@johnayliff@mastodon.gamedev.place
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johnayliff

@johnayliff@mastodon.gamedev.place

Indie game developer, writer, and narrative designer, best known for the text-based game Seedship and its successor, Beyond the Chiron Gate. Former MMORPG content developer, also science fiction novelist, and getting into TTRPG design.

Header image by Tom Morley

#GameDev #IndieDev #Twine #InteractiveFiction #GameWriting #NarrativeDesign #TTRPG

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johnayliff, to random
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Beyond the Chiron Gate is now on Steam! Get it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2960700/Beyond_the_Chiron_Gate/

Anyone who bought the game on itch.io (on its own, not as part of a bundle) should be able to claim a Steam key from the itch.io download page.

If you like the game, please consider posting a review on Steam! My understanding is that positive reviews do a lot to help people find games.

johnayliff, to random
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Managed to catch the in Vancouver! (The photo is iphone magic, it was not that colorful to the naked eye, but still impressive.)

johnayliff, to random
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If I was confronted by incomprehensible horrors from beyond reality I would simply stay sane, it would be easy for me

johnayliff, to random
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If I was super rich I'd endow a "gamer outreach" academic grant. It would fund any kind of research but you'd have to document it in the form of panicked audio logs left scattered around the university campus.

johnayliff, to random
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Pet peeve: people on home improvement shows who use "English" as a shorthand for a twee rustic aesthetic that only a minority of homes in England look like.

johnayliff,
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"We wanted an English aesthetic so we're making it look like a 1960s concrete tenement building that's covered in mould."

johnayliff,
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@beeoproblem you see, this is why you need to specify

johnayliff, to random
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Just hit 25k on !

And I'm a bit less than 1/3 of the way through my plan, so it looks like the whole novel will weigh in at a respectable 80-100k.

johnayliff, to random
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I'm re-reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time since I was a teenager. I'm only a few chapters in, but so far:

  • It's beautifully written
  • It's deeply, unreflectively conservative, in ways I didn't pick up on before

I'm looking forward to when they finally get out of the Shire and into the wider world, because I feel like the beautiful prose is wasted on the dull Little England of idle country squires and their jolly faithful servants.

johnayliff,
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Characters don't even seem to have personalities so much as genealogies. Tolkien spends a lot more time telling us what hobbits are a race are like than describing any individual character. When he does describe characters, it's often in terms of what family they're from (Frodo is like that because he's half Brandybuck on his mother's side, or whatever).

johnayliff,
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I'm still not sure if I'm pro- or anti-Tom Bombadil, but I did enjoy the way all his dialogue is in the same meter as his songs even when it's not set off as poetry -- except very briefly, when he talks about having been around before the rivers and the trees, and for a moment he seems much more serious.

johnayliff,
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If I was Aragorn I think I'd get myself a regular non-broken sword in addition to my broken ancestral sword that can only be fixed at the dramatically appropriate moment, just saying

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