Fiction Factory Games

Non-binary in the Nineties

I saw an interesting article today from the new voice talent behind Morph, the shapeshifting mutant from X-Men '97. While Morph was cis male in the original nineties cartoon, the producers decided to update them to non-binary, even if it's not going to be trumpted particularly loud within the narrative itself. The predictable backlash exists but honestly the posit...

Next Build Plan

As a heads up, this week I'm going to put together the next major update for the game, downloadable by all five dollar backers.

This should include the entire daytime story right up through the ending, as well as Niara's story. Most of this was technically in the last build but bugs were preventing progression forward.

Nighttime scenes with the other old ones will have placeholders to allow you to progress.

Honestly I was hoping to get more done. The main focus for the last...

Llamasoft, the First Indie (Kinda)

I've spent the last few nights playing through "Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story" by Digital Eclipse, the same folks who brought us the Making of Karateka and the amazing Atari 50 collection.

Let me sum up -- Llamasoft was a tiny indie game company releasing Commodre 64, VIC-20, Atari ST and other 80s microcomputer games in the United Kingdom back in the day. It was pretty much just one dude, Jeff Minter, and he was very much a random weirdo who made arcade-style games because he liked ...

State of the Shadow, March 19th

This week I put WWE 2k24 aside and dove heavily back into game development. I won't list every single change or new bit of content here to avoid spoilers, but here's some of the majors.

The daytime storyline is now playable end-to-end. The final sequence with Cthulhu is incomplete because I haven't added any scenes involving the other Old Ones, but I wanted to nail down Cthulhu since we may be recording his voice acting soon. He'll be voiced by the incomparable Jacob Burgess, aka Matt f...

Dodging a Bullet

Layoffs. Failed acquisitions and mergers. IP hung up in limbo as game devs get traded like pogs. The industry is not in great shape in 2024, as the gulf between the C-suite and the actual game developers widens further and further -- games treated as widgets or commodities by people who don't even understand what they're funding, as long as it keeps making them richer and richer...

Yeah, things ain't great. And despite being a game dev I've felt like a perpetual outsider, looking in on ...

Visual Novel Is a Game Mechanic

One thing I've never quite understood, and I'll admit that this is me as an outsider looking in despite literally being in this industry and this particular corner of the industry for five years... is why visual novel is looked at as a genre instead of a game mechanic.

It feels limiting to call it an entire genre, with its own set of absolute expectations and limits and traditions. In essence, this is a game mechanic. And it's been applied in so many different contexts beyond your stand...

The U-Shaped Narrative

OK, a bit of a conundrum.

So the way this game works, the daytime storyline is fairly linear. Day by day specific events unfold. Then, at night, you have freedom of choice of who you want to talk to.

Right now, we have the first week of gameplay finished. Think of that as the left-hand side of the letter U. That's done and polished, with just a few edits to make to accelerate the pace a bit.

For the last few weeks I've been writing all of the daytime scenes while ignoring t...

On Moving Goalposts

Here's the first of your weekly blog updates. These will be in-depth looks at the development of our games, or essays about the game industry and game design in general.

This week, since it's relevant to the launch of the Patreon, I'd like to talk about how I've re-aligned how I look at success. Because to date, Fiction Factory Games could be considered a complete failure... depending on a Certain Point Of View, to quote Obi-Wan.

Here's how I saw things before:

2024-02-28 19:13:17 +0000 UTC View Post

Alpha 01 Build - Codename "Splatterhouse"

For $5 and up backers, here's the latest build of the game to play, enjoy, and leave feedback on! The link is at the top of the Google Doc where you can file bug reports and leave comments:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1By9ILaHvFd8HgJX-_vidKJH2xfBB4Ac052Cw2AiJWRo/edit?usp=sharing 

Only the Windows PC version is available currently but ...

Day One Thanks

A hell of a lot of people joined up today, and you have my deepest thanks. Whether you're tossing one dollar my way or five or whatever. All of it is going to go towards this dream of working on games and releasing them for everyone.

The plan is to get the first blog post going soon, discussing topics about the game project and the game industry in general. I'll have that up this week. If anyone has any suggestions for things they'd like me to write a short essay about, go ah...

Welcome to the Fiction Factory Games Patreon

I'm Stefan Gagne, owner and lead dev for Fiction Factory Games. I co-authored Arcade Spirits and Arcade Spirits: The New Challengers, and wrote Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain. I work with diverse teams to collaborate on art and music, bringing those words to life as LGBTQIA+ friendly narrative indie games.

And... I'm sick of the rat race. I'm sick of capitalism. I just want to make art, not juggle platform demands and the intensely crowded indie ecosystem, dealing with publishe...

Patreon's Restarting!

I have no idea if this is going to actually send to the people who were subscribed to my Patreon back in 2019, but I'm hoping it will..

We're going to be relaunching the Patreon a Fiction Factory Games patreon. You'll get developer blog articles and beta access if you choose to continue subscribing.

If you want out and don't want to be charged, please manage your patronage on the website and remove us from your list of subs! 

(If I could manually flush the list, I would...