10/12/2022

6/24/2025 3:44 PM

110

2

0 wins / 0 losses

Marauder

Rainbow-1

You are a Californian inmate firefighter, flying out to stop a wildfire in the sierras. You are also a native of this land, descendent of a proud line of firewalker shamans, but the blaze you're facing now is unlike anything you've ever seen. As you stand before it with your high-powered chainsaw, you'll will have to face the demons of your past. Depending on your choices, you may emerge tempered, reforged, or burned to a crisp. The choice is yours, Chief.

This is a game for adults. It has a fair bit of gore, violence, sexual elements, and touches on offensive topics. If that's not for you, turn around now, this site has plenty of other content that you will like better.

Despite the word count this is a short game: Typical time for one playthrough is 25min.

This game was an entry to Sherbet's "Summer's End Synnergy Contest". (I wanted it to be Quentin Tarantino, but it turned out David Lynch.)

The Laconia Incident

It's 1942 and you are Karl Petersen—In another life, you'd still be studying for your doctorate in English Literature, but this isn't another life, and you've been assigned as second officer of the submarine U-156, patrolling the South Atlantic. So come on now, the Third Reich is at war and the Kriegsmarine needs you!

The game was made as an entry to END MASTER'S PROMPT CONTEST 4, with the prompt “A story about naval warfare.”

Content Warning: I thought this one would turn out on the lighter side, but the usual sex, violence, occasional torture and optional suicide crept back in (It also has language!). In cinematic terms think of Hemmingway and the Reservoir Dogs re-enacting the Omen on a submarine.

Regardless of word count, this is a short game: Playtime is only 20-30 min.

There are several storylines but only ONE TRUE ENDING.

Angelside

unpublished

In this near-future hard sci-fi noir story you are Patricia 'Mace' Angelside, an ex-cop who has a hard time adjusting to her role as a bodyguard for the heir of a business empire. Can you keep him save during his trip on a luxury space liner? And, do you actually want to? Depending on your answers, this might turn dark pretty quickly.

This is a game for adults: if you are under 18 please give this one a pass, there are many other stories on this side you can enjoy.

This is a relatively short game: Much of the word count comes from the breadth of choices you have. You'll likely reach an ending within 20 minutes of reading, but there are quite a number of major storylines to explore.

This game was started as contribution to Sherbet's Summer's End Synergy contest. The theme of the contest was a character coping with a bad event in the immediate past. I thought that would go well with a noir detective story. An important inspiration was William Hjortsberg's noir novel "Falling Angel," but I wanted to escape some outdated cliches of the noir genre. You might say I wanted to show another side of the Angel, hence the name of the story. Specifically I wanted a female protagonist and a sci-fi setting. To accommodate the noir theme near-future hard sci-fi capitalist world, ala "The Expanse" was an obvious choice. In the writing, the story got a bit out of hand, and eventually I had to quickly write another game (Rainbow-1) to have something to show by the contest deadline.

Shades of Ice

unpublished

tbc

Tornados are traditionally measured by firing chickens into them, I heard.

That's impressive. I should check that out.

All Endings? Can I challenge you to review Rainbow-1? ;)

What books do you like generally?

That's a good book.

;o) <--

The em dash is such an emotional interpunctuation mark. In some dark corner of my mind I see ChatGPT desperately trying to wring some emotions out of its texts by replacing every comma with en am dash, hoping that sometime, somehow, a human will respond and be moved by its writing.

Semicolons are great; I like them. The em dash though--it's overused. And, don't forget about the colon: it can introduce explanations! My favorite is the ellipsis...

Funny that you ask. In my experience the best advice is to separate plotting, drafting and revising as much as possible. It is good to get your plotting done in broad strokes before you start writing. But its good to get away from the computer for plotting, so you can use your time under the shower, your commute, etc. For drafting you want to get into the flow as fast as possible and stay in it, so its best to just write, don't edit at all, don't even fix typos. Editing can take a lot of time, but if you had your plot and pacing down before drafting, there is little need to redraft while editing. This makes the editing easy, which means you can still edit during times when you are not at peak writing performance, so editing takes a lot of time, but comparatively cheaper time, that you may have more of.

In a train now trying to make it home today, if the internet holds I might get to reading them.