That’s right! I am stoked to announce that the award-winning Wonderland Nights: White Rabbit’s Diary is out on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and XBox One, thanks to publishers Ratalaika Games. It’s been great working with them to see this come to fruition.
So… I dunno, buy the game or whatever 😛😘🐇
Thought I might cover my (sometimes our) thoughts on the D&D OGL situation, in more depth than I did the other day, since more stuff has come out. It’s mostly what I said the other day, but has more details and also covers how we personally feel too.
Hey all, so there’s a lot going on over the RPG fan interwebs right now about Hasbro/WOTC’s changes to the OGL. There’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of people without legal training making comment, but like… this is a sign of things to come, no matter where you fall on this issue.
Here’s the message I posted today on itch.io to everyone who has ever bought our Dragons of Tirenia guidebook, published in 2021. I think it pretty much sums everything up nicely, which is why I think it’s important to share:
Given the recent changes to the Open Gaming Licence by Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast, we are choosing to remove all Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition references from Tirenia. This is something we have always wanted to do, as we originally only chose D&D as our mechanics base due to its popularity – or even ubiquity, you might say. But D&D was never the ideal mechanics base for this game.
So what does this mean for you, owners of this e-zine guidebook? Until we have a new version of this zine, we are leaving the original one up for all of you who have purchased it. No new people may purchase it or even look at its page. As soon as we have a new version, we will take the old one down permanently and you will only have access to the new one.
Comments are open on this, but I would ask that you refrain from trying to dissuade us from taking this action. It’s not going to happen. Tirenia is a setting we have spent almost a decade planning and playing in, and there is another project we have in mind for it that the new OGL will prevent us from doing. So instead we are packing up our toys and moving them to a new toy box. I encourage you to support other creatives you see doing this, or talking about doing this.
Happy New Year all, and thanks for supporting indie creators.
But seriously… right? F*** that. I’ve made mention of a possible new project for Tirenia. I won’t say more on that right now, but it’s in the works. This is just messy, right? Much bigger players than us are worried about the implications of this massive change to an industry standard. But anyway, leave it to the actual lawyers to decide, I reckon. For James and me, the writing is on the wall. D&D was never the ideal mechanic base for us. This greedy, over-reaching, bullying move from them is the catalyst for us to GTFO before things get any worse. We’ll still play when we wanna play, and we’re not trying to dissuade anyone from playing it, certainly not. But no way in hell are we going to chain our creative power to a corporate machine that has now openly stated its intent to swallow us and many other creatives whole.
Hey! It’s been a while, and I have been super busy, but I thought I should help boost ChoiceBeat Issue #6, even though I haven’t contributed anything this time. Hopefully I can write something for the next issue! Anyway, this looks like a pretty exciting line up of games, with quite a few I’ve been interested in trying out.
Hope everyone is having a happy holiday season. Happy New Year!
Good news, interactive fiction fans, the ChoiceBeat magazine is back again with this quarter’s issue. It is packed full with all sorts of content this time! I have one review this time. Check it out below:
Hello SBG followers, I just thought I might let you in on what’s happening to me over on Steam and Twitter. This is kinda the most I have ever been rewteeted yet, and the most sales my games have ever made so… kinda exciting if you can’t tell.
Below is the tweet thread that’s getting me noticed, and if you want to come tweet at me to add to the conversation you can find it here: https://twitter.com/SkyBearGamesNZ/status/1560771146693644288
The tweets:
Indie game-dev/creative writer truth time but also big thank you time, buckle up:
Thank you so, so much to @nzgda for organising the Made in NZ Steam sale: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nzgames
My three games have sold more copies in the last 48 hours than they ever have in a single year, in the last three years I’ve had them available on steam.
I bet there are some marketing gurus shaking their head at me, out there. But as a mother and a full-time worker (not working at my art) I had to make the call:
do I spend my precious spare time learning and doing the marketing stuff that I don’t enjoy (and which activates my anxiety), or …do I spend it devoting myself to the art – writing games, plays, novels – that I love?
So I made the choice to focus on the art, realising it was probably relegating me to obscurity and not making a living from the work I love doing, unless I could find my breakout moment in this very busy, noisy world.
The fact that @nzgda have used their mana, their influence, to spread the word far and wide about the wonderful creative work going on here in Aotearoa is just so generous and amazing. I have no idea how you all did it, but you have made my weekend. Thank you, arohanui
Hey all, just dropping a quick line to say that if you use Steam, you should check out the current sale of game made in NZ! All three of my games are up there (Her Jentle Hi-ness, Wonderland Nights, The Nine Lives of Nim), amongst some amazing other ones. I personally recommend checking out Umurangi Generation and Best Friend Forever as two that I have played and enjoyed.
Check it out – https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nzgames
I’ve contributed again to the fourth issue of the ChoiceBeat zine with just one article this time, on a lovely little gem of a game called “The Lost Oregon City Gold”. Also, “Her Jentle Hi-ness” gets a write-up and a giveaway, so check it out!
Hey! Her Jentle Hi-ness was nominated for two awards at the Pavs this year, the one for Excellence in Narrative Design and the one for Excellence in Representation.
This news comes to you two days late because of impostor syndrome 😀 how ridiculous, right?
I’m absolutely thrilled to be a part of the Pavs line-up again, and with an amazing cohort which you can check out here: https://nzgamesfest.com/the-pavs/2022-finalists/
So I have been keeping a few awesome little pieces of news close to my chest lately, and the first of these that I can announce is that Nine Lives of Nim is in Indiepocalypse Issue #28. This is an amazing initiative where every dev contributing to the zine gets a cut of the sales, which is just like… honestly just such an amazing thing when you are an unknown indie dev.
So if you hop on over here https://pizzapranks.itch.io/indiepocalypse-28 and buy this, you get 10 great games and help out a bunch of small-time creators 🙂
Sky Bear Games 