Game Writing Samples

I wrote some quest materials for the interactive fiction game Susurrus: Season of Tides, as well as company blog posts taking place within the game’s universe – which is a magically-inflected overlay of our own.

Narrative Game writing sample

“No, ah, specific trouble, sir,” you manage. That ‘sir’ again! “She... enlisted me to help find you. She thinks that you can help her with... a thing.” A few months with the Gandolfinis have taught you that when you have something sensitive to discuss, you under no circumstances mention it where someone else might be listening, and if you must refer to it, all such things become “a thing” or “the thing.”

There’s a short pause, perhaps motorcycle-sized.

“I see. So it’s a thing, then.” He says it without quotation marks. “I do specialize in things.”

“The Cities’ Hidden Rage”: Speculative Fiction in Game World

“People outside of Boston often know about the Red Sox/Yankees feud; fewer know about the “Green Monstah.” Fewer still know about the Rage Warehouse.

At a busy intersection, near one of the preeminent technology institutes in the nation, sits an ancient hulk of a building, a brickwork study in industrial menace. In this fortress, one can store valuables even in the face of conflagration: in massive letters on the building’s side, it reads: STORAGE WAREHOUSE - FIRE PROOF.”

Branching Game writing sample

"Ha!" Cheryl actually laughs, a bitter chuckle that seems genuine. "Gutsy. I like it. Scared of me, are ya? Grrrr." She shoots an over-the-top growl at you, holding up one hand like a claw. Joke or no, you sure notice her teeth as she snarls, just a little elongated and sharp. Her other hand digs in her jacket and pulls out a lighter and a cigarette pack. She lights her cigarette, shaking her head and still laughing, slightly. "You'll be perfect," she says on her first outbreath of smoke.

“Waiting for the Fallout”: Speculative Fiction in Game World

The fallout shelter sign is old, and those who don’t know better aren’t even sure it’s pointing to anything real. The clarification, “IN BASEMENT,” was clearly pasted on after the fact, and doesn’t help much with the sign’s credibility. What would we need it for anyway, most modern city-dwellers think, and some are too young to even remember a time when such signs hung over the populous like the distant, flashbulb promise of a mushroom cloud.

But the Awakened Ones remember.

Nobody walking the world with awakened senses can pass by this sort of sign, rare as they are nowadays, without at least a frisson. Of hunger, of hate. Of knowledge deeper than anyone should have.

Intro to one of ten game factions: rhytec

Welcome to Rhytec Life Sciences, home of the most sophisticated life-changing medical interventions available today. Through advanced  research and highly safe and regulated human testing, Rhytec seeks nothing less than peace in our time.

So the ad copy goes, in any case. A cursory Google search will also reveal Rhytec’s affiliation with Cosmic Beverages,  purveyors of fine caffeinated products available on every street corner. What other molecules said beverages might contain, you’ve only begun to surmise. The samples you tried that day in Hamilton Square had some decidedly anomalous results.

“Just how cosmic is that coffee?”: Speculative fiction in game world

Keane Candy. You know, Tum-Tums? Small, spherical confections, the bag-bottom detritus of any Halloween haul, and the lollipops you’ve seen on the desk of every bank you’ve ever been to. Cheap sweets, the sop to every impatient, fidgeting child who has ever had to wait for their parent to finish doing their boring, adult business. If you look inside the wrappers, there are sometimes coded messages. Most take no notice, thinking it akin to a cereal-box-top marketing game, a toy in the package of caramel corn.

Look deeper.