WordPlay – Ironic Iconic Studios

I recently had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Seoirse Dunbar for Adventure Games Podcast. We had a long and fun chat where we discussed my history as a game maker, my work with Talespinners, and my work with the WordPlay Festival where I am proud to continue to serve as Festival Director. You can listen to the episode here.

Besides promoting the WordPlay Festival (coming up this November 9th and 10th), one of my goals in the interview was to talk about my own experiences making games in a way that would be accessible to people new to the game development world and may even inspire them to try making their own games.

That goal led me to talk about one of the first games I’d ever worked on as a game designer: Curse of the Mummy’s Brain!! As mentioned in the interview, I’d made Mummy’s Brain in 2011 during OrcaJam, an annual game jam that is run by IGDA Victoria. It was my first game jam and it opened my eyes to the amazing things that could be done by a small team of creative, motivated individuals over a short period of time.

After talking about it on the podcast, it seemed like a shame to me that listeners wouldn’t be able to experience the game for themselves, so I did some digging around, found the source code, made a bunch of updates to make it run on modern hardware, and posted it on my itch.io page for all to see. It’s a bit clunky, and there are definitely a few things that aren’t working as they’re meant to, but once again it’s back from the dead! I hope you’ll enjoy playing Curse of the Mummy’s Brain!! as much as I enjoyed making it.

2017 was an interesting year. Not interesting in the “may you live in interesting times” way entirely, although there were certainly a share of challenges during the year. One challenge that was a welcome one was the challenge of becoming familiar with my new home in Toronto and getting to know a city I haven’t had much contact with for twenty years. But instead of focusing on the challenges that 2017 had brought, I thought I’d focus on some of the highlights:

Won first place for Game of the Year for 2016 with Mandatory Upgrade: X Marks the Spot
Became an Associate Writer/Game Designer with Talespinners
Started writing a tabletop role-playing game based on the world of Mandatory Upgrade
Attended my first Breakout Con, played many games, and met lots of tabletop & RPG game folks
Got to work on some great games: Primer for Headless Chicken Games and Depot for Villainous Games
Returned to Raleigh NC for another terrific time at the East Coast Game Conference with friends new and old
A game I worked on was released – Raid: World War II. I’ve now officially worked on a thing that features John Cleese.
Ran the WordPlay Festival in November as Festival Director. It was my first event that I ran since arriving in Toronto.
Finished an outline for an interactive novel about ghost hunters (now I just have to figure out what to do with it)
Was interviewed for a “featured developer” article by EveryDownload

And all of that is just stuff I can talk about. There are also a few things brewing up behind the scenes that I hope to be able to talk more about soon. Unfortunately, this means that the “looking forward” part of this post is going to be a bit light in detail at the moment. Rest assured that more news will be forthcoming as 2018 progresses. You can definitely expect to see more news about Mandatory Upgrade related projects, and possibly something around a certain web-comic that remains near and dear to my heart. Oops! I may have said too much, ignore that. Regardless, 2018 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Ironic Iconic Studios and I hope you’ll be joining me for the ride.

Tag: WordPlay

Chris’ Interview with Adventure Games Podcast and also Game Dev Necromancy!

Looking Back and Looking Forward