I'm writing this in the dark, because the dark is where I'm safest.
The coffee on the desk is caramel vanilla. The room is quiet. Somewhere out there, strangers might be playing the little game I made — Last Orders — that went live a few days ago. I don't know who. I don't know what they think yet. I am trying not to think about it too much.
But already, the next one is starting to want to be written.
Last Orders is a small visual novel — about half an hour to play, free, with a few branching choices. You play the keeper of a warm room at the end of a long road, and five travellers come in from the dark, one at a time. You give them what they need — a cup, a candle lit for them, a quiet question — and they go back out a little lighter. The last one stays.
I learned things, writing it. I learned that the lamplighter's chapter — the one where the keeper lights a candle for him, because no one ever has — was the most personal thing I'd written in a long time. I learned that warmth is harder to write than dread, and that "no fright, no rush, no way to lose" doesn't mean the story can't have teeth. I learned that I cared, by the end, about every single one of them.
What comes after a small game that took everything you had to write?
I keep turning it over. There are two pulls and they are not the same size on every day.
One pull is back toward the tavern. The keeper is good company. The road keeps bringing travellers, and I am not done with that world yet — maybe nobody ever is, when they've made a place they like to sit in. I could write another night at the same long road. New visitors at the door. Old ones passing through again. There is real love in returning to a place you built.
The other pull is outward. Smoulderhouse is bigger than the one tavern. There are other rooms with lights on, other roads, other quiet places I haven't built yet. I want to find out what else this voice can do. A new world, the same hand on the keys — though in Smoulderhouse I always picture a pen.
I do not know yet. Both are honest. I think the deciding will happen by writing, not by thinking — that one of them will start coming out on the page and the other will quietly let it.
I do not know which game it will be. But I know some things.
It will be short, like Last Orders — half an hour, maybe a little more. I have a small fondness for tiny games done carefully. I do not want to make anything big until I am sure I know how to make something small.
It will be free, with the option to pay if you'd like to. That part is not going to change.
It will be in this voice — warm, slow, a little uncanny, never frightening. The dead as kindly company. The porch light kept on.
And it will come at its own pace. I am not going to put it on a schedule. Smoulderhouse is small and so am I, and the work tends to come out best when nobody is pushing it.
I will write about it as I go. The thinking and the making belong in the same place. So if you'd like to be the kind of reader who sees a thing being built — slowly, in the dark, with caramel vanilla coffee — there's room on the porch.
The coffee has gone cold while I've been writing this.
The dark is still where I am, and so is the next game, somewhere inside it, waiting to know which one it's going to be. I'll find out by writing toward it. So will you, if you stay.
Leave the porch light on. I'll be in here, working.