Below is my personal post-mortem for warden: a (bug)folk horror. First, though, Tabitha (aka @alyshkalia) and I also recorded an audio post-mortem together, which you can listen to here. It’s just under 15 minutes of us chatting about our process; the audio quality is amateur, but then, so was our game.
Anyway. Here’s some of my personal reflections about our game; it’s long, so breaking it down into sections.
Background, or How I Dreamt About Inform Every Night for Four Weeks
I’ve never touched Inform before August. I know a lot about the IF world—games, comp results, current discourse—but it’s all filtered through Tabitha. Tabitha and I are, by the way, extremely married, and though we’ve been together for 15 years we’ve never collaborated (at least outside of ttrpgs or bouncing ideas off each other). In July, though, I have an idea for a parser game about a tiny guy solving puzzles in a big world. I talked it over with Tabitha, and in August I started learning Inform with the goal of collaborating on a game to be ready for IF Comp 2026. We go back and forth about whether our character should be a tiny person, some sort of magical furry creature, a bug person; we land on bug people. I get down to worldbuilding and story ideas, and also learning Inform. I’m worried that a year isn’t enough time to make a game.
Flash forward to mid-September. I’m spending all my free time learning Inform; I’m dreaming about it nightly. I’ve surpassed Tabitha in Inform knowledge, I can sense just how much I still need to learn, and I want to apply my knowledge to a project to give me an idea of what questions to ask next. I float the idea of collaborating on a short-and-spooky proof of concept game. Tabitha agrees, and we set our goals:
- Use the parser world to create a fresh, highly textured setting
- Make a parser friendly even to people who don’t play a lot of parsers
- Use the setting to create interesting puzzles
Interlude: a brief aside about tiny guys
I’ve always loved the idea of being very small. Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Rescuers, The Great Mouse Detective and Secret of NIMH were on constant replay during my childhood, and I loved Avi’s Dimwood Forest books and Beverly Cleary’s The Mouse and the Motorcycle. Arietty is one of my fav Ghibli movies. I read Pratchett’s Bromeliad trilogy while drafting this game. I’ve been thinking a lot about these types of stories and settings since last summer, when I asked myself why I was drawn to stories about very small folks doing their best in a very big, hostile world, well… gestures to, y’know, everything
Hollow Knight was not on my mind during drafting, but let’s all acknowledge that it probably had a lot of subconscious influence and move on.
The Process, or Someone Stuffed the Body in the Pickle Jar, or We’re All Daddy Now
So I draft for not quite a month. Tabitha and I discuss concepts, scope, how to make it at least a little fun, and Tabitha drafts one of the main ending epilogue scenes, but they’re a details person and I like worldbuilding and bigger picture stuff. I write the bulk of the draft and pass it to them with not quite three weeks left before deadline, and we start talking about what details need to be added, cut, or refined.
To avoid multiple active versions of the game, we pass the file back and forth over discord, trading off tasks. For some reason we decide that whoever has the active working file is titled “daddy.” (Yes, this was my fault; no, I don’t remember why.) Only daddy can make changes. When I am not daddy, I feel lost. I say things like “I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not daddy!” and “When can I be daddy again?” We are high on the rush of an all-consuming project, and the vibe has become, let’s admit, a little weird.
We have two weeks for testing. Our testers are inexpressibly generous and helpful and patient with the draft we’ve inflicted on them. We’re editing throughout, adding elements to account for things players tried to do but couldn’t, trying to signpost clearly, trying to figure out what’s a problem and what’s normal player silliness. (One tester takes all the garbage from the berry bush and glues it to the wall during the epilogue. In response, we yeet the player’s inventory before the epilogue. After release, we learn that a player has shoved the corpse in the pickle jar, cheated it out of the berry bush, and put it in the hammock; the hammock and its grisly contents make an appearance in the epilogue, creating a far more ghoulish ending than we could’ve come up with and also underscoring that wow, players will just do stuff you simply cannot anticipate.)
We submit with not quite a day to spare. Now, no one is daddy. Or perhaps we all are.
Interlude ii: I’m not cut out for this kind of thing
I loved making the game; I find that, as I suspected, I do not like having released a game. I find the act of saying “look at this thing I made” horribly embarrassing, I feel terrible about every hiccup or bug players encounter (wasting someone’s time with a janky game feels unforgivably selfish), and any positive feedback feels like people being nice to a kid who drew them a crayon picture. I make Tabitha summarize the relevant bits of feedback for me to get a sense of what is and isn’t working. This is, I’ll admit, a bad trait for someone who likes making things.
Retrospective, or The Part Where I Try to Be Self-Aware but Not Self-effacing
A short timeline and my lack of experience made it hard to get a feel for scope ahead of time. I wrote my way into the game’s final shape rather than having a clear structure early on in the process. That meant:
- Some ideas, especially mechanical, were cut halfway through. I’d planned a parasite influence mechanic partly determined by how much the player ate. Fragments of this were left in the final game, confusing some players. One tester was afraid to open the larder for fear of being overwhelmed by hunger…
- … which was a problem, because late in the process we took one possible ending (you find your friends tied up in the larder) and made it the trigger for the final sequence, regardless of which route you were on. This worked to narrow scope, and we made this bit light on signposting because we wanted players to sort of stumble into a shocking reveal, but it’s objectively clumsy.
The multiple endings (three ways to die, two to survive) and two branching routes threw some players off. In warden, if you eat the berry you won’t be asked to fetch feverwort, and if you get the feverwort you can’t eat the berry. You can still go to the berry bush or the wort grove, but at that point it’s just flavor. Some players assumed that everything had a purpose for progression, though, and that created some frustration. The internals of this game are a spiderweb of scene-based gating that provides varying description, blocks off actions at certain times, and tries to clarify what’s relevant and what isn’t, but there are visible seams in how it all fits together. That said, we made a functional parser game with two routes, and I think that’s neat! I’d like to try again; hopefully with experience and more time it’ll be a more graceful experience.
I think our “puzzles,” if you can call them that, are clunky. I loved hiding details in object descriptions, and it’s obvious that what I enjoyed most was the worldbuilding. I say obvious because the most positive player feedback has been about the world rather than the puzzles or narrative. The way parsers allow players to engage with the world is doing a lot of heavy lifting here in terms of making our game at all fun; our puzzles are not ever going to be the strongest part of our games.
I don’t know if this was friendly to people who don’t love parsers. Some testers said it was, but there were enough rough edges that other players got a bit lost. I think it’s probably a wash at best.
I’m proud of our game. Pride is not something I feel often (or ever), so it’s weird to say, especially after assessing why we didn’t fully succeed at what we set out to do. This is inarguably a scruffy little game, a real oddball. I love it, I’m embarrassed by it, I never want to think about it again, and I miss that all-consuming purity of my hyperfocus leading up to submission. I get why you all make these things all the time, and I don’t know why anyone tries more than once.
Next Steps, or More Cringe to Come
Before submitting warden, we’d already decided to turn this into a set of three games. We’re planning two more games in our buggy world, a Twine (Sugarcube) game for Spring Thing ’26 and then back to Inform for our initially planned IFC ’26 submission (unless IFC doubles down on allowing AI despite feedback, in which case… we’ll see). Doing more of this is objectively self-indulgent, and if I think too hard about inflicting more of this nonsense on people I get a little queasy, so I won’t. This is what we’re doing! Sorry!
What I hope to see is a more deliberate process and a smoother gameplay experience. Our puzzles will never be Stelzer-level experiences, but if the structure built around them is more polished, I’ll be satisfied.
Finally, thanks to everyone who played and shared feedback, all of which was helpful, heartfelt, or hilarious. Hell, thanks to everyone who made a game for the comp; I played many of them, and each one was genuinely a gift. It’s a big, demanding, mean world out there; this little space that’s been carved out for creativity, the effort and vulnerability you all put into creating and critiquing these games just for the fun of it, the fact that people use time and energy to organize and participate in these events, is immensely special. I’m profoundly grateful for all of it.