Hi everybody!

I'm Grim, and I'm an interactive fiction developer, classicist, and decaying spellbook who loves worldbuilding and making eerie, wordy games. I'm an independent creator with a lot of obligations at home that I need to stay on top of, so I can't afford to attend GDC financially or otherwise. I also run the twice-yearly MytholoJams, and since the World MytholoJam started just a few days ago, I'm pretty preoccupied this week.

My main project at the moment is a collection of games called the Sacred Tides series, which started with a game about fervently worshiping a silent, unknowable mass of writhing sea-serpents.

You know, like you do.

That game is DEVOTIONALIA, which was first published in October and re-released in December of 2018. DEVOTIONALIA is a text-based ritual simulator originally created for the 2018 Interactive Fiction Competition, in which it tied for 20th place out of 77 entries. The updated post-competition version is available here on itch, and contains new content as well as a preview of the next game in the series, Heretic's Hope.

For more information about DEVOTIONALIA, including screenshots, a walkthrough, a post-mortem, and a collection of reviews, please check out its page, where the game itself is free to play and can be either downloaded or played immediately in your browser!

Sacred Tides is a series which examines ritual and identity among strange creatures in an alien world of seas-upon-seas. The games are all text-based, but emphasize presentation as well, and the gameplay relies on player interaction and choice. Heretic's Hope will introduce a new player character, expand on DEVOTIONALIA's approach to ritual both thematically and mechanically, and will include an entirely new mechanic: branching dialogue with a selection of NPCs.

I'm aiming to have Heretic's Hope finished by October. Below is an early-development screenshot:

For more of my arcane pursuits, you can follow me on Twitter @grimoirtua. If you'd like to check out more of my work, I've had interactive fiction published in sub-Q magazine, and the most recent game I made was THE EMBRACE for the Bitsy Mech Jam and the Digital Emotional Mecha Jam.

A few final words: I started sharing my work on itch a few years ago, and having this space to explore game development has been a gamechanger for me. I'm really enjoying seeing what people are up to at GDC, but I think it's great that this initiative also lets me check out a bunch of new indie projects that I wouldn't have otherwise heard about. I understand how tough it can be to put yourself and your work out there, so I love seeing the other #notGDC projects, and I really appreciate the opportunity to share my work as well. Thanks so much to itch.io for being such an accessible, inclusive platform.