#hpowellsmith

Marilyn Fontaine

My PC for the titular game in the Crème de la Crème series by @hpowellsmith!

Marilyn is a soft-spoken and sweet student who is eager to make connections and find a place to belong, though there is little else she is sure of in her life, including her relationship with her parents and her future. Her sweet demeanor gets her out of trouble easily, while her quietly rebellious side keeps her popular with her peers. Fashionable and feminine, she sometimes struggles to balance her old life with her new circumstances.

swept up is a short Twine about blood, violent girls, and the desert.

It takes a matter of minutes to play, but it has a couple of different endings and a number of branches and callbacks. I loved making it: I will always be an easy sell for this kind of thing* and it was fun to do it myself.

I've not written anything as stark/stylised as this since, but I did enjoy using the one-word choice sets again in Heretic Dreams: I like the effect a lot.

It was the first writing I was ever paid for - the following year, sub-Q magazine got in touch asking about reprinting Aquarium but it was too large for them to afford, so I sent swept up in the hopes that it would be accepted. And to my delight, it was! Unfortunately I've misplaced the lovely cover art they made for it, and the magazine site's sadly gone now, but the original game is still up on itch.io.

This had a massive ripple effect: knowing that people were interested in paying for my work led directly to my writing career now. swept up has even been used as teaching materials in at least one college course, which is the wildest thing I've ever heard.

I certainly didn't know any of that when I made this, though - it was very fast and fun to make, and I mostly just shared it with my friends. But it made me realise that my instinct was to do this in an interactive medium rather than a short story or poem, which I hadn't considered so much before playing around with Twine. I remain very fond of it.

With "Royal Affairs" by @hpowellsmith being released soon (I am so very excited!!) I dug up my old illustration of my RA OC Princess Claudette with her bodyguard and childhood friend Asher (and how I imagined him when I played the demo over a year ago).

Hello! We do have some recs for games with trans and/or nonbinary werewolves, here’s what we found.

For those interested, you can check out our werewolf IF rec list here!

If anyone has any recommendations of IFs with a trans or nonbinary werewolves, please feel free to send us a message and we’ll add it to the list!

Blood Moon (Marco and Roe) by @barbwritesstuff

Lure of the Gallows (gender-selectable shifter RO) by @lureofthegallowsgame

Moonrise by Natalie Cannon 

Wolfwater by @carrs-universe-if

Up & Coming (no demo yet!) 

Sleepless Angels (can be a werewolf, trans werewolf RO) by @sleeplessangelsgame

Bouts of inspiration for personal art are really, really rare for me. But this one was such a piece again.  I was bored yesterday and read the teaser/demo of “Royal Affairs” by @hpowellsmith and well... here we are...  

It’s my MC Princess Claudette of Westerlin with her bodyguard/childhood friend Asher Garnett.  Claudette is madly in love with Asher but tries not to show it because she knows there are certain responsibilities that come with her being the (2nd) princess... 

I just had to draw a picture of how I see the two. Such instant-inspiration characters are rare, so I had to seize the moment. I draw not nearly enough personal art these days so I had to indulge and man... I enjoyed drawing them a lot.