Here we go, here we go...

What is this? Who is this? What is even going on here...

Hello all you crazy cats and kittens, and welcome to our newsletter. Well, I guess I’m speaking in some generic first person plural because Riddle Fox Games is really just one person, little old Paul Jessup. I’ve been doing video games under various guises for the last twenty five years (there about, might be a bit more than that). I got my start in QBasic, making RPG’s that were similar to the ones on the SNES (a still current gaming system at that time). Later I moved beyond that with C++ and Allegro, and then beyond that even more, learning some ASM and even doing a few games on the GBA.

Until recently, I did this mostly for others, and kept my coding and pixel art stuff separate from my writing stuff. I’ve been writing professionally for about as long as I’ve been dabbling in video games, give or take a few years here and there. And until last year, I always considered the two as completely different worlds that I moved back and forth throughout the years. Don’t get me wrong, I had a few friends who did both, and did it well, but I (for some insane reason) saw them as two separate spheres of my life, and didn’t bring them together.

Until I made Bad Writer. It seems so obvious in retrospect! I made a game a year before that, but I was still keeping video games and fantasy writing separate, usually downplaying the games. I was a solo game maker, but I wasn’t confident of my skills. I thought no one would care about these silly games that I made, and that it was just something I could do for fun, and hide away from the people who read my books and short stories.

What a silly old bear I was! Of course there are a lot of you out there, playing and making video games, and you’re also a huge part of the writing/publishing scene in fantasy and science fiction. When I got my start making video games was difficult, and required a lot of free time and concentration, but the bar to entry has lowered and now I know a ton of people dipping their toes in. How amazing that was to find out!

And when I released Bad Writer I realized just how many people writing and reading science fiction/fantasy/horror wanted games made just for them. Not games that were tangentially related to fiction and literature, but games that drew on that rich history, by game designers who loved it as much as they did. The success of Bad Writer gave me my niche- combine the two worlds. Make games for the fans of fantastic literature.

It made me recall the early days of Vertigo and DC, and how Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman approached comics with a literary sensibility. They drew on subgenres of fantasy/scifi that didn’t exist in the world of comics, bringing a New Wave edge to their works, recalling the history of literary genre fiction as a whole. Moore had bits of Harlan Ellison is his work, Gaiman bits of Beagle, Le Guin, and Gene Wolfe. And I realized, I want to do the same for video games.

I’m not saying no one else is doing that, quite the contrary. I’m just saying that’s what I’m going to do, and I’m uniquely poised to do just that. As a writer, as a game designer, as a pixel artist. Pretty soon I’m going to level up my SFWA membership thanks to Bad Writer and be a full member both for Video Games and for professional writing in short stories and novels.

So there, that’s what Riddle Fox is, and who they will be, and what kind of games we’re going to make. This newsletter will be discussing all of that, and focusing a lot on my upcoming game, Monster Heart. True to form, it actually has a lot of monsters and NPC’s named after writers, editors, and publishers in the field, which is a lot of fun. Until that’s done, this will act like a devlog of sorts, as well as going over some pixel art, and maybe talking about my techniques. I’ll also be talking about what it means to be a solo game dev, the joys and frustrations, all that stuff.

Until next time, relax, enjoy. Play your favorite games, read your favorite books. We’re going to have loads to talk about when I come back.