Playable Experiences

Click on in-text links for itch.io page and game headings for a more detailed description of my time working on the game and what I learned from it.

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Red String

Red String is a collective play experience where players work together to unravel a complex mystery over a prolonged period of time. Red String was designed for exhibition spaces but can also be printed and played at home. The game is made up of various documents detailing the unsolved police investigation into an occult murder in northern England. Gameplay centres on the construction of the conspiracy board where the game documents are attached to a wall, corkboard, or whiteboard, and combined with notes from the player’s investigation and pieces of red string. Over the course of hours or days, players slowly add to the board connecting events and formulating a timeline of events. However, as with real amateur investigating, there is no clear resolution and the game ends when players feel satisfied with their understanding and feelings on the crime.

Creating Red String was a balancing act of providing enough information to make the story coherent and solvable while still being interesting and worth the effort of creating the conspiracy board. This delicate balance combined with the embodied actions of reading the game material, making notes, and building the board allowed for me to explore player motivations and immersion and gain a stronger understanding of fragmented and non-linear narratives. (Gameplay video)

Black Witch’s Grimoire

Black Witch’s Grimoire is a single-player journaling TTRPG exploring truma, recovery, and cycles of violence through a coven of black witches all trying to escape something. This game is meant to be played over 7 days with each day providing a new prompt to write in your grimoire and a new magical event to complete which combine to progress the story forward. As you play you create an artefact of your characters journey as the grimoire your write in gets warped, changed, and potentially destroyed along with you and your coven.

While writing this I had to be careful that the promps provided each day were broad enough to be entertaining through multiple playthroughs while still constrained enough to lead the player through the intended emotional journey for the following prompts to make sense. This led to a strong development of focus and word choice in my writing and games design as well as a deeper understanding of the many paths a story can take while still hitting similar emotional or plot beats.

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