preform grammar generation tool, an Inweb preprocessor), and I hope to finish most of them this year. I’m not a very creative person, but I do also have a couple of IF “games” (such as they are) that I also hope to release at some point. Maybe this year! Who knows where my fancy takes me.
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I’m really happy I’ve been able to help out with that! Your feedback and that of others has been absolutely invaluable, and has really helped refine elements of the system I would otherwise not have even considered.
This also feeds right back into my current project for 2026. Working on ChronicleHub is the most fun I’ve had in a long time doing game development. The core architecture is making great strides, and I hope I have everyone’s trust regarding the platform, and people feel comfortable using it. Right now I push updates pretty much every day, which means working on the platform is likely a volatile experience as things might occasionally break and I am not currently accounting for legacy support (though I am wary not to completely break user and save files). Still, I feel like I’ve built something I personally enjoy using.
To that end, I have several goals for IF on that platform:
- Concrete Requiem: A Film Noir style detective game that implements the core gameplay loop of Demon Bluff while using narrative design tricks to make it feel like you’re actually investigating a crime, and the people you meet are persistent between cases.
- Cloak of Shadows: @HanonO recommended this as a port to ChronicleHub, as is apparently tradition for platforms.
- Black Crown Project: I had permission from the creator, and successfully wrote a conversion script to transform the data from StoryNexus to ChronicleHub. It’s a challenge though, so I am consciously putting it off a bit.
- The Delve – Insert Subtitle Here: A sort of narrative heavier/RPG port of my mobile game “The Delve – Soldiers of Fortune & Folly”. In the mobile game, you play as the guild leader, but I want to create a version where you play as an individual mercenary. I since learned mobile development can be a real drag, and I think I can use ScribeScript to actually emulate my mobile game’s core mechanics. This is mostly also just a challenge for me to see if I can stretch the capabilities of my own programming language.
- Lex Arcanis: This is one is super weird. I intend to build a ChronicleHub game about magical research. The player inscribes spells using magical glyphs which resolve to ScribeScript in the background, but it’s not explicitly communicated how it resolves. So, the game becomes about experimentation and finding ways to affect the world and the narrative.
- Unnamed Deckbuilder: I met someone at a LARP who also loves doing Narrative Design. Initially we wanted to make a narrative game in Unity, but now that I have a full blown custom engine, we’re likely using that instead. The core idea is a Deckbuilder, but the cards you use during games also affect your reputation and the narrative. Use criminals to undermine your rivals? Very powerful during a game, but you’re not going to be making friends in the narrative layer.
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Actually finish my JavaScript library for interactive fiction.
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2025 was a very slow and difficult year creatively for me, and I took a long break from any serious writing and drawing until mid/late October when I was consumed by zine work (which should be coming out this month so I’ll be able to finally post it.)
In 2026, my goal is to make at least one piece of interactive fiction. Even if it’s just for the Neo-Twiny Jam again, getting back into making things would be nice. I’m more on the illustration side of things now, and doing a bit of regular old prose writing to post every now and again, but I do miss the process of making IF.
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