The Hum
The Hum is a branching dialogue game with a twenty minute playtime, best described as ‘cosy horror’. It imagines a friendship between two young people growing up in a world where everyone starts hearing a sound, the same sound, all the time; what effects would this have on the world as time passes, and on those living through this experience?
As well as dialogue and a branching narrative, The Hum features a dozen unique endings, and has a summary screen at the end, encouraging replayability. It’s written in the Sugarcube2 story format, and uses custom images and sounds throughout. The images below showcase some of the back-end, two ingame screenshots, and part of the code.
With this game, I wanted to create something that was more story-driven and complex, with many different variables and possible endings. Player choice is important, as how they interact with their childhood friend directly influences many endings and ingame interactions.
You Are Two Cats
‘You Are Two Cats’ is a branching dialogue game I created as a side project. It allowed me to play with Twine, a platform with a variety of story types, and to learn a little CSS and Javascript.
I made use of the Trialogue story format, a messenger-style story format. The core mechanic is the pizza order with other conversational dialogue trees being a bonus. Two of the images in the gallery show the decision matrix behind the game. Where possible, I tried to have branching elements that still tied back in to the core mechanic, steering the player through the game to a satisfactory ending, while still allowing for players to make their own choices. Since the stated aim is to buy a pizza, many of the conversation chains link back to that process, but there are some nonstandard endings.
This project was a chance to demonstrate both my ability to construct realistic dialogue and design a game process that was enjoyable, relatively short, and accessible.
Artwork for the project was commissioned from Susan Cook.
If you’d like to try the game, click here or click the image to the left!
Table-Top Roleplaying Games
I have been designing and running tabletop roleplaying experiences for over ten years. Over that time, I have developed three different fully-realised settings that have their roots in different genres and references.
Each of these, played with different groups over varying amounts of time, was built around my personal philosophy: that TTRPGs are collaborative storytelling, that the story won’t stand still for anything, and that there are consequences to every action. Encouraging characters to own the story, taking decisions that have real impact, and having other actors make their own moves in the background gives each campaign a realistic feel and lends weight to decisions.
As part of designing these campaigns, I created custom locations, monsters, items and maps. ‘Ethel’, based on a character concept developed in collaboration with world, player and artist, is by John Aggs. The map was designed and generated by me in Wonderdraft mapmaking software to support gameplay. The other two images here are samples taken from two published works, available on the DM’s Guild: Fire Giant Forge, a standalone encounter for players of 5th level, and Ten Towers, a source book with ten level-adjusted adventures.
Most recently, I have been involved in creating the new campaign setting for High Rollers, the UK’s most-watched Twitch longplay D&D stream. Working alongside DM Mark ‘Sherlock’ Hulmes, I created Iceheart, a frozen ice kingdom to the north of his custom world, Altheya. Like all my RPG work, I created people, customs, magical artefacts and lore for this location.
Example Item Descriptions
These are some examples of magical items created in the style of TTRPGs, most notably Dungeons and Dragons. In each case, I aimed to create item descriptions that were interesting and hinted at a wider world, while also keeping to a limited amount of space.
The World of Giant’s Reach
Proud humans live side by side with giant, intelligent animals. The cat-riding Gyb; the fierce boar-soldiers of the Sanglier; even the Church of the Chimera compete over yellowdust, the chemical that grants animals size and sentience. But supplies of this vital substance are always short, and tainted by blood…
I have written several short stories and a novel in the world of Giant's Reach, blending science fiction with fantasy. I am pleased to be able to share two of those stories with you, right now. 'Feathered Death', previously published in Broadswords and Blasters 2, and 'Uplifted', an introductory novelette set in the country of Meria.
I recorded many of the short stories as podcasts, released weekly as ‘The Giant’s Reach Podcast’. You can listen to an example by clicking this link, while the entire archive is available here.
Short Story Collections
I'm delighted to be able to share these three short story collections with you. These stories span fantasy, science-fiction, steampunk, and horror, and are available now from the Amazon Kindle store.
Cover artwork by Dave Andrews.
Murder Matches
“I can’t say that I’ll miss him, but I wouldn’t want him dead…”
Colonel Harold Redmond is dead, stabbed in his apartment, and the ancient and valuable Lo-Uphet diamond stolen… but who is to blame?
An interactive murder-mystery story developed in partnership with illustrator Nana Li. Each matchbox contained a witness statement filled with clues and puzzles. Only by reading all eight, and cross-examining the evidence, could the identity of the killer be revealed and the location of the missing diamond be discovered.
This was an immensely fun project to work on; such characterful illustrations immediately gave them individual voices, but space was limited to get the required information across. The result was a tiny but dense experience that could be approached in a number of different ways. It was designed for, and sold at, Thought Bubble Comic Art Festival in 2014.
Published Fiction
Edited by Dwight Hurst
First Prize winner of the first issue short story competition:
Belina
Hi, I'm Steve!
I’m an author, storyteller, game developer and former teacher living in the UK and currently working for EA Games. For over fifteen years I've been writing both short and long-form fiction alongside storytelling in role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons foremost among them. I write across a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, and steampunk. In 2015, I won first prize in the Amygdala eZine Short Story competition and was featured in their first issue. Much of my fiction is also available in audio format, as I produced two podcasts: Pocket Fiction, which ran for two years, and The Giant’s Reach Podcast, which ran for a year.
Through tabletop roleplaying games, primarily D&D, I have created collaborative narratives that are both far-reaching and reactive in nature. Together with several completed campaigns spanning both fourth and fifth edition D&D, I also have experience with games in several other systems such as Ryuutama, Curse of Cthulu and the Alien RPG.
Fourteen years of teaching to an outstanding level at both a primary and secondary level have given me a skillset that includes a great deal of experience in public speaking, breaking ideas down into structured concepts, and working as part of an extremely varied team.
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