#native creators

Q1: So, tell us a little bit about the projects you’re working on!

When it Hungers is a cosmic horror mystery where you play as a parole agent working off your sentence by helping an organization solve magical and monstrous phenomena. You yourself are a monster, and can play as one of three species each with their own unique flavor text, abilities, and weaknesses ;)

The game starts off with you a few years into your parole and dealing with something dark in your past that happened to you on the job and stole your memories from most of your parole sentence. You’re plagued by the past, bitten by the present, and the future is looking at you like a delicious snack.

You can figure out what happened to you, try to survive the current case you’ve been put on, and maybe come to more than a few scary truths about yourself in the process. Or become a creature of cruel intent bent on taking your own slice of justice—it’s up to you!

I’m also lowkey planning some short story ideas, flirting with ideas for the sequel to WiH even though I’m nowhere close to finishing it yet! All the stories I’ve thought up of still take place within the WiH universe, with monsters all around, witches, basilisks, magic, and things you don’t want to know are in the dark, and I’m excited to explore different eras of time with the same universe I’ve set up.

Q2: What has been your favorite thing about using interactive fiction and/or being in the community? What are some of the biggest challenges?

My favorite thing about IF is the interactivity of it—it’s more interactive than a novel, I create a character and make them unique to themself in the story they’re in, without being so rigid as a video game. There are so many more avenues to take in IF and both reading and writing it has been so much fun and good for my ADHD brain lol.

The biggest challenge with IF is how much work gets put into so little gameplay. I’m over 200,000 words written, with only 45,000 words per playthrough about. Essentially, it’s taken me 200k to write 45k and it’s disheartening to see that while also being just a nature of the medium. It means there’s a lot of variation, it means that people can play and experience the story in wildly different ways—it also means it’s going to take longer, going to be harder, to make a finished story than if it were written linearly.

If it were written linearly, I’d be done by now. But I also wouldn’t do it any other way. I love writing for IF, it’s just….a lot of work. And you so rarely ever know if anyone has seen everything you’ve written. You don’t get that kind of uncertainty with other kinds of writing.

Q3: What is something you’re excited to explore within your work?

I honestly love exploring personality and character choices in my work. It’s so exciting and puzzling to figure out how each scene will happen with each personality trait. I always have to ask myself if I’ve come up with all the options that people want to make? If there’s something else someone with a different personality would say and do in this scene?

It’s having to look through so many different lenses at once to come up with all the possible avenues your story could go down—and decide which ones make it to the cut, since not all of them do, but then having to balance to make sure each personality has equal opportunity to grow.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the personality of the MC is one of my favorite things to play with and explore since it’s such a big mechanic to my game. I’m excited to see how different everyone’s experiences are playing through to the end based on personality and character choices and seeing just how varied the NPCs and story will become because of player choices.

Q4: What’s something you feel is overlooked and would like to be changed? Either with encouraging people to research Indigenous cultures more, by being more aware, or the like?

I think people are afraid to include indigenous cultures in their work.

It’s true that cultures that aren’t your own should be handled with sensitivity in mind, and respect, but the solution to that isn’t to not include that representation at all.

Do your research. Ask for help. Don’t give in to cowardice of being wrong because, yes, it might happen! You might be wrong! What counts is listening to those who are part of that community, fix your mistakes, learn from them.

Without mistakes we do not learn and being afraid is a disservice to communities everywhere who do not have the representation they deserve to have. It is not the job of the oppressed to be their sole representation in media.

Something else that is often overlooked is the uniqueness to indigenous cultures. Too often we’re lumped into ‘north native american’ or ‘south native american’ or ‘pacific islander native’—large non-specific groups that completely ignore how unique every tribe is, even those who are neighbors to one another.

We are not all the same, and just saying you have a ‘native’ character isn’t enough. Be specific. Do your research for that culture—I, myself, am guilty of this! What matters is your willingness to learn and to fix what you did wrong in the first place.

Q5: Does your heritage influence your story or characters as you create them? How? Why or why not?

Not as much and that’s something that makes me sad to be honest. I’m very mixed, I’m white passing, my family lost their native culture a long time ago after the trail of tears and though it’s important to me to try to reconnect with distant ancestors, I also know it’s not my place to speak over other native persons who experience life in a much more ostracized way than I have.

I’ve grappled a lot with being ‘native enough’, which is (sadly)ironic considering I’m less French than I am Muscogee Creek, yet I’ve never grappled with the idea of being ‘not French enough’.

I think it’s this grappling that’s influenced me a lot with my character design. In the future, I intend to honor native cultures much more loudly than I’ve done with WiH, and I will always always have indigenous characters in my stories. There have been hundreds of stories with all white cast, why not hundreds more with an all-indigenous cast?

Nico, for example, is Zapotec, which is a tribe in Oaxaca. I’ve used Zapotec models for their face claim—though I know they grapple with a lost culture as that’s something they and I, intentionally, share, being a refugee from their childhood home from a young age and, even now, living in a different country than the one they grew up in. They suffer a lot of imposter syndrome which they try to make up for by learning and being as useful as they can.

Kalipa, one of the antagonists of WiH (and one of my favorite characters), is also indigenous, being a person whose ancestry is from this world’s equivalent of Hawai’i.Actually, I think my indigenous heritage has influenced the world of WiH more than I initially thought at the beginning of this answer!

I’ve intentionally made it a world without colonial influence—there is no country past or present that has successfully campaigned, raided, and raped other cultures, countries, etc. of their autonomy en mass. Yes, there have been wars, struggles, cultures have died out for other reasons, like time, famine, disease, etc. But there is no catalyst that caused this dying out via war and domination to the scale our world does.

Many indigenous peoples in my world have maintained their sovereignty and practice their cultures freely. Because I didn’t want to make a colonial world. We get enough of that as is.

I am incredibly lucky to have been able to track my ancestry to the Hotalgalgi clan in one side of my family, and I would hate to create a world where people like me have to be lucky to figure out where they come from, as opposed to that information being readily and freely available.

Q6: What is something you’d love to see in interactive fiction?

Hmmmmm…I love personality systems like mine but that’s biased XDDD

I honestly love so many different projects being worked on and it’s hard to decide what I would like to see ‘more’ of. I think in terms of story, genre, IF is varied, though I would like to see more horror and even a different zombie apocalypse take (which I’ve been lowkey storming a short story idea for in the world of WiH, shhh).

In terms of mechanics, I would like to see more exploration in failing. I love when my character fails! And that’s something I’ve put in WiH. I’ve approached failure in the game in a very ttrpg way—failing doesn’t mean death, or losing out on content, but instead seeing other unique content that people who succeed won’t see!

Failure is not a bad thing in WiH from a game mechanic standpoint, it’s not something to be punished but to add a different flavor to the story. For example, in the farm scene, when the MC fails in the fight with Kalipa was one of my favorite bits of variation to write. Because when they succeed, Nico is the one who gets tackled out of the barn, when they fail, the MC is the one who does so, and you get different information based on that failure. And, if I recall, Nico doesn’t end up with a massive bite wound if the MC fails??? At least…if I remember correctly XD it’s been awhile since I’ve written that scene.

I really need to reread my own story I stg.

Q7: Any advice to give to aspiring devs?

Be patient.

Don’t feel pressured to answer asks you don’t want to answer, or even asks you do want to answer but don’t have the energy for! Don’t feel the need to create a blog even before you have the demo bc that’s a lot of pressure! It’s stressful managing a blog, writing a story, and doing whatever you’re doing in regular life to pay the bills.

It is a LOT of work, and you need to be patient with yourself in doing it as well as pace yourself to see your project come to fruition. It does both you and your story a disservice to rush it.

If it takes years then it takes years, writers have spent decades writing one story and they were doing it linearly—making IF is so much more work. You, and your audience, should respect it for the beast it is.

TL;DR

Q1: So tell us about the project(s) you’re working on!

My main project right now is The Watchwood, a story about trauma, recovery, and what family always should have been. In it you play a member of the Grey Family, who have resided in an old house called the Watchwood for generations unnumbered. You and your parents left when you were a child, after an event you don’t clearly remember anymore, and ~20 years later you’ve returned for your grandmother’s memorial service.

Not all is as it seems, though. The Woods are dark and deep, your family’s ancestral home holds secrets untold, and there is something perhaps best left forgotten tickling the back of your mind as though it wants desperately to be remembered.

Q2: What has been your favorite thing about using interactive fiction and/or being in the community? What are some of the biggest challenges?

In all, my favorite thing has also been among the biggest challenges? I like building interactive stories- mostly I’ve done this through a tabletop medium, which is different. It’s freer and more open. You don’t have to account for as many variables because you’re playing it improv and you can adapt the story to what your players are going after.

With an interactive novel, though, that’s not so much an option. I’m having to sit down and not only sort out what the most likely avenues of action would be for my readers/players, but also try to delineate what’s going to be most feasible for me to write and work with my friend to implement into code.

Q3: What is something you're excited to explore within your work?

Like I said, this is a story about trauma & recovery. It’s a very personal story for me? And as such it gets really heavy at times, but I’m just- I’m really excited to be laying out something very similar to my recovery journey, and to also lay out this… I don’t know, this concept of what family should be, and how they should act, and what family really means.

Because for a lot of us, myself included, family hasn’t always been a comforting word or presence- but family should be comforting, loving, accepting, and supportive, and the Grey Family is very much that, always.

Q4: What's something you feel is overlooked and would like to be changed? Either with encouraging people to research Indigenous cultures more, by being more aware, or the like?

There’s so much, honestly. I come from multiple nations, most of which are historically and currently located in what is now known as Mexico, although a couple of my nations are located in what is now the Southwest United States as well. Since even just my native heritage is so varied, it really draws into sharp attention how rare it is to see someone understand the way native cultures relate to each other.

Many of my nations share the same stories and concepts- the trickster Coyote is ever-present in Southwest US nations as well as in Northern and Central Mexican nations, for example. But if you go research the Northeast US nations you’ll find that the trickster Coyote is much less present.

There’s no easy, solid, simple, quick answer here because Native nations across the Americas are at once wildly varied and intensely interconnected. The one thing that really ties us all together is these everlasting effects of colonization, and that’s what I’d really like people to put more thought into. How colonization has changed (almost exclusively for the worst) our family structures and our “borders” and our diets and our health. How colonization prevents many people who are connected to their cultures from being legally recognized as a member of their nation. How colonization has changed our cultural views on gender & sexuality.

How colonization has ripped our people away from us- to the point that many do not know who they belong to at all, if they even know they’re Native. How colonization has irreparably damaged our languages and practices. What effect that’s had on Natives across the Americas, and how we’ve persevered anyway.

Q5: Does your heritage influence your story or characters as you create them? How? Why or why not?

Oh, it absolutely does. For a start, no matter how you envision your character in The Watchwood, your family is mixed race. You may have been adopted or not, but your grandfather (always referred to as Abuelo), who is an important side character, is Native (specifically he’s Purépecha, a Central Mexican nation and part of my heritage). I’ll admit that Abuelo is a bit of a self-insert, and people who play will find out a lot about who I am through interacting with him- but his heritage shines through primarily in his food and the way he addresses his family.Other characters who are distinctly Native in some way are two of the three love interests: Salomón and Bridget. I don’t want to spoil everything about their character arcs, but suffice to say that they have two different approaches to their connections to their ancestries- or lack thereof. Their indigeneity affects the way they view the world, and also affects the way they view their genders and sexualities. It’s as much a part of them as my indigenous heritages are a part of me.

Q6: What is something you'd love to see in interactive fiction?

This is a hard one to say, because interactive fiction has been such a fun, interesting, and diverse medium already in the last, say, 5-10 years. I barely ever stumble across a game where I don’t get to play who I want to play, and make choices I want to make. I even get to be polyamorous and ace in some games, reflecting my real identities. I’d love to say “I’d like to see more Native characters” but in truth I don’t want to encourage anyone to shoehorn them in where they don’t belong. What I want to see instead is more Native writers making interactive novels. It’s an engaging and interesting medium, and seeing more Native stories told through it would be amazing.

Q7: Any advice to give to aspiring devs?

Don’t be afraid to turn to your peers for help.

If you want to do something, but you aren’t sure it’ll fit into the end product, do it anyway! Worst case scenario, you’ll cut it and maybe use it for another project later- or maybe it’ll take the project in an entirely new direction that you like better.

Take breaks. If you’re getting frustrated with something, put it away for a little while. After a break- maybe a meal, a good nap, a chat with some friends- you’ll have a fresh perspective and maybe you’ll have figured out what you need to do with it.

Q1: So, tell us a little bit about the projects you’re working on!

I only have one project and it’s The Graves of Heirs being written with Choice Script. It’s an admittedly cheesy take on the reincarnation/isekai genre that I’ve been having a lot of fun working on. The main character has been transported into the world of their favourite novel in the place of the series’ villain, Carmine. They start out as a child in the volatile magical school Ehrenreich alongside one of the original series’ love interests, and they must choose whether to follow the path of the original novel or go their own way.

Q2: What has been your favorite thing about using interactive fiction and/or being in the community? Some of the biggest challenges?

Overall my experiences with the community have been massively positive! I’ve been seriously blessed to receive all of the positivity and support that I have!

The medium of interactive fiction allows exploration of alternate story threads that I would’ve been forced to throw out otherwise, but that can also be a double edged sword sometimes. There’s a lot of repetition in the code, and I find myself getting paranoid about overusing certain words when I’ve maybe only used it once in that particular branch - the curse of writing a branching narrative with a short memory.

Q3: What is something you’re excited to explore within your work?

I am so excited to get further into the various story branches! It’s seriously the only thing I can think about recently. Also, despite how tropey it is, I am excited to explore the world of TGOH further - I’m actually really proud of the worldbuilding I’ve managed to put together!

Q4: What’s something you feel is overlooked and would like to be changed? Either with encouraging people to research Indigenous cultures more, by being more aware, or the like?

I can’t speak for other indigenous peoples, but I understand the hesitance people have to look into and include things regarding native/First Nations culture. I also don’t think there’s a whole lot people can do to find out more - information about cultural practices and the like are rarely shared on the internet, and books written on the topic are often severely inaccurate or outdated. Even within nations, tribes often differ wildly between each other.

It’s kind of a complex issue, but I feel like this particular problem itself is overlooked a lot. The question of learning more about native people is complex, because oftentimes wildly different peoples were gathered together under the same ‘nation’ for convenience’s sake. A question like: “How do Blackfoot people smudge and pray?” will have different answers depending on which tribe you’re asking.

I don’t know what the solution would be - if there is any - but this is probably the thing I think people overlook the most.

Q5: Does your heritage influence your story or characters as you create them? How? Why or why not?

At first I wasn’t sure, but then I realized that it does quite a bit!

Around the time I started the tumblr devblog for TGOH, the residential school mass graves were in the news. Most of the older generation of my family are survivors; my entire life has been lived in the shadow of what the schools did, and how people dealt with the aftermath.

In that way, I think the setting of TGOH - The Ehrenreich Organization - is heavily inspired by the residential schools. Like the students in TGOH, my family lost our name when the older generation went to the schools, and the records of what our last name actually was were destroyed when the local church burned down.

There’s other examples, I imagine - like any writer, my life and experiences are littered throughout in ways I probably haven’t realized yet. This is simply the biggest example I could think of.

Q6: Any advice to give to aspiring devs?

Just do it, Shia Labeouf meme-style. Anything you’re nervous or unsure about - just do it. At the end of the day, bugs and typos are fixable, lines can be rewritten - nothing has to be written in stone if you don’t want it to be. It can be anxiety inducing - the fear of failing or messing up, releasing a product that’s garbage and unplayable - but I guarantee the fun and enjoyment you’ll get from making it and messing around will be worth it. At least, it has been for me, and I have no regrets. I’m having so much fun, and I pray that you will too.