I’ve been a long-time fan of successful indie author Joanna Penn and her excellent writing podcast The Creative Penn, so it was really awesome to be invited on her show to talk about writing for games, indie development, interactive fiction, and self-publishing. We had a great chat, and the interview is now live!
You can watch the extreme bearded edition of the interview above, or listen-in on The Creative Penn podcast. If you’re into writing and self-publishing, definitely check out Joanna’s other excellent guest episodes!
During the interview, I also talk about Twine dev stuff, how that might of interest to authors, and my new self-publishing/horror twine game project: This Book Is A Dungeon [This Dungeon Is A Book], which you can pre-order now to save 30% off the full price ($9.99)
Nathan Meunier - Freelance Writer / Author / Indie Game Developer 
I listened to your interview with Joanna Penn this morning and, as soon as I had a cup of coffee in hand, had to come check out your web site and your project to integrate a book with a work of interactive fiction. A long time ago on a Commodore 64, I was an Infocom junkie. Decades passed with diversions into marriage, motherhood, and a career as an applications programmer before I reached my current state of retirement and second career as indie author of mystery novels.
My current WIP is about the murder of the developer of a Twine game, so I’ve been delving back into IF and game development and playing games as “research.” My amateur sleuth is a bit of a geek, so I have her decide to learn Twine and write her own game. I’ve long thought that offering that game as a perk to my newsletter subscribers might work as an incentive. So you can see why I jumped right on this.
I have a couple of comments/questions about the game. First of all, I’d like to see some kind of intro telling me why (as a player) I’m here and what the objective of being “here” is. You know, standard stuff like a quest to rescue the damsel in distress or discover a hoard of gold or kill foozle. Wandering around aimlessly isn’t very interesting. Secondly, I found the font distracting. I think you chose it to give a horror vibe to the game, but it’s not very easy to read, especially since it’s all caps. My question is why did you decided to go with those ugly pixelated graphics? It’s not a limitation of Twine and I think more realistic depictions would engage the player more.
Anyway, good luck with this project!
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