Cantata brainrot for the day, featuring the parents that haunt the narrative!! Iâve been wanting to draw my MCâs Unda and Caleum, but was violently inspired by @kloudkweenâs comic they did recently!
I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
Smoke and flame swirl around you.
Conjured fire is spontaneous, dangerous magic. When set loose by its caster, it is quick to spread and difficult to control.
Already a wall of fire flares across the exit. Escape is impossibleâŚ
For anyone who isnât a Wayfarer.
â 1. You canât run. Not when innocent people are dying. You have to help.
â 2. You donât owe this city anything. Donât risk your life when youâre so close to making it out.
WAYFARER is a dark fantasy interactive fiction game. Take the role of a Wayfarer, a mercenary from a dying order of warriors marked by their immunity to magic, and explore a world of cutthroat politics, chaos, and danger.
Customize your protagonist, including their ancestry, origin, and appearance
Navigate hundreds of branching choicesâevery action, big or small, matters
Develop relationships with a cast of diverse characters and factions
Enjoy a highly re-playable experience, with over 900,000 words of epic adventure in the current demo
đ PLAY THE GAME HERE đ
Intrigued? Want to play Episode 3? Support my work on Patreon!
In honour of Wayfarer Day (or 6+1 Dayâthat mysterious six and one that haunts the narrative, if you know you know!), all Patreon tiers are 50% off. Get alpha build access and continue your journey, stay up to date with progress reports, and enjoy extras and short stories.
Alpha build access is a benefit for the Recruit and Apprentice tiers only.
Sale applies to monthly and annual memberships.
Use code 48E17 to claim.
It was a pleasure to speak with @ataleofcrowns about A Tale of Crowns, the top-voted game in the Fantasy category!
AToC is a sweeping fantasy romance inspired by Middle Eastern cultures and traditions. Blending fascinating world-building, unforgettable romance options into a truly distinctive story, this is a must-play (if you haven't already) and 100% a deserving winner in a stacked category.
We hope you enjoy this interview as much as we enjoyed putting it together! Read the other interview with @wings-of-ink for God-Cursed here.
You can find the list of fantasy winners here.
About the author
Thereâs a lot that people donât know since I donât really post much about myself or my personal life, and Iâd honestly prefer to keep it that way, which I suppose is in and of itself something that people should know! Iâm just naturally a private person, so I would like people to pay attention to my work first and foremost. I also struggle answering questions about myself in general, so itâs easier this way haha.
About the game
Itâs a high fantasy romance story with Middle Eastern roots.
Tell me about your journey into interactive fiction and what youâre working on right now
Aside from AToC I also write for fun (traditional fiction that is), but itâs nothing I would ever post since itâs just for myself and to practice at writing. As for interactive fiction, Iâve always been very fond of choice-based games since I was a kid, so when I discovered the medium of Twine I thought it was a perfect way to try my hand at it for fun. It started as a hobby and then it unexpectedly developed into something more from there.
What was the inspiration for this game, and why did you want to write a story in this genre?
Aside from my enjoyment of the choice-based genre, I also enjoy fantasy, but in Western spheres you usually get European-inspired fantasy settings for obvious reasons. When Western authors do decide to include West Asian representation, itâs usually in an exoticized or fetishized form. So I wanted to create something that reflected art that was recognizable to me and others like me.Â
Are there any specific themes or messages you hope players take away from your work?
This is a bit broader than what the question asks for, but: I hope it inspires and motivates people to seek out or create spaces for themselves instead of seeking representation in spheres that have proven hostile to anything that diverges from the norm, whether it be in regards to culture, race, gender, sexuality, etc. I find this more useful than begging such creators to please consider us as human beings when writing their stories. Besides which, you realistically canât expect any single person to perfectly cater to and represent your individual needs. Itâs better to make or seek out art that resonates with you and supporting that than waste time and energy hoping for scraps.Â
Whatâs the one thing youâre really proud of that youâve written so far? Do you have a favorite character or scene that youâve written?Â
My favorite scene is and still remains the coronation scene in Chapter 7. It touches both on a lot of world-building for the setting of the game as well as personal development for the Crown, who up until that point has felt like a survivor just trying to get by. Now, for the first time in their life, theyâre being entrusted with something monumental and terrifying: the wellbeing of an entire nation. Itâs the ârealâ beginning of the game, in a way.
Any books, music, movies etc. youâre obsessed with at the moment, or would like to recommend?
This kind of gets back to the earlier question of what inspired me to write AToC/fantasy, but I saved it for this because I want to give a massive recommendation for everyone to check out the light novel series Twelve Kingdoms written by Fuyumi Ono. Itâs also available in anime form, though that is left unfinished, and the light novels have recently gotten an updated English translation for the entire series. I never cared for traditional Western fantasy books, but Twelve Kingdoms was one of the works of fantasy that made me absolutely fall in love with the genre and inspired a lot of AToC as well.Â
Whatâre you excited to tackle/implement/work on next?
Iâve begun brainstorming my next IF work after AToC is finished. I wonât start writing on it until AToC is in its final chapters, but until then Iâm letting it marinate for the next couple of years. Iâm planning on it to be very different from AToC, in a more horror-oriented and much smaller setting, with an older and experienced cast of characters and MC. Though of course it will be romance-centric as well, because Iâm a romance writer at heart haha. Theyâll all be a lot more morally ambiguous or, in some cases, outright bad people. I think itâll be a refreshing change of pace after having worked on AToC for so long!
hello! do you mind sharing your headcanons abt shuake? Your post-canon artwork has taken over my brain
thanks sm :> always happy to share the brainrot lmao
additional headcanons under the cut:
+ akira does a lot of odd jobs to keep busy because a bored akira tends to find trouble (the odd jobs also get him into trouble. akechi both loves and hates it here)
+ akechi grows his hair out to feel closer to his mother, he takes very good care of it!
+ akira eventually starts getting tattoos in the latter half of his 20s, just says fuck it since they really only go back to Japan twice a year for a Phantom Thief Holiday Meetup. akechi gets arsene's wings on his back, akira gets hereward's arrow as a part of a sleeve that references all his Thieves
+ get hitched in vegas with ann as the witness--their 'honeymoon' is spent traveling america for half a year with ann's apartment as their homebase
+ they also run into lots of weird demon/metaverse flavored events in their travels! they're practically cryptids to the more official shadow organizations,
+ when they hit 35ish they buy a house in italy they only spend like 3 months out of the year in, neither of them are great at staying in one place for too long!
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