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November 2025

Created: 2025-11-30 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-12-21T18:56:00
Status: completed

A delayed newsletter for November! I spent about half of the month in a slightly dissociative state, albeit one which involved a lot of writing. So records exist, if not memories.

Bitsy Jam 97 - Obsolete

Only one update for this month. I joined the October Bitsy Jam, for which the theme was obsolete. My submission was a tiny printmaking workshop, which you can find here and at Itch

Being a Bitsy game, your options are a little limited. But making this did get me thinking it would be fun to make, or play, a game set in an art studio that lets you goof around with different tools and techniques, that tries to replicate the physical feeling of applying and scraping of rosin ground, or wafting a copper plate over a flame to apply an aquatint, or dunking it in mordant. One day.

The other submissions into the jam were fantastic too.

A Slow Goodbye and Saffron both revolve around lost animal companions. Sang & Acier Aftermath charts the slow deterioration of a decomissioned mecha, the K-Arthur 01 Articulated Cuirass! And Last Game Hero sees you searching a dumping ground for a legendary, failed videogame. It reuses an extract from a real life PlayStation Pro magazine review in a fascinating way.

ECTOCOMP 2025 Revisited

I spent a good portion of the month playing through other submissions for the ECTOCOMP 2025 interactive fiction jam.

ECTOCOMP has several categories, La Petite Mort for works written in under four hours and Le Grande Guignol for those that took longer. I mostly played the La Petite Mort submissions, but very much want to work through the longer entries too. Some of my favourites:

NOTHING IN MY VEINS is made in Decker and (mis)uses it to its fullest. A strange, dark story involving a body swap with a virtual health assistant, I appreciated the way the interaction between the characters immediately shot off the rails. The dialog is broken but profuse, as though these characters are pushing up against the limits of both the chat protocol and their ability to articulate themselves. I really want to write about this one more, it’s brilliant.

The Lamp of Your Body was the category winner and deservedly so. It is wild to me that something this cohesively creepy was written in only four hours. Saying more would probably ruin the fun of it.

Diary of a Drowned Girl draws from a ballad by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brech and takes place in a larger setting being developed by the author. I love the idea of using a game jam to tell side stories in this way, particularly when it is to tell a story set far from (or far below) everything else going on.

Every Day I Get Emails asks you to stay on top of your workload, while redirecting emails that are not your responsibility to other departments. Where it goes from there felt uncomfortably similar to some of my own experiences working in offices.

Coming off SCREAM JAM 2025, which had around a thousand submissions, ECTOCOMP 2025 felt much cozier and friendlier. I felt like there was more time available to play submissions and chat to to other participants. Anecdotally, it seemed like people left more thoughtful feedback on each other’s work too, maybe because there was not such an overwhelming abundance of other stuff competing for attention.

That said, I barely scratched the surface of Le Grand Guignol, and still want to play a bunch of submissions when the opportunity comes up. As with other jams, my plan is to add finds to a collection at ECTOCOMP 2025 Favourites

Marginalia

I played a whole lot more interactive fiction and small games outside of these jams too. My preowned Playstation 4 with its copies of Control and Metal Gear Solid V has sat under the television gathering dust, because all my free time is going to Bitsy games, Decker games, Ren’Py games and Twine games instead.

Games made by large studios, and maybe one or two made by indies, tend to be the ones that suck all the oxygen out of the room, that people only ever want to talk and write about. But it is this interactive fiction, these things made by singular weirdos, things that are often on the border of falling into artistic dark matter, that makes my heart thump. Trawling through places like Itch and IFDB, I suspect this is true for lots of other people too.

References

Endmatter

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