About Me

I worked in marketing for five years. One day, a colleague invited me to a D&D game. I started playing, and later started running games myself. I'd always liked writing and designing things, but with my job occupying most of my attention, I never found the chance to develop anything specific or complete. So one day I decided to quit my job and invest my savings into my passion instead. Originally they meant for a mortgage down payment, but I now live off those savings while working on my projects full-time.

When my attention shifted from marketing to the creative field, I started reading about human creativity, looking for some academic grounding on how to stay productive and efficient. That sounds a bit strange, since creativity is usually seen as more about impulse and the consequences of our chaotic nature. That's partly true for me too, but there are also things we can actively do to support our own creativity. Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird gave great advice on writing, while Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running offered great lessons on framing a creative workflow. Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels gives a glimpse into the industry, opening up its inner workings a little — it's both frightening, since the industry can be quite aggressive, and inspiring, with some great success stories. Tristan Donovan's Replay is a whole book on the history of video games that helps build a bird's-eye view of how things evolved over time. Playing games in general also sharpens your eye and your sense of which mechanics work and which are best avoided. I love SOMA for its moral questions. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice are both great story-driven games. Hades is an awesome example of balancing narrative and gameplay. I can't list them all!

I want to grow an audience of people with similar interests and share my experience and thoughts along the way. That's why, alongside developing the game itself, I also started a YouTube channel and I'm trying to build a presence on other social platforms too.

As a side project, I'm also working on a couple of Obsidian plugins. I love Obsidian for note-taking, but I wanted a proper tool for game design planning and writing — that's Loom Loom! Another one is Link Link! It makes it much easier to build connections between notes while writing.

I currently work solo, but if you've got a collaborative idea, feel free to reach out at artieficr@pm.me.

You can find all my socials linked below.