Earlier this year, I participated in the Imaginary Games Jam, an interactive fiction game jam where creators make games based on prompts which are reviews of nonexistent games. It’s a very cool premise and I liked it a lot!
My game is Our Bleak-Ass Writing Competition At The Ragged Verge Of Spacetime, a collaborative/competitive party game where players have to pretend to be 19th century authors trapped writing a story together at the end of the world.
The game is not designed to be particularly replayable; it is designed to reflect the fact that I thought the prompt sounded like a completely horrific and terrible experience. I think that was the prompt-writer’s intention; I found that misery very funny, and I wanted to create a game that was as horrible to play as the situation the prompt described would have been mind-destroyingly frustrating to live through.
The result is a game where players must shout words at each other along with the beats of a metronome, without stopping, until they all agree on what they want to write. They have conflicting goals, which makes it even more miserable.
You can find both the jam download and the updated version of the game here.
Emily Short wrote about the game here, and also talked about the prompt I wrote for the game Sub Way. I was extremely proud of all five prompts that I wrote. I may post them on this blog at some point in the future. They were pretty damn great, if I do say so myself.
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