Hi everyone! Mungo here! I was away last month but I have returned! Here’s what has been happening at HUMUNGO Games.

1. Business Cards

Yes! My wonderful artist Lucy has designed fabulous business cards for me and herself. They’ll be arriving this week.

2. Evil Badguy Fantasy RPG is back

Yes, my main game project is going to be called “Evil Badguy Fantasy RPG” once more, because you guys prefer that name. I’m not going to put up a screenshot though because the art is all in flux right now.

3. Genesis

This is a working title. My latest interactive story almost certainly won’t be called “Genesis” upon completion. It’s a piece that I started work on last weekend that I’m going to pitch for this digital commission on 1st July. Its a fantasy comedy-thriller about spaceships, fascism and political compromise set in humanity’s sunset. Here’s what the story plan/structure looks like so far:

As you can see I’m only a few pages in, so there’s a long way to go before I have a pitchable demo. What makes me smile and want to jump up and down about it is that it will be genuinely unique and novel (plus also as high-quality and professional as you would expect of me :P). Most political games are all about stats – you basically make calculations so that you can maximise x over y, and all the effects are just abstract numbers. See the Democracy series, Tropico, Super Power and so on. There are some great exceptions like Crusader Kings II, which simulates thousands of individual characters, with family trees, professions, aims and personality traits.

But what I want to do is to create a small, intimate political game with a cast of ten or so main characters, where you can really get to know them like a family over an hour of gameplay. These characters will be invested in the outcome of your decisions and they will judge you for your choices. The closest parallel I’ve encountered to what I’m trying to do is Telltale Games’ Game of Thrones, which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in interactive stories. That is a brilliant game, but was sadly hampered by being tied into an existing franchise. Your aim is to try and survive as a small family in the face of the evil Boltons, but you know you can’t do diddly-squat about Ramsey because that would ruin the series’ continuity.

My game will be shorter, with only one main character, and no tie-ins to any franchises. This means readers cannot be certain of anything when they open up the story. And it also means that I can hopefully write in a reasonable range of consequences for player decisions. It won’t be Game of Thrones-style people-die-all-the-time stuff, rather the choices the reader makes will affect what their staff think of them, will change the environment of the ship, and ultimately will shape what happens to Genesis and the last humans left in the universe. No biggie.