I’ve been writing text adventures for over ten years now; I think I’ve written thirty-something games of various sizes, in various genres. My work is in the parser-based format, games where you type in “EAT APPLE” or “TELL ADAM ABOUT SNAKE” and the game tells you what happens next.
Emily Short wrote a very complimentary overview of my work a while back in which she quickly identified the core tenet of my ethos: “He [Ryan Veeder] really wants you to have a good time.” I’m passionate about distracting people from their problems with goofy entertainment, and I’m especially enamored of the text parser medium and its illusion of facilitating on a conversation between me and the player.
You should hire me as a game designer if you’re making games and telling stories that are fun, thoughtful, and unconventional.
You should hire me as a writer if you need prose that is engaging and functional, characters that are clever and memorable, or evocative descriptions of cemeteries, parking lots, dingy fluorescent-lit hallways, that kind of thing.
Contact me and we’ll get into it.
WRITING SAMPLES
Where We Can Hear the Whispering Dark (From “Additional Tales from Castle Balderstone,” 2019) – avoid being devoured in space
Mud Warriors (2020) – war stories from the after-school program
A Rope of Chalk (2020) – college kids gabbing about art
Dial C for Cupcakes (2014) – ex-cops plan a dessert heist
SELECTED WORKS
I have a portfolio for you with what I consider my best work. A more exhaustive inventory of my games is at the Interactive Fiction Database, and there you can find other people’s reviews and see what they think. The timeline below is more of a historical overview, I guess:
2011
In July of 2011 I released my first game, You’ve Got a Stew Going!, about a rat who makes a stew. In October I entered IFComp with Taco Fiction, which took first place! (Taco Fiction is a game about crime.) People bring up Taco Fiction a lot to refer to the tricks it plays with the player’s expectations and the text parser format, but I think its popularity is mostly to do with its being a fun story with funny characters.
2012
For the Apollo 18+20 tribute to They Might Be Giants, I wrote The Statue Got Me High (as well as another, less good game). The story is a kind of TMBG League of Extraordinary Gentlemen thing, reinterpreting that famous scene with the statue from Don Giovanni. Emily Short wrote about how the comedy in this and many of my other games comes from the player participating in the construction of funny situations. I can’t really talk to the players of my games, but I can predict what they’ll do, and they can predict what I’ll do, and we can play off of each other’s predictions in a way that feels like a collaboration, or at least a conversation.
The source text for The Statue Got Me High is available online, with annotations added some years afterward—long enough for me to have become embarrased by some of the code.
2013
I entered two games in 2013’s IFComp: Robin & Orchid, which I wrote with Emily Boegheim, took second place. It’s a high school mystery story in a big spooky haunted church, which the player explores with a stack of extremely extensive notes (written by me) and an incredibly well-realized Polaroid camera (coded by Emily). In retrospect, this was perhaps the first of a long line of “museum games” where I’ve focused on showcasing and interpreting a detailed environment for the player.
My other entry, Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder, came in fourth place. The game puts you on a sinking ship and gives you a limited number of turns to collect treasure before escaping: It doesn’t take long, but once you’ve found out how many doubloons your haul was worth, you can play again and try for a higher score. This turned out to be an irresistible goal: Even the reviewers who argued that the game needed to be randomized to be really compelling also said that they’d played it several times. Other players have optimized the game enough to achieve scores I never imagined were possible—And people were still at it in 2020!
There’s a post-mortem (and Hall of Fame) for this game if you want to check that out.
2014
Simon Carless commissioned a text adventure from me for a video games-themed StoryBundle, and I came up with The Ascent of the Gothic Tower, a contemplative semiautobiographical urban exploration story. I also wrote a tutorial game intended for StoryBundle customers who may have been entirely unfamiliar with the format. I have a lot of thoughts about teaching parser-game-language and tutorial games, and I’m not sure I’m still happy with this one, but this probably isn’t the place for litigating the issue.
This was the year Jenni Polodna and I launched our podcast Clash of the Type-Ins, which makes the imaginary conversation of text parser games into a terrifying reality by having authors read their work out loud on Skype, introducing a volatile live interpersonal component. On some episodes we get into analysis and criticism, investigating our guests’ design and development processes; mostly we just goof off and have a grand old time. We haven’t recorded a Clash episode in a while, but the world always needs more goofing off, so we should probably get around to it eventually.
2015
In Winter Storm Draco, the player experiences the eponymous 2012 blizzard firsthand in an Iowan Magical Realist context. This might be the best game I’ve written, along certain metrics: The pacing and structure are tight and symmetrical. It develops its themes correctly. Its Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym pastiche angle and its autobiographical angle are each full-bodied but they meld into each other without contradiction. These are only my personal impressions, of course.
The Island of Doctor Wooby was written for a virtual pet-themed game jam, but it ended up being more of a Random Dinosaur Plushie Generator than a true virtual pet game. The impressive procedural generation capabilities of Inform 7 are well-documented; I am very proud (up to a point) of how I used them here. I wrote a blog post a couple years later where I explained some of the code and talked about aspects that could be improved. This is a kind of project that I would like to return to eventually…
2016
Late in 2015 I announced that the first quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction would take place the following February. Although the stated goal of the Exposition was to entertain me exclusively, many of the games entered were later released publicly, and some went on to achieve acclaim even among audiences other than myself.
Reference and Representation: An Approach to First-Order Semantics is as self-indulgent as the title suggests; it is a story about a preverbal caveman trying to be a good husband. As with Winter Storm Draco, I’m proud of its structural and thematic compactness, plus I think it’s very funny and sweet.
An Evening at the Ransom Woodingdean Museum House is a literal museum game, in which I attempted to recreate the Rensselaer Russell House Museum of Waterloo, Iowa and then make it a setting for a creepy story. There are some very sneaky parser tricks in there!
2017
For most of this year, my game design energies were focused on preparing for the MIT Mystery Hunt, but I did release a couple of games. The Roscovian Palladium is a sort of museum game, although it’s mostly focused on worldbuilding and jokes. Appreciating Crocodracula: What Happened to Calvin requires more context than will fit here, so make sure you read up on its convoluted provenance.
2018
It was a great honor to be on the organizing team for the 2018 MIT Mystery Hunt. I got to help out with the creation of several puzzles (and made a lot of Pokémon art for one round!) but the contribution I’m most proud of was a puzzle in the form of a text adventure: The Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening.
A good Hunt puzzle demands a kind of clockwork precision. There is no room for red herrings, lacunae, or ambiguity. This tends to preclude “cuteness” in the form of extraneous jokes or continuity. With The Lurkening, I got a unique chance to make a puzzle with a narrative, funny characters, self-indulgent worldbuilding, and jokes! And it works as a puzzle too!
On a whim, Jenni Polodna and I organized Cragne Manor, a massive Anchorhead tribute in which more than eighty people each wrote one room, Exquisite Corpse style. This was one of the larger IF community undertakings in recent memory, and it required roughly as much meticulous planning, community management, code-wrangling, and Excedrin-swallowing as you’d expect. But we finished it, and a lot of players loved it! Most of those players were also authors, but that hardly invalidates their opinions.
I also entered Tales from Castle Balderstone in EctoComp and it took first place in its category! For this mock anthology I got to juxtapose a bunch of different authorial voices and design styles. It was really fun.
2019
Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing was in what we call the “design phase” for a long time before I knuckled down and spent five or six months actually writing it. It’s a highly experimental game that’s focused on creating an engrossing and fun environment, to the exclusion of many elements associated with conventional interactive narrative, such as what we call “an ending.”
I submitted Additional Tales from Castle Balderstone to EctoComp as well, and the pieces of an Extended Castle Balderstone Universe began to settle into place…
2020
The year began with the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction, which was very fun. This time around, all the Entries were released to the public, and some extremely clever material was on display.
Later I discovered and ported Taleframe’s Crocodracula: The Beginning, which critics have noted bears a strong stylistic resemblance to much of my own work. Uncannily so.
I entered A Rope of Chalk in IFComp 2020; it won 7th place out of 103 entries. And I submitted Several Other Tales from Castle Balderstone to EctoComp. It took 2nd place out of 7 entries in its category. Which of these results is the more impressive? Hmm.
2021
In 2021 I released Even Some More Tales from Castle Balderstone, which took 1st place out of 8 entries in its category in EctoComp! There is a good reason for it to be the only game I released this year: It is HUGE. It contains AT LEAST FOUR OTHER GAMES.
I also released The Little Match Girl, by Hans Christian Andersen to the entire world—it was originally a Patreon exclusive for New Year’s Eve 2019.
2022
In 2022 I was pretty busy moving to Australia. But I released The Little Match Girl 2: Annus Evertens, a sequel to Hans Christian Andersen’s short story in which the titular little match girl travels to the years 2000, 3030, and 1969, among others.
2023
As of this writing, 2023 has seen the publication of The Little Match Girl 3: The Escalus Manifold, plus some other smaller IF projects as part of my EnigMarch efforts. The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls is currently a Patreon exclusive, but that’s sure to change soon—probably around the time I finish The Little Match Girl 5: The Hunter’s Vow.
I am also working on projects outside of the Little Match Girl mythos.
For all the behind-the-scenes info on upcoming projects, you can get hooked up with my Patreon.
That’s all! Thank you for your interest.