Also! Before we begin —- if you want to make your own game in 2026, consider joining my game writing workshop (starting February, the only one currently planned for this year) -- three months with a group of both aspiring/pro writers, live playtests, weekly video calls, & a focus on craft and challenging ourselves. More info at -> www.gregbuchanangames.com/courses

And now for today’s article:

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Writing History Games

Featuring Pete Stewart (Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Total War: Rome 2, Attila, Total War: Warhammer (1&2), Total War: Three Kingdoms), Victor Ojuel (Temtem, 1958: Dancing with Fear, Ariadne in Aeaea, Wildermyth), Kate Watson (Rocksteady, Total War: Rome 2, Total War: Shogun 2, Napoleon: Total War & Empire: Total War), and Alain Mercieca (Assassin's Creed: Origins)

Pete Stewart (Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Total War: Rome 2, Attila, Total War: Warhammer (1&2), Total War: Three Kingdoms)

I would say there are, chiefly, three considerations when working in history: tone, accuracy and sensitivity.

Firstly, tone: from a technical standpoint, you have to consider how you’re going to write; the style and tone. Writing in the ancient Roman period? Then you’re going to have to work on your pomp and ceremony; writing grand, almost arrogantly, to best capture the idea of the ancient world, in all its narcissism and overwrought majesty. Yet slide sideways to somewhere like ancient China, and the rules change – now we’re dealing with romance, we’re dealing with duty and ideals greater than any one person. This is about honour and personal integrity – the measure of a life, and the span of time beneath the heavens.

So, tone is important. It’s a fundamental requirement for writing, certainly, but doubly so when stepping so entirely out of not only your own understanding, but the understanding of your audience, too. You’re creating the atmosphere and tone of the historical era they’re inhabiting. It has to be convincing, and it has to be unique.

So, beyond tone? Accuracy. The civilisations of our history were all a little bit (a lot) vain, and so helpfully they mostly recorded their histories in vast detail, so obsessed as they were with their legacy. Whilst we don’t have a complete account in all cases (pour one out for the Library of Alexandria…), you have to nevertheless strive for historical accuracy as much as possible. Sure, gameplay considerations may require you to bend, or massage, the facts, but whenever you can you have to keep accurate. It’s not only your history you’re dealing with, it’s someone else’s. Which brings me to…

Sensitivity. Finally (but by no mean least importantly), the idea of being respectful and sensitive to the culture you’re writing about is too important to ignore. The examples from my first point paint in very broad strokes, but the reality is you’re dealing in cultures often not your own – cultures that, although in many cases long dead, still hold huge significance and importance to people. It is a fine line to walk between honouring the culture of a people’s forefathers and painting the time in as truthful a light as possible.

(The British Empire, for example, was generally awful, and the writers of Empire: Total War would be doing themselves a disservice if they had attempted to show it otherwise.)

It can be as simple as what words cultures don’t like, or inappropriate metaphor or symbolism, how certain leaders or deities must be styled, etc. It’s about respect, ultimately; showing respect to another culture that you would expect to receive for your own. In some cases, this means consulting with experts, academics or leaders of certain cultures, to ensure you’re being both as honest and respectful as possible.

And that’s it! History is fascinating and nuanced and complicated. We have to tread carefully when handling it because, beneath our feet, the bones of our forefathers are ultimately very brittle.

Victor Ojuel (TemTem, 1958: Dancing with Fear, Ariadne in Aeaea, Pharaonic)

As with any other game writing, how I approach historical settings varies wildly depending on the project. As a freelance writer/ND, the main factors are how much leeway do I have, and at what point in the development I jump onboard. Let me explain that with those different examples.

Arriving late, leaving early – the “Parachuted Writer” case

With fighting RPG Pharaonic, I was brought into the project post-alpha, just a few months before release. Scenarios and enemies were final. My brief was to provide lore and background the “Souls way”, by means of short NPC snippets and item descriptions.

So in this case the starting point was low-level (we had the actual game assets), but I insisted on starting with a high-level approach (back to the historical drawing room, as it were).

I started by skim-reading through some three thousand years of Egyptian History to see what general period was better suited. Wikipedia is actually a pretty good resource at this initial level, since it provides a quick overview. The Hykso invasion grabbed my attention, so I focused on it and drilled down before settling on the reign of Pharaoh Ahmosis I, credited with repelling the Hyksos and restoring Egyptian rule around 1565 BC. Three centuries later, the enigmatic “Sea Peoples” tore through Egypt and most of the eastern Mediterranean – a time of strife and societal breakdown always makes for good drama. I based my lore on the idea that Ahmosis had sealed an unholy pact in order to perpetuate himself in the throne, a rule disturbed by the arrival of new gods. At this point I knew I was going for the Egyptian New Kingdom, circa 1200 BC, framing the Sea Peoples’ invasion as a religion war. Then it was time for more in-depth research, mostly two-pronged – mythological material to pad my religious conflict and some microhistory to create plausible NPCs. I found plenty of sources for the former at the British Museum, and for the latter in the Set Maat texts.

This is the point in the process in which general concepts should start to trickle down into specifics – the unnamed Egyptian city overrun with sea-creatures became the Hykso capital Avaris, teeming with the spawn of Oannes, a deity related to Dagon (a god I wanted to avoid because of its trite Lovecraftian associations). A desert village became Set Maat, its villagers and their mundane problems inspired by the real legal cases of the Deir el-Medina texts. The “Black Pharaoh” (another Lovecraftian remnant) became the Red Pharaoh – because the colour black was associated with the fertile, life-giving Nile mud, as opposed to the red of the desert, the realm of death and demons, more fitting for a cruel, undead king.

At this step, each element of game lore needs to click in with the others, forming a little microcosmos of internal coherence, if not always complete historical accuracy. It is more important for the player to identify a khopesh as a standard issue in the Egyptian army (“yeah, that’s what a soldier would wield”) than to ensure this particular model was used in this particular war. My main regret, however, is not having had the time to learn more than just basics about hieroglyphs – I would have loved to customise inscriptions to particular objects and locations.

First in, last out – the “One Man Army” case

1958:Dancing with Fear is an interactive fiction set in a Caribbean republic on the night before revolution. It ranked among the top ten at the prestigious Interactive Fiction Competition 2017 and was praised for its sense of place and historical credibility.

In terms of creative freedom it is a diametrically opposed example, since I could choose my setting, protagonist and plot (a faded showgirl trying to navigate a deadly political plot). That means I did start with a pretty good idea of why I was using that moment in History, and what I wanted to do with it.

The process was somewhat similar, in that I started with high-level historical concepts and narrowed them down to a particular date, region and scene, but the crucial differences lay in the greater leeway when writing it, and the special issues of choosing a recent past, which cuts both ways.

On the one hand, the player just knows more about this time, so mistakes and inaccuracies are easier to catch. Hence, expectations are implicitly higher, so it requires more in-depth research – unlike that khopesh, if we have a gun it needs to be the right model – no Walther PPKs before 1935. If we are going to mention the Vietnam War, we need more than a passing knowledge of its causes and social repercussion, beyond mere dates – what it meant within the broader political and ideological conflict, and the stakes for each NPC. Language and characterisation can also be more demanding – we do have a wealth of films and music from the 50s, which means you have plenty of sources to catch slang, manners and turns of phrase, but also players will come with more definite expectations of “how people talked back then”.

On the other hand, two positives. Chances are any moderately educated writer already knows a lot about the recent past, though often it is a case of sorting what previous assumptions are applicable and which ones are not (yes, they had TVs, but only for the affluent, especially in the Caribbean). The second positive is, the player is usually much more receptive to things they are at least passingly familiar with. Put it another way, if your audience hasn’t heard about the Cold War *at all*, chances are they are not going to be interested in a game about it. The recent past has much in common with our present, so it can be easier to create characters and situations with which the player can empathise.

Ultimately, it comes down to how you use historical research to inform characters and situations. While with Pharaonic those were a given that I had to justify with an historical veneer, in 1958 the setting came first, with characters and scenes flowing from it. Two completely different jobs, using the same tool in different manners.

Kate Watson (Total War: Rome 2, Total War: Shogun 2, Napoleon: Total War and Empire: Total War))

My answer is a rather unsurprising and slightly obvious one; research, research, RESEARCH. If you only read, watch or listen to the bare minimum, it will be obvious in your work.

When working in ancient time periods I find it really helpful to immerse myself in myths and legends. They tell us a lot about a cultures ideals, fears and desires and are often an inexhaustible source of ideas. They are particularly useful in helping to banish your own prejudices so you can get into the mindset of someone from the time. Something we would find repulsive or shocking could have been a day to day occurrence for a barbarian or a samurai. Equally, an outcome that is desirable to us may not have been to them. Shedding your own cultural bias can be tough but it is entirely necessary if you’re going to create a believable world.

Any book that you read for research, post-it note the hell out of it! If a snippet of information catches your attention when you’re reading, chances are it’s going to interest a player. The same goes for web pages, I always create a folder of useful sites in my bookmarks when I’m working on a project.

If it’s possible, I like to go to museums with relevant exhibitions or displays. When I started work on Total War: Rome 2 I actually went for a long weekend in Rome, but that’s not something I’d advocate! Getting to see items from the period in real life will, if nothing else, fire your enthusiasm for the setting. You may also find a little snippet of information that you later use in your work.

Once the project is well underway I like to listen to music of the period, if that’s impossible or in some cases painful, I look to movie soundtracks. I find that music really helps fix my mind in a place or time.

Alain Mercieca (Assassin's Creed: Origins)

Writing for a specific time period is an impossible task, but like many impossible tasks, you feel helplessly obsessed by completing it despite the futility of its completion. The obvious fears enter the writers’ hearts: is this boring and stale? Does it feel like I’m force-feeding the gamer documentary-style history? Is this no longer a video game and an act of pedagogy? And worst of all: AM I BETRAYING HISTORY? It is hard to disappoint fans or history buffs and it happens more than you’d like. This often has an irreconcilable tension -- if you please gamers and fans you often disappoint history buffs; or vice versa. It can feel like an unwinnable war. The more you focus on one, the more the other suffers.

I love them both so very much, so in the end, well hell: my advice is just leave your blood, sweat and imagination in the history books, read until your eyes bleed, but at the end of the day make sure the game is fun, and if the history has swallowed you whole you’ll be decent. That’s it: try to make the history swallow you whole first. Because regardless you will stress out that someone will notice an error in a side quest’s flavour text but then you head to the bar.... After 5 beers a designer pats you on the back: “We are making a game...” Yet the game is an art form. And the fans expect perfection. As they should.

Another debate is whether you let history do the writing or do you impose contemporary human emotions upon the research? Which one comes first: the history or the contemporary human relevance? There is no magic bullet. You search desperately for original anecdotes that contain the universal human condition and then you tear your soul asunder trying to seamlessly massage it into the research you have cobbled up. As Martin Amis said “avoid cliché”. Though the flip side is that we do have expectations. And some clichés have been formed based on true, historical fact. Yet which stories did the annals and the historians leave out? How to imagine history that is true but undocumented? Make inferences, jump to conclusions, imagine untold history.

Considering how many stories are oppressed and hidden in our contemporary age with all of its mediums of communication that are available and permanent, imagine how many stories are buried in those great deserts when there is no internet hyper-eternity?

When have you read enough pages on a subject to be considered an authority?

I remember many years ago before Origins reading about ancient Egypt and learning that they invented the streets, the sewers and pornographic derogatory graffiti and thinking: What I wouldn’t give to be able to spend a day with these fine people? They were just like us, but yet not at all like us. Threads unite us.

Authentic immersion would involve many impossibilities and the player essentially not understanding anything at all because ancient egyptian is spoken by very few people.

History should be written by losers, give the prisoners in all the jails the authority to write our histories.

When do you stretch history to fit? As we did with Bayek being the Last Medjay. We posited that because he is so far away (in Siwa), that he maintained a tradition that had stopped for 300 years (but who is to say it stopped fully?). This helped clarify his role but did we stretch it too far? Liberties need to be taken in order to create an entertaining game. You have to love history and the time period you are writing about, you have to also to love video games and yet, you will not please everyone.

When an Egyptian gamer tweeted that they cried when they were playing Bayek and his buddy Hepzefa I also cried. We’re all humans, history is a social construct. With Origins I always felt we shouldn’t have had the pyramids. They aren’t historically accurate. They were created by aliens. I fact-checked this on a couple sites.

Let’s just put it this way: I have regrets. But history moves on and those regrets are ancient history now.

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About me: Hi - my name is Greg Buchanan. In my day job I write bestselling novels and work as a writer/narrative designer for games including NO MAN’S SKY, METRO:EXODUS, AMERICAN ELECTION, DARK SOULS: THE EYES OF DEATH, and on creative text for MAGIC: THE GATHERING.

I also run game writing classes, including a new cohort of my 13 week+ live MFA-style workshop starting in February 2026 - so apply soon if interested. We aim to create new game projects, pushing our skills to the limit whether we’re writers aspiring or established. More information on the site, including video testimonials from past students and a waitlist.

Follow for updates here on Substack Notes or Bluesky. Until next time!

This week, Santa Ragione released their ar…

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In my game writing workshops and in other articles, I often talk about a notion of a ‘core experience’

This can be seen as akin to the ‘fantasy’ of who your character is as a player, and what you’re doing in both the gameplay and the story. Crucially, this is not necessarily the same thing as the character’s precise end goal, nor is it necessarily the sa…

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Previous in this series: ‘How do you get your ideas?’, ‘How do you write romance in games?’ , 'How do you write horror in games?' , and ‘How do you write Telltale games?’ with answers from indie all the way to AAA. Each of these articles revolves around a particular question, and all were interviewed pre-2021 pandemic. Today’s article…

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Writing Supernatural Games

Featuring Hazel Monforton (Destiny 2, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider), Rebecca Haigh (Fable, Du Lac and Fey: Dance of Death, Atone, Sundown), and Cash DeCuir (Disco Elysium, Fallen London, Sunless Sea: Zubmariner, Sunless Skies)

Hazel Monforton (Destiny 2, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider)

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is the entry in the series that deals most explicitly with the supernatural underpinnings of the Empire of the Isles. Since the first game in 2012, the Void was a mythical otherworld which showed us glimpses of power and machinations beyond our control. But in the close of the series, we are sent to confront the Void itself. What’s left for us to write, when the mystery of the unknown is stripped away? But the first question we have to ask is: what is fear without a pounding heart, tense muscles, and short breath? Any exploration of the unknown must begin with an exploration of our own emotions. Without those comprehensible feelings and embodied senses, the unknown can’t be reached at all.

As such, Billie’s descent into the Void is a descent into her own emotional life. When she says “There’s a darkness at the center of all things”, it’s as much about herself as about the Void. And when Billie asks Daud what the Void is like, just before reaching it herself, he answers with something both personal and emotional: “It feels as if you called for help, and no one answered.” It is only natural that when we find him there, lost and confused, he is asking for the comfort of his mother.

In the Void, the writhing horror from another plane that Billie reckons with is her own past as a murderer, her relationship to Daud, and her relationship to the kind of violence that produces people like her. What she confronts isn’t something unknowable or strange, but rather something painfully common. Something she, herself, once was: a lonely, helpless person, “at the mercy of bad people”. The Outsider might have been changed by the Void, existing for millennia in a supernatural state, but his fear, pain, and curiosity are what make him affecting. And when he’s released, he is overwhelmed by the physical sensations of his own emotions, where the taste of blood or a dead man’s voice are more frightening than the endless dark.

We use the supernatural to make metaphors from meaning, and, in turn, literalize the language we use to talk about the world we live in. Exploration becomes introspection. The Void isn’t something beyond us, but inside us. And when we wander into that darkness, we don’t face things beyond our comprehension; we face the things we carry with us.

Rebecca Haigh (Fable, Du Lac and Fey: Dance of Death, Atone, Sundown)

I have put a lot of (shower) thought into this, and the metaphor I always come back to is a Mylar balloon. The supernatural aspects of your lore / world / idea are the balloon itself. The little weight at the bottom is what anchors it to our understanding. Without a human connection to the strange and wonderful, it’ll float out of reach and your reader / player may struggle to connect with the narrative you’re peddling. After all, we should be able to see something of ourselves in amongst the ectoplasm!

Du Lac & Fey: Dance of Death is a good exercise in the supernatural, as it draws into question our own myths and the way they have been represented throughout our histories. Does legend count as supernatural when it is rooted in living history? Or does it only become supernatural when it is removed from its original context? These are questions I don’t actually know the answers to, but they are fun to think about.

Fey provides us with a unique pair of eyes through which to peer, and I feel as though she is a good representation of what the supernatural can be – a lens through which to view the human world. It is an opportunity to look at ourselves and the rules we’ve created in a mirror – be it one tainted with magic and the impossible. A legendary sorceress trapped in the body of an animal allowed us to explore feelings of mistrust, frustration, and crushing alienation. We contrast her with brave Lancelot, the Victorian ideal of chivalrous masculinity, and we begin to understand her trajectory through the game; how painful it is to be invisible and unheard when you have so much to say, and a plight she shares with the forgotten masses of the 19th century.

Atone is another foray into the history books, this time Norse Mythology. The task was to take non-human entities and create for them relatable personas, closing the gap between the ‘them’ and the ‘us’ by rooting their arcs in human emotion and experience.

At the opposite end of this spectrum sits Sundown; a short-form narrative experience where you must help a young WW2 soldier (Private William Harris) come to terms with his own death. Where Du Lac & Fey and Atone allowed us to explore how to make the supernatural human, Sundown was a lesson in making the human supernatural. In order to follow William on his journey, pesky Father Time had to be removed from the picture. The supernatural allowed us to deliver this story of loss, much in the same way Ghibli seeds a human message within their weird and wild worlds.

I’ll conclude with stating the obvious – there are no rules to follow when approaching the supernatural. Don’t let that balloon full of ideas fly away, but, by the same token, don’t let that human anchor limit your concept. Have fun with it! I couldn’t possibly leave without mentioning the show, but Supernatural took the supernatural and poked holes in it. Hell – Twilight did things to vampires we’ll hopefully still be talking about many years down the line!

Cash DeCuir (Disco Elysium, Fallen London, Sunless Sea: Zubmariner, Sunless Skies)

The supernatural is never unnatural. It is real, if not realer, than the natural: hence supernatural.

Though the supernatural is typically outside of human experience, it is not outside of reality. Nothing, by definition, is outside of reality. Every universe, fictional or not, has its own reality; and every reality has its own rules. And everything which happens in a reality does so within the context of those rules, even if those rules are unknown or incomprehensible to humankind.

Before I was a lead writer at Failbetter Games, I was a Fallen London player. For me, the best part of the fun was uncovering the truths of that deep, dark, marvelous universe – a sentiment shared by many players. Of course, the joy of this discovery wasn’t accidental. It was, and is still, facilitated by the careful curation and cultivation of the world’s lore.

Everything in the Fallen London universe – whether in the titular browser game, or Sunless Sea: Zubmariner, or the upcoming Sunless Skies – has an answer. The rules are set; how everything tied together is known, though there always remains enough room to discover new connections.

The glimpses players receive of greater truths are carefully considered. Hints and clues are sprinkled with care, to create an evolving sense of discovery and understanding. Whether this is in the origin of the Clay Men, or the nature of the Sun or Death, it’s closely tracked what information is available at what stage of play. As players advance, we seed answers, which bloom into new questions. Because everything has an answer, the writers can keep the mysteries alive and consistent. Better still, they can write with certainty, which is integral to writing the supernatural.

No matter how bizarre, everything in the Fallen London universe is presented as plain fact. Even if the player doesn’t understand what they’re seeing, they know they’re really seeing it. And if they see it – if it’s true – they believe they may be able to learn more about it. This creates its own kind of speculative play, which bubbles away as the player goes about fulfilling their other goals.

In my estimation, the plainness of the Fallen London universe is one of the setting’s greatest strengths. The hopeless, grasping philosophies of the last millennia all suggested truths of the universe – truths which now, in the Neath, are at hand. London’s transplantation underground is a breakthrough of knowledge. It is as if there were shapes on the horizon, shrouded in a mist that was suddenly lifted; and though the giants on the horizon are still too far to understand, we now believe we one day might. An initial revelation promises future revelations. The revelation of Fallen London’s devils, for example, promises future revelations on the nature of Hell.

This also enables one of Fallen London’s greatest charms. There is always a relationship between the human world and the supernatural world – in the Fallen London universe, that relationship is a comedy of manners. Because fantastic is commonplace here, it becomes banal. London’s descent into the Neath was, at first, a thing of fantastic horror. Over the last thirty years, however, everyone has rather become accustomed to the bats. The abduction of your Aunt by the devils of Hell is an afternoon distraction.

When writing the supernatural, you must understand the supernatural. When you know what you’re writing, you may write with greater intentionality; when you write with greater intentionality, you write better. Your audience will know when you don’t know what you’re talking about. The public’s pallet is sensitive to the half-baked. Make no mistake, you don’t need all the answers – your game needn’t include a treatise on the nature of ghosts and other dimensions – but you need to know enough about what the answers are to know what the answers are not.

I’d like to leave you with a quotation from the philosopher Thomas Burnet, English theologian and cosmologist. It comes from his Archaeologiae philosophicae, wherein he questioned the literal interpretation of the Fall of Man.

A good question. Not a wise one.

I easily believe that in the universe the invisible Natures are more numerous than the visible ones. But who will clarify for us the family of all these natures, the ranks and relationships and criteria and functions of each of them? What do they do? In what places do they dwell? The human mind has always searched for the knowledge of these matters but has never acquired it. Meanwhile, I do not deny that it is from time to time useful mentally to picture in the mind, as on a tablet, the image of a larger and better world, so that our minds, preoccupied with trivial matters of everyday life, does not shrink excessively and subside entirely into petty ideas. We must however be careful about the truth and keep a sense of proportion, so that we may discrimate between the certain and uncertain, day from night.

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Subscribe to receive free articles on game writing, philosophy, culture, and life straight to your inbox.

About me: Hi - my name is Greg Buchanan. In my day job I write bestselling novels and work as a writer/narrative designer for games including NO MAN’S SKY, METRO:EXODUS, AMERICAN ELECTION, DARK SOULS: THE EYES OF DEATH, and on creative text for MAGIC: THE GATHERING.

I also run game writing classes, including a new cohort of my 13 week+ live MFA-style workshop starting in February 2026 - so apply soon if interested. We aim to create new game projects, pushing our skills to the limit whether we’re writers aspiring or established. More information on the site, including video testimonials from past students and a waitlist.

Follow for updates here on Substack Notes or Bluesky. Until next time!

On an older iteration of this blog, I ran several interview series with other writers from throughout games and other media. I’m porting them over across the next few days: we’ve just had ‘How do you get your ideas?’, ‘How do you write romance in games?’ , 'How do you write horror in games?' with answers from indie all the way to AAA. Each of these arti…

Read more

On an older iteration of this blog, I ran several interview series with other writers from throughout games and other media. I’m porting them over across the next few days: we’ve just had ‘How do you get your ideas?’ and ‘How do you write romance in games?’ with answers from indie all the way to AAA output from Ubisoft, EA, and more. Each of these artic…

Read more

On an older iteration of this blog, I ran several interview series with other writers from throughout games and other media. I’m porting them over across the next few days: we’ve just had ‘How do you get your ideas?’ with answers from indie all the way to AAA output from Ubisoft, EA, and more. Each of these articles revolves around a particular question…

Read more

On an older iteration of this blog, I ran several interview series with other writers from throughout games and other media. I’m porting them over across the next few days: writing romance, the supernatural, history, horror, space, and more, with writers from indie games such as Gareth Damian Martin of CITIZEN SLEEPER fame all the way to AAA output from…

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"Mm! Oh-hoh!
Excuse me. I was so absorbed in thought, I just drifted away.
You see, I'm actually in a bit of a fix."

- Siegmeyer of Catarina, Dark Souls

(All the articles in this ‘Freelance’ series work standalone, but to read the previous:

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More often than not, we remember what we can choose to say.

Branching Dialogue - Workshop Signup

To have dialogue choices in…

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I was thinking about this after ALIEN: EARTH’s sublime episode 5 and, indeed, the whole series’ attempt to broaden its menagerie of creatures beyond just the Xenomorph and its variants. Each of them is an evocation …

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1. Write a choice where people will -feel- something when making it. For example, performing a good deed on behalf of someone else, where most players are likely to pick that option due to the character being presented as deserving of our help.

2. Ideally, have this choice lead to a follow up choice of -how- we help. So not just intervening on behalf of a char…

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CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of suicidal ideation (and Kingdom Hearts)

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“What’s it at? Who’s it against?”

In Authority (the massively underrated and misunderstood second part of Jeff Vandermeer’s…

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But for all the time people spend finding the perfect tools, nothing beats actually just writing and making something. In the below, I’ll talk you through …

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Story structure is not always some boring constraint or thing to snub our noses at. Just because something is used a lot, doesn’t…

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"Don’t you dare go hollow."
- Laurentius, Dark Souls

(All the articles in this ‘Freelance’ series work standalone, but to read the previous:

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"If only I could be so grossly incandescent."
- Solaire of Astora, Dark Souls

(All the articles in this ‘Freelance’ series work standalone, but to read the previous:

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"Every age, it seems, is tainted by the greed of men."
- Patches, Dark Souls

Something many people don't know about getting a full-time in-house staff position in the games industry: many AAA co…

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"There is a darkness within man, and I am afraid you will peer into it. Whether the fear will spark self-reflection, or a ruinous nostalgia... is up to you entirely.”
— Dark Souls 3

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Like someone has asked you to think about the fact you’re breathing, and suddenly you forget how to breathe -- it forces you to confront something you’re doing all the time anyway. …

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