I made a horror game

Also a new comic for 2000AD, both launched this week.

Two things I’ve written launched last Wednesday. The first is my latest comic for 2000AD, the first I’ve written for them in a few years – it’s a three-parter called Die Hoard, drawn by the brilliant Nick Brokenshire, and it was inspired by this true story I heard on the Doctor Who podcast 42 to Doomsday. The first part is in Prog 2347, on sale now. Here’s the opening page.

The second is something totally new for me. Last year I was approached via LinkedIn (the only useful thing that has ever come my way on LinkedIn) to pitch an idea for a new interactive storytelling app called Richcast, playable on desktop but primarily aimed at phones. They had money to create some launch games for the platform and invited me to put a proposal together.

I came up with a horror story set in an eerie hotel, inspired by a missed connection I had when flying from Nashville to London and got stranded in Washington DC (I’ve never flown with that airline again, it was entirely their fault).I called it Liminal Hotel because it’s about those odd nowhere spaces you get around airports, where you could be almost anywhere in the world.

The pitch went down well and very soon I was on a video call with some people from Panivox, the company behind Richcast – including Andrew Oliver, an actual legend of the UK games industry. During the 1980s boom years, he and his brother Philip (who’s also now at Panivox) created the Dizzy series and became the most prolific developers of the 8-bit era.

In many ways Richcast harks back to the text adventures of early home computer gaming, but enhanced with imagery, sound and voice recognition. You can play by choosing from a range of responses which appear on-screen, or you can turn that off and just talk to the characters. The app listens out for key words and responds accordingly. It’s very much based around interaction with NPCs – listening, responding and working out what’s going on.

Richcast’s interface for creating games is very clever: I didn’t just write the story and dialogue, I actually defined how the game was structured and proceeded, without having to know the first thing about coding. There’s a blank board and you put tiles on it representing images, dialogue, sound and choices, then you link them like a flow chart, and that’s the game. It’s also open access, so anyone can submit games to the platform.

In some ways making Liminal Hotel was a hybrid of writing a comic and an audio script. Richcast’s editor has a text-to-speech system which was invaluable when working on the game, as I could playtest it and change the dialogue as I went along – but for the finished version it was performed by voice actors. I also used temporary images and sound, pulling pictures of hotel interiors and darkened streets from the internet and inserting bits of vintage mall musak to give the team a sense of what I intended – again, this was really helpful when playtesting. Then they produced all-new art and sound.

The logic side of it, however, was completely different to any other kind of writing I’ve done. Once I got the hang of it, I found it really enjoyable to program simple things like letting the player order a drink at a bar. Larger choices with a bigger effect on the game logic were trickier to implement, but incredibly satisfying when I got them to work.

One section offers the player a range of solutions to a problem, with the ability to attempt a different one if the first one fails, and I was keen that the dialogue should play out differently depending on how many attempts had been made – so when I dumped the player back where they started, I added branches with logic tiles that registered how many attempts had been made and which avenues had been tried. I hope players go through the game more than once to check out branches they might not have taken first time round.

Here’s a trailer for it. (You can also watch on YouTube if that’s easier for you.)

You can play Liminal Hotel for free on the Richcast app. And create your own games for it too, if you want.