Yesterday I participated in my first Game Jam here in Galway, hosted by Darren from Mind Cauldron and the PorterShed co-working space. The 12th Galway Game Jam was already a little underway when I arrived (car troubles), but was well received when I asked in anyone needed a writer. Thus was born “A Good Death.”

The first team that Darren introduced me to, Pat Ryan and Ciarán O’Brien, were working on a dungeon crawler in Twine and said they’d need some content when they were done coding it. It was about a warrior in search of a glorious death, they said. Naturally, I was intrigued. So after a quick chat with my teammates, they set back to coding combat and dungeon loops and I sat down to come up with something to write.

I started with encounters. The first couple I blurted out turned out kind of funny, albeit a bit dark, so I wrote some more. I asked about some of mechanics, and wrote some corresponding flavor text. We talked about health vs glory mechanics. I went back to writing. They requested a couple rooms they’d already decided on, so I wrote up descriptions. But I still wanted to know why the warrior wanted to die a glorious death. So I ran a backstory by them and decided, instead of putting it up front in the intro, to hint at it through some of the encounters and reveal it in full through conversations in the pub as the player character becomes more famous.

One decision I made on my own that turned out to be surprisingly popular with my teammates was gender. I wrote it neutrally so that the player could imagine whatever gender and orientation they wanted. This apparently went down very well and the game is advertised as staring a “Gender Neutral Barbarian.” I’m pretty chuffed with that, really.

The game t is hosted on the Itch.io Galway Game Jam 12 site and can be played here. It’s a browser game that can be played on computer or mobile, so enjoy!