I published a game!
You might remember I said I was learning to code…
And I can now safely say I sort of have.
Like, I’m not saying I’m an expert or anything, that would be a lie.
But. I can say I have developed a short, not-especially-to-be-taken-seriously interactive fiction ‘game’ called FELIX IN THE UNDERRIME, and you can play it now.
It’s a cyberpunk-ish narrative set in the Ark City of Rime, where citizens live in stratified class systems defined by which layer of the pyramid-shaped society they reside in. Felix, our protagonist, scrapes by in the lowest level, the Underrime, which was never really supposed to exist.
He’s a Tasker, which means he makes a sparse living from taking on odd jobs in the gig economy (which I’m afraid still thrives post-apocalypse). The only benefit of this precarious life is that it gives him license to visit the other layers from time to time, meaning he’s an excellent guide to the city.
But it’s a stressful way to live, and for that reason he’s decided to outsource his decision-making to a chip embedded in his spinal column, which will help him choose between passive, aggressive, or assertive choices as he goes about his day…
As you might be able to tell, this is as much a careers advisor’s educational tool as it is a story…
But really, it’s a prototype. The Ark City of Rime is a world I’ve been imagining for YEARS, and the eventual plan is to write a totally different story to Felix’s, based on a character named Lira. There’s something really nice about being able to make something like this and then just… release it, without having to go through the years of edits and approvals etc which are required with traditional publishing. Also, cyberpunk often feels so very close to our real existence, I was worried that anything I write now about a troubled near-future would be outdated in the 2-3 years it might take for a novel to hit the shelves.
So, if you decide to give this a go, I hope you enjoy it - if there’s anything broken etc please do let me know via the contact page.
This is only version one of Felix - in the long run I want to add some more images (but they take me long enough to make because I do it all myself in Affinity and I’d never done that before I started making this game), and also I’m going to code in a mechanism whereby the game remembers your choices and your ending will depends on how you decided for Felix throughout the game. It still works right now, but this will make your decisions matter more, which I think is important.