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 […]
Author Archives: Alexis Kennedy
“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 […]
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 […]
‘Embed the ending in the middle, or crush it up and stir it into the rest of the game.’
My Eurogamer column this month is about endings: specifically, but not exclusively, the problems on endings in Fallen London. If you like that, take a look at my previous columns: http://www.eurogamer.net/author/1390. They’ve included pieces on gravity in games, an alternative history without D&D, the People’s Crusade as it relates to Kickstarter, and six reviews of […]
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 […]