Posted December 15, 2023 by cecile richard
#blog #update #dawn chorus #recommendations
Hello! It’s been a while. It’s already December, which is wild to me. Seems like it was 2021 just yesterday etc etc etc.
Last time I posted an update like this was January this year and was a similar year-in-review type post, which feels like an easy habit to keep up except this time I’m actually doing it before I go off on holiday or something.
Anyway let’s just cut to the chase, and get into the meat (🥩?) of this post…
Let’s start from the top…
Winner of Domino Club’s M.R. James Award — ‘for a tale of primeval forces, unknown, uncaring, and unearthed’
THE DEVIL’S IMAGO is a game about, well, primeval forces, unknown, uncaring, and unearthed (still can’t get over how good this line is, thanks candle). It’s a period piece (!), it’s about strange things that start happening in a small village in 17th century France. Bronze statues get dug up, a body is found, a strange yet alluring man shows up…
I set out to write this story of subconscious/forbidden desire, temptation, and devilry… and it ended up being that and more! It’s really a tale that explores class struggle, state violence, and the ways the past always seems to find a way to repeat itself.
I’ve made this game with my (previously on GUTLESS) co-conspirator isyourguy, he made the sounds AND the wonderful engine inkrunner for it (which should be available for public use… soon).
I wrote the whole game and even dusted off my good ol’ illustration skills to draw the character portraits in the game!
☞ Be aware that the game comes with a list of content warnings available on the game’s page, and is not suitable for minors and people who do NOT want to read sexually explicit content.
If you follow(ed) me on Twitter, you would have seen me talk about this. To reiterate what I wrote on there: I’m a recipient of VicScreen’s Originate Games funding program. I pitched the concept for DAWN CHORUS to them early this year and now I… have to make it. Hurray!
DAWN CHORUS is an interactive fiction game set in a future Melbourne. It’s about mundane tenderness in an era of cosmic dread. The game will be presented in a patchwork of browser-based multi-media storytelling.
It’s my first large(ish) scale project… everything I’ve made so far is work I’ve completed in a month or two at most (probably the project with the longest dev time I’ve spearheaded is HYPER//ECHO), so it’s interesting to be given a much longer timeline to work on something entirely self-driven.
To be perfectly honest it’s taken a while for me to really get a good grasp on what exactly I want this story to be. I dealt with a pretty big case of writers’ block this year but I think I’m mostly past that now (I did write The Devil’s Imago), and I’m excited to really get tinkering with it in the new year.
Inspirations for this game include 17776 by Jon Bois, The City & The City by China Miéville, Pajeú by Pedro Dioegenes, Disco Elysium by ZA/UM… It’s also kind of a thematic/stylistic extension of my previous Domino Club offering ( C Y C L E ) which is also set in Melbourne.
Recently I’ve been thinking about it in a much more focused way, and I think this game is sort of a spiritual sequel or revisit of my bitsy game UNDER A STAR CALLED SUN. It’s been a while since I made a game that really has that permeating sense of wistful grief. I wanna write something sad yet hopeful again and this feels right… I think?
I need to make up some characters though… with GUTLESS and The Devil’s Imago I’ve been having a lot of fun writing characters, which is something I never thought I’d be capable of somehow. It’s cool to see my abilities as a writer get stronger as I make more things.
So yeah I’ve been making things! I think pretty much all of my newest games I’ve published through Domino Club so if you don’t really follow me on socials it may seem like I’ve been mostly dormant for the past 2 years or so… I think that will change soon as I’ve got a few side project ideas I’m idly tinkering on as I work on DAWN CHORUS.
I’m hoping I’ll write little blog posts more regularly next year as I begin work on DAWN CHORUS in earnest, and even if I have nothing new to show I reckon I can still talk about stuff like game/book/movie/etc recommendations if that’s anything people would be interested in (would be a good excuse for me to write review-like paragraphs about things.)
OK I think that’s enough self-promo and other self-talk from me, so I’ll just end this post on a list of recommendations.
That’s it! Happy holidays, take care.
Cecile