Interactive

The following is a list of all the interactive works I’ve been involved with: anything from text-based interactive fiction all the way to commercially released videogames:

---

Interactive Fiction:

Blacklight 1995 sees you take on the role of a police officer in an alternate 1995 of advanced cybernetics and digital drugs. But what seems like an everyday run into the industrial district to drive away vandals soon turns into something else entirely.

---

Project Pandora is an experimental piece revolving around boxes and opening them or not. Take your time. Think carefully. Don’t open the box.

---

Project Pandora 2 takes off precisely where Project Pandora left off. It is vital to play the original first.

---

Project Pandora 3 is a standalone instalment of the Project Pandora series, but would probably benefit from having played the previous ones.

---

Marooned is a story in two halves, alternating between a shipwrecked protagonist’s struggle to escape a desert island and, simultaneously, the struggle to regain a place in the civilised world.

---

Spring Rain was an April Fools’ prank for 2014. It features an extremely peculiar zombie apocalypse.

---

Project Proteus was an April Fools’ prank for 2016. The story revolves around a journalist reporting on the mysterious Project Proteus, but the true nature of that project can vary wildly.

---

Treasure Hunt is an experiment in using graphics and coordinates to construct a game. Though I made it using interactive fiction software, Twine, it actually behaves more like a straightforward videogame.

---

Artwork copyright Thomas Venner, 2014.

Outpost sees you take on the role of a visitor to the Alterworld: a nightmarish, sunless parallel plane of existence. There’s a literally infinite space to explore, but for your own safety it’s best to stay within sight of the beacon. Terrible things wait in the dark.

---

Artwork by Joe Wright

Girth Loinhammer’s Most Exponential Adventure is an absolutely vast work of interactive fiction: the full version has 512 endings (though the demo available online only features a measly 256). It places you in the role of Girth ‘Meatthrust’ Loinhammer who, despite wanting only to catch and torture generic fantasy heroes in order to steal their treasure, finds his dungeon inundated with suspiciously enthusiastic visitors. Needless to say, he’s not happy. Not happy at all.

---

Inquisition was written for Flash Fiction Month 2016, and so is necessarily very short indeed (under 1,000 words in total). Nevertheless, I set myself the personal challenge of making it as interactive as possible. This story sees you take on the role of an inquisitor in a high fantasy police state, torn between maintaining your humanity and conquering an inhuman foe.

---

Project Pythias was an April Fools’ prank for 2017. It generates an almost infinite number of random story scenarios with a handful of custom-written outlines thrown in for good measure. Generate enough different stories and Project Pythias will begin to tell one for itself.

---

Ultraviolent Unicorn Deathmatch of Destiny was written for Flash Fiction Month 2017, and also includes under 1,000 words of text in total. However, it includes more than twice as many passages as Inquisition, and has a much less linear structure: it’s often possible to loop back to an earlier choice (if you aren’t horribly mangled by gigantic unicorns with chainsaws for horns, that is).

---

Ultraviolent Unicorn Deathmatch of Destiny 2: Aquatic Boogaloo is basically the same as the first one, but much like Speed 2 it’s on a boat this time.

---

Damon L. Wakes’ WiFi Simulator 2018 is designed to emulate the experience of getting my WiFi to work. Being as faithful to reality as possible, it is very, very annoying.

---

Damon L. Wakes’ WiFi Simulator 2018 Simulator 2019 is a hyper-realistic simulation of the earlier Damon L. Wakes’ Wi-Fi Simulator 2018.

---

Project Procrustes was an April Fools’ prank for 2018. Though presented as a text-based RPG – complete with a comprehensive character creation system – it’s really much more of a puzzle to be unravelled than a game to be played.

---

Lovely Pleasant Teatime Simulator is a competitive text-based tea party simulator, which I didn’t really expect anybody to enjoy but inexplicably became very popular and was selected as one of Rock, Paper, Shotgun‘s Free Games of the Week in July 2018.

---

Damon L. Wakes’ Stuck-in-a-Library Simulator is a game about making a game while stuck in a library, made while stick in a library.

---

Damon L. Wakes’ Beer-on-the-Wall Simulator is not so much a game as an exercise in making a complete story in Twine using just one passage of text.

---

Draw Nine puts you in the role of a magician whose powers depend on a pack of magic cards. These can help or harm, but the selection available to you is determined randomly at the start of the game. Since you cannot choose your cards, you must find the path through the world that makes the most of the powers at your disposal.

This game was granted IntroComp‘s Honourable prize for 2018 and features artwork by Joe Wright.

---

Game Jam Games:

Brituals was a game I worked on as part of a team – Jammers in Pyjammers – as part of Brighton Global Game Jam 2016. The title link will take you to the Game Jam project page which includes the credits for the other creators, but if you’d like to skip straight to the game you can find it here. I feel that I should mention that no member of Jammers in Pyjammers was actually wearing pyjamas while participating, though given the nature of the game – a social awkwardness simulator set in a hellish parallel Britan – that would have been comparatively normal all things considered.

---

Undercurrent was a team effort from Brighton Global Game Jam 2017. We tried using Unity to combine interactive fiction with a Mexican wave minigame, but couldn’t quite get everything working within the 48 hours of the jam. Instead, we showcased what we had by that point (which can be found through the link above) along with a quick Twine prototype of the whole game that you can play here. Although the prototype has no graphics, it does include a rudimentary version of the minigame itself so should give a good idea of the overall feel of the project.

---

Resonance was produced in Southampton as part of the 2018 Global Game Jam, and was the first game I worked on as a coder rather than a writer. The story follows two groups of characters – a team of astronauts on board a space station trying to create a cure for an apocalyptic alien plague, and a band of survivors on Earth trying to outlast it – with control alternating between them. Having been made entirely using Twine, you can play Resonance online in your browser.

---

Mobile Home was produced in Southampton for the 2019 Global Game Jam. You play as a house who must scuttle about looking for people to live inside it. You can play it online here.

---

Videogames:

Spoiler Alert (Megafuzz, 2014) is the first game you will ever uncomplete. When you pick it up, it has already been beaten. The big bad boss is defeated, the coins are collected and the princess has been rescued. Unravelling this mystery takes you through the entire game, from the last level to the first. You must uncollect the coins, revive the enemies and avoid nasty time paradoxes. In other words, you must uncomplete the game by playing it backwards. Winner of “MOST PROMISING GAME IN DEVELOPMENT” award, Indie Prize Amsterdam 2014. Available for most mobile and desktop platforms.

---

Rainbow Bears’ Playtime was my April Fools’ prank for 2015. It purports to be a children’s puzzle game involving brightly coloured bears, but it isn’t.

---

Craft Keep VR (developed by Strange Fire, published by Excalibur Games) puts you in the role of an artisan merchant from long ago. That sounds pretty fancy until you realise you are effectively that generic shopkeeper NPC selling weapons to the heroes in just about every RPG ever. It’s actually great fun, though: being a VR title, you play it by strapping on a headset and actually performing all the same actions your character would. Seriously, this thing is room-scale: you can actually walk around your workshop in the game world (provided you’ve given yourself enough space in the real one)! Writing for this has been an amazing experience, particularly as the setting and tone are just the sort of thing I like. If you’ve read any of my comedic fantasy stories, this is the closest you’ll come to stepping into one.

---

Fallout: Cascadia (developed by Cascadia Development Team, release date TBA)  is a total conversion mod for Fallout 4 that’ll likely appeal to fans of earlier games in the series. It restores the skill and perk system familiar to players of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, plus you get all the fun of trying to guess which bits I personally wrote.