Author: Alexis Kennedy
How It Happened To Happen
Jack Cohen is a reproductive biologist who gives talks on speculative xenobiology. I once heard him explain how we had happened to evolve from a species of fish that kept its reproductive organs next to the pipes it used to eliminate waste from its body.
September #1: IS THIS THING ON?
MAYBE A PUBLIC ALPHA OF BOOK OF HOURS?! Also, our August newsletter goes out.
/kəˈbal/, Part 1: The Caldecotts
The following is an extract from an article Alexis wrote decades ago, in 1996, for British roleplaying magazine Valkyrie. It’s juvenilia, and some bits make him wince – but it’s an insight into his early style and fiction which later became Fallen London, Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator. [ Part 2, Part 3 ]
DAYBREAK IN THE INVISIBLE SERAPEUM
This is the season of the Forge of Days – the hottest August day in the UK for the last decade – so here’s something apposite for you.
How I Got Into Games, Part 1: Echo Bazaar
I get asked a lot how I got into games. I always feel unhelpful when I tell my story, because it’s such an unconventional and such an unrecommendable one.
“What are your influences?”
This is probably the question I’ve been asked most over the years, and every time as soon as I answer it I think of someone
State of the Factory: Year 2
Thanks for reading to the end! I hope it’s been useful. And if you’ve stayed with us through the rough times, we really appreciate it, both of us. A heartfelt thank you. It’s probably meant more this year than any time before or since.
What Actually Happened
My name’s Alexis Kennedy. With my fiancée, Lottie Bevan, I run a very small game development studio out of our London flat. I used to own and run another studio, Failbetter Games, which was a little bigger (about half a dozen employees for most of my time there, ballooning to seventeen by the time I left in 2016) but was also generally indie and cash-strapped. We’ve...
BOOK OF HOURS: Where Knowledge Goes
…and next time, I’ll talk about not just about Knowledge and Skills but also about Thoughts and Beliefs, and how in BOOK OF HOURS you can make and shape them.
NERDPOST: Content Frameworks in Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours
This is probably interesting to about 2% of the already select audience of this blog. Sorry, everyone else! But for those who are interested, this is from a Slack discussion about how the content framework in Book of Hours (which we’re calling ‘Vak’) looks like it’ll differently from the content framework in Cultist Simulator (retrospectively called ‘Fucine).
The Busiest Week of Our God Damned Lives
We haven’t posted for a bit, and I don’t think Lottie is going to manage a sprint update this week unless she works over the weekend which she definitely ain’t doing, so I wanted to talk about what’s been happening. It’s a lot.
NOW HIRING: UI-Focused Unity Developer [Applications now closed]
Weather Factory is an indie studio founded in 2017 by Lottie Bevan and Alexis Kennedy (creator of Fallen London and Sunless Sea) to make experimental narrative games, and joined recently by Claire Sharkey of Sharkbit. Our first project, Cultist Simulator, exceeded all our expectations, and we’re growing the studio.
ONE WEIRD TRICK TO GET STARTED IN GAMES WRITING NO SERIOUSLY
Here’s the good news. This blog post really does contain one weird trick. The bad news: it isn’t a reliable list of steps you can follow, or a career track with an exam you can do, or the email address of someone who wants to hire you. Those things don’t exist. Games writing is a very competitive career. More on what that phrase, ‘competitive career’, actually...
Enigma: what it is, what it isn’t
This is an unusually straightforward post on a subject I am usually very coy about. Please feel free to link to it if you ever think anyone will find it useful.