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Autumn 2026

Created: 2026-02-28 (11:00:06)
Status: completed

I did end up vanishing in autumn to jump around in leaves instead of adding anything new to the site. It has been very nice!

So very nice, in fact, I’ve been wondering about getting offline entirely, going climbing, cycling, dancing and hiking, eating big slices of cake in warm comfy cafes and photographing fungi on the mountain instead.

Fungus growing out of a stringybark

Updates

Not that I haven’t made some stuff over the last few months… but I start to suspect that that part of my life exists mainly as a set of responsibilities I can enjoy running away from. I’m overdue to write a lot of site-pages so will just direct link instead.

I’ve been writing micro-reviews for fiction. I’ve lately fallen off reading in favour of some long-ass-videogames, but will no doubt get back to books eventually.

I made a few works for jams: Last Storm of the Season is a point and click wander through a country town for Pizza Jam, made in March. Autumn is a dream zine for the Hybrid Decker Zine Jam, made in May. This was my first time working with Decker and it was really enjoyable! I would like to try out more zines with this template.

Manifesto Jam 2026

Finally, there was the Manifesto Jam. Around a decade ago, Robert Yang suggested game developers should write more manifestos and in the intervening time there have been a few jams directly taking this up, namely, Em Reed’s Manifesto Jam 2018 and Max Myers’s Manifesto Jam 2022.

I’ve been reading submissions to these jams for years. They’ve had an outsized influence on my own approach to hobbyist game development, to the extent that probably most my writing on the subject just restates what people wrote there first.

Writing manifestos for these jams always looked like so much fun! As a form, the manifesto is confrontational, didactic, scrappy, uncompromising. It is hard to write one without feeling and looking silly. But when all the artists I respect are suddenly doing it, well, there’s my license to jump in and write one too.

Haraiva ran Manifesto Jam 2026 and clearly clearly a whole lot of people were in the same headspace as me because, oh boy, submissions to this one ran into the hundreds. I spent most the week putting together mess.txt, a clunky commitment to make more broken shit. Then on the last day in a fit I wrote High Precision, which is incoherent but also tried to get at other kinds of games I maybe want to write about and make too?

A manifestos broke out into the discourse and elicited some defensive / offended reactions. But there were also a bunch of others that resonated with me.

NO MORE CRAFT by Em Reed, targets “craft” as a cover word for tedious game narratives. “And anything that deviates from the expected character relationships, poetic touches, sentimental conclusions etc of english language literature? NOT CRAFT.”

the sky was the color of a gnatcatcher’s breast by Wyrmforge is described as an interactive poem, but really it’s a delicately built argument against perfectionism, that it is any way noble, that it can end in anything other than “a plastic bin of manuscripts hidden under the bed.”

Dead body manifesto argues that a good game is a dead body. CINAPINNA’S MANIFESTO guides us to create “a pervert’s room of one’s own.” YOU HAVE TO BE A PERVERT along similar lines is an injunctive to “kill the catholic in your head.” Stop the plot! wants more h-scenes, hell yeah.

You start to see themes emerging as you trawl through, a consistent pushing back against craft, against polish, against the belief you need to alter your writing to be more palatable. To whom? People submitting to the jam acknowledge that their work is unmarketable. The submission that broke free of the jam, NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY YOUR GAME, is explicitly about this. If you’re going to do something as inadvisable as hobbyist game development, why not be completely, uncompromisingly yourself in doing it?

I’m still working through the submissions. If the previous jams are anything to go by, I’ll be dipping into this one for a long while, easily until someone organises the next Manifesto Jam in 2030. I’ve been adding ones I enjoy to a couple collections, Game Writing! and Writing and Zine Favourites.

I’m not sure how often this site is going to get updated going forward. But I’ll try to get a newsletter up each month, even if it may be less “news” and more “gushing about whatever I read / played / climbed” for the foreseeable future. Enjoy your winter and/or summer!

Garfield with the good advice to “buy some paint”

References

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