James Cavin Writes

So, the young gremlins in your life want to do this whole "Dungeons and Dragons" thing they heard about. Who can blame them? What kid doesn't want to explore a magical world, fight monsters, and get treasure? I recently had this exact experience, and I am here to share my accumulated wisdoms.

I'm making a game! Purely for my own enjoyment. I highly recommend it. For the moment, I'm calling it: "Wake up, dead kosmonaut!" IT'S GONNA BE WEIRD.

It’s a sad fact of narrative design that WHEN EVERYTHING IS CRAZY, NOTHING IS CRAZY.

Navigating the teleological terrors which assail creativity in the current age.

We tend to think of world-building as the foundation of any fantastical project, BUT WE ARE WRONG.

In which a screenshot is enscreenshottened.

Real stakes require a real world, regardless of how much humor characters use to cope with it.

In which Grit the Quill does not die alone.

The results were pretty weird.

On the last day of the last month of the last year, I thought I'd play some word games, and maybe ramble about some offensively hot-button topics.

...What happens when you make a young adult actually a young adult?

In which I lose my manuscript, and have to rewrite it all from scratch.

-OR- Is all fun good fun? Distraction, entertainment, and the slow murder of our capacity for satisfaction.

One of the things that I do instead of driving fast cars and dating supermodels is collect interesting quotes.

A quick followup to my previous post about Russel Hoban's The Hungry Three series!

My friend Lars likes to use the phrase, "Garbage in, garbage out."

A tiny bit of Vim for you today! Just a morsel really, but I have been very sick.

For my birthday, my brother gave me a MIDI keyboard controller... and a head cold.

Bam! Pow! Zap! Other sounds of beeping and blooping digital destruction!

Happy Friday! For those of you to whom reality provides an insufficient amount of psychedelic, grave-robbing shenanigans amongst the rusting hulks and inhuman powers of the fallen future, I have another slice of Vim! ...Poor Grit the Quill is out of the snake-siege and into even greater insanities.

Thanks to an unexpected bout of insomnia last night, I am currently operating with approximately 3.5 hours of sleep. I also have 39 pages of rambling, incoherent, hand scrawled notes for something called The Cleverest Beast , which apparently felt very compelling in the wee hours of the morning.

I've got another bit of madness for you! For some reason, I've been in kind of a swordfish mood lately… (Is this what being trapped in an artistic rut* feels like?)

See Part One here! Time to break some more table tops! (and also my face...)

Let's break some tabletops! (By applying videogame narrative design tactics!)

In the chaos-infested realm known only as James's Garage, one man faces the tide of empty cardboard boxes, forgotten furniture, old shoes that only kind of fit, abandoned bicycles, a bag of some unholy abomination labeled "s'mores flavored coffee" left by an old roommate and slightly mauled by a wild animal that lived in here for a little bit, what might actually be a dead possum (presumably deceased because he ate the s'mores flavored coffee), and more old shoes (marked by a trickling trail of evidence that seems to support the previous hypothesis)…

Some more Vim for you, fresh from the fetid jungles of the imagination!

Paint.net sure has come a long way.

I saw a ghost once.

( Read Part Two here. ) I don't normally post first drafts of personal writing, but I submitted an in-progress short story for last week's Operation Garbage Fountain , and, as per my agreement with fellow garbage-fountainier Lars Doucet , I am contractually obliged to write about it online.

For only 5 of your human minutes, you can experience the glorious pulp horror comedy splendor that is Interview with an Ichthyologist Itch.io! (Did I mention that you can get a pet fish-puppy to smite your enemies?)

Do you have a Garbage Fountain Accountability Buddy (TM) ?

Is what you are doing right now less emotionally fulfilling than moving large bags of rat feces?

Temple Run: Legends was a really interesting challenge in general, but the trickiest part was definitely the limited time events that the design team wanted to do as post-launch content.

Our premise is simple: Don't try to use story to contradict everything else that the player sees and does.

A quick and simple rundown of the power of "player fantasy" in narrative design

I recently rediscovered this in the depths of my Google drive! Years ago, I printed this out and gave it as a Christmas present to my boss at the company that I was working at the time, who had complained about not knowing what to do with the tuna steaks a family member had recently given him.

Are you human being who sometimes must describe things to other people to convince them to give you money to feed your children and/or dangerous addiction to high-end Lego castles ?

Did you know that if you take 90-year-old public domain banjo music and then chop it up and slow it down 1000% and loop it over itself a bunch of times and add a bunch of distortion filters, it becomes melancholy ambient space music?

  There's a finite amount of text space in your game. It's a terrible shame to waste any of it.

  – A Tragedy of Seeing With Open Eyes – – – Also Some Rambling Advice about Narrative Delivery Systems – –

In all its rugged splendor. This is a brilliant book, and you should buy it. I was reading Gene Wolfe's Castle of the Otter (a collection of essays and advice named after a humorous misreporting of the title of his book Citadel of Autarch ), and two pieces of advice really stuck out to me: 1) Write a story every day. 2) Buy the New York Times Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, & Mispronounced Words – it's really cheap.   Also an $8 find. I thought, "Okay, but he wrote that back in the 80s. I bet this book is a collectors' item now." Then, I looked it up on Thrift Books. It's only eight dollars! 8! That's, like, half a latte. You could buy three and juggle them! One, it's awesome if you're reading Gene Wolfe, because when he uses a word you don't know (approximately every other sentence), you have the dictionary that he was using right here in your hand. Secondly, you now possess a normal-book sized dictionary with readable size text tha...

      Out of all my 2024 projects, this was one of the ones that I enjoyed the most. Just for fun, I decided to try narrative design in a new context. I took a break from video games and participated in a tabletop RPG adventure design contest – Ben Milton's (of Questing Beast , Maze Rats, and Knave fame) Knave 2e Adventure Game Jam to be exact. Despite never having made anything with the system before, I managed to finish in sixth place! (Out of 117 entries! That's a heck of a lot better than I was expecting!) Plus, you get to draw on all the unhinged influences that you can't allow into your day job! If you're looking to flex your narrative design muscles, taking a little field trip into tabletop games is a great way to practice all of your skills in a slightly alien environment with new limitations that force you to think outside of the box. It's really interesting to start thinking of narrative and quest design in terms of page count and layout and graphic desig...

  Has anyone else experienced the master class in narrative design that is Fireball Island: the Curse of Vul-Kar?

AND I DID IT WITHOUT COFFEE.

Howdy! I'm a narrative designer and writer with wildly diverse work experience that includes content planning and copywriting for blockbuster mobile games like Temple Run 2, manuscript editing at a small press, and user interface and taxonomy design as a contractor working on Valve Company's Steam Labs Experiments. (I can also cook.) Most recently, I was the Senior Narrative Designer for Imangi Studios’ world-famous Temple Run franchise, where I created the narrative plans and dialogue for 4 Temple Run projects, managed internal branding documentation, did copywriting for storefronts and social media promotions, and gave narrative presentations to internal teams and external partners in a pith helmet and safari suit because theme is everything. (I also once filled my office with jungle plants so that I could start a meeting by bursting out of them.)