Month: June 2016

Haunted craters, mobile development, ginger + lime

I’m at Pocket Gamer Connect Vancouver, and out of long Failbetter habit I was dutifully going to write up a blog post about it; and about the experience of being an indie at a mobile games conference; how much it’s like being a pine marten or some other small twitchy hyper animal in an old growth […]

Written by on June 28, 2016

Ten Lessons from running Failbetter

” For an indie dev, your community is essential. They’re your evangelists, your early warning system, your Baker Street Irregulars, your Praetorian Guard…. but you have to look beyond them, too.” I’ve got a feature in GamesIndustry.biz, about things we did right and things I’d do differently: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-06-24-failbetter-games-seven-years-ten-lessons

Written by on June 28, 2016

What I’m up to: 25th June

This is the first time I’ve been out of full time employment in seven years. I meant to relax and do nothing. It turns out that when you’ve been occasionally starving and always busy for seven years, relaxing and doing nothing is like expecting an earthworm to lie still. I just keep rippling, involuntarily-wise. At […]

Written by on June 25, 2016

“The Healing Question”

Earlier this week, [a carefully unspecified number of] players completed the Seeking Mr Eaten’s Name quest line, an epic and long-awaited storyline in Fallen London which ends with the player character’s deliberate self-destruction. You can read more about Mr Eaten here  (me talking about it) and here (someone else talking about it). I’ve generally avoided giving […]

Written by on June 22, 2016

Coding again: old dog, old tricks

My worst-kept secret is that my favourite MLP:FIM character is Pinkie Pie. Okay, that’s not even really a secret. My actual worst-kept secret is that I was a software developer for ten years before I was a writer. I hired another developer a year into Failbetter’s time, and since then I’ve hardly written a line of code […]

Written by on June 20, 2016

Why the hell I would ever leave Failbetter

If you’ve heard of me, you probably know me as ‘the guy who runs Failbetter’. If you’ve ever talked to me about that, you probably heard me say that I loved my job, that I loved the work we did, that the people I work with are great. All those things were true. And Failbetter is in […]

Written by on June 17, 2016