Essays about game development, thinking and books

«Slay The Princess» — combinatorial narrative

My favorite version of the Princess.

My favorite version of the Princess.

It's hard to impress me as a player and even harder as a game developer. The last time it happened with Owlcat Games in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, when they added a timer to the game's plot.

But Black Tabby Games managed to do it. And they did it not with some technological complexity but with a visual novel on a standard engine (RenPy), which is cool in itself.

I'll share a couple of thoughts about the game and its narrative structure, while I'm still under the impression. I need to think about how to adapt this approach to my projects.

ATTENTION: SPOILERS!

If you haven't played Slay The Princess yet, I strongly recommend you to catch up — the game takes 3-4 hours. You'll not regret it.

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Hello, World!

Nice to meet you, friends!

My name is Aliaksei, but feel free to call me Tiendil — it is my nickname for the last 20 years or so :-)

A few words about me:

  • By occupation, I am a software developer, mostly backend, mainly in Python.
  • For most of my career, I've been working in game development on big projects and own indie games.
  • I like playing games, reading books, and writing long-reads about partially complex topics.

You can find more about me:

This is my first blog post in English, but not the first one in general. I have blogged in Russian for a long time and have always wanted to share my thoughts with the English-speaking world. At last, I found some time to adapt my blog, and here we are!

Most of the future posts will be bilingual (English & Russian). Also, with time, I'll translate my most interesting old posts.

Once again, nice to meet you! Feel free to contact me by any means.