Interviewing Chris Longhurst

Chris is a UK designer with a range of serious and comic games under his belt and more to come.

Please tell me a bit about yourself

I am an archetypal aging nerd: hetero-cis white man, mid-40s, beard, autistic traits but no diagnosis, too much weight around the middle. I like games of all kinds and real ale. My publishing company is Certain Death.

What do you like best about designing games?

I am driven to create games by a terrible compulsion. I can't stop. But I do also enjoy it -- I like making the sort of thing that I think ought to exist. Like part of the design of Bleak Spirit was the conviction that other Soulslike RPGs were missing the point by focusing on combat, or death-and-rebirth, that sort of thing. None of them captured the part of Dark Souls which spoke to me, which was the inherent mystery of the setting and the piecing together of what actually happened. So I made the game that was about that.

What are you working on at the moment, and what excites you about it?

As usual, I'm working on a bunch of stuff at once. I'm still doing the writing for Threadcutters, which is a collaboration with the artist Galen Pejeau (who is the current hotness these days); we kickstarted it earlier this year so I do actually need to cross the i's and dot the t's on that one.

I'm writing Crucible, a solo game inspired by roguelikes in the Nethack/Stone Soup vein; I'm particularly pleased with the way it uses cards to bring back recurring elements and loaded questions to build information about the setting as you go. (In this way it inherits from See Issue X, which also uses those elements but in a less focused way.)

And I've just started writing some third-party content for Pitcrawler, a duet game by Macguffin and Co., since they're running a game jam for it starting next month. After doing some gloomy, violent, introspective games it's nice to do something fun, blending violence and silliness like 1980s gamebooks.

I am not employed by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Macguffin and Co. I have to say that or I'll get into trouble.

Can you tell me more about how you are using cards in Crucible?

Crucible starts with very little setting information. You have a deck of 40 blank index cards, an empty journal (or text file), and a couple of questions to get you started. You deal cards from the deck to randomise the layout of the floor you're exploring, roguelike style, so they function as a map. But also you write on each card as you explore the kind of thing that it is — a powerful enemy, a portal, a small treasure, etc. — and you keep the same deck between runs, so the more runs you do the more you fill out the kind of place the Crucible is, and the more information you'll create about what the Crucible is meant for, and what sort of world created a place like it.

This is an evolution of the system in See Issue X, where the constant recycling of cards is a parallel to the constant recycling of elements from a superhero's comics continuity. Here the recycling of cards creates an 'emergent vibe', so to speak.

What experience(s) are you trying to give to players?

I mean, it depends on the game. The compulsion that drives me to create also forbids creating the same thing twice, so every game I make is unlike all the others. (This makes marketing very difficult.) In Pigsmoke the fun is in playing out a sitcom: the moves and system are designed to create that vibe. In Attorneys at Jaw it's about trying to solve impossible problems with a very limited skill set. In Gravity it's about mounting tension and diminishing options.

I'm a very versatile designer.

Is there anything you would like to promote right now?

Right now I'd like to promote Gravity. It's my newest complete work (although it's not quite finished -- it still needs art and a few other odds and ends) and it's one of the best games I've ever designed. It uses a modified version of No Dice, No Masters to create a system where the tension keeps mounting and as it does so that characters' ability to deal with it is further and further constrained, culminating in a dramatic climax. It's good stuff.

Where should people go to follow you, and to find your products?

I can be followed on Bluesky at @potatocubed.bsky.social, and my games can be purchased from https://potatocubed.itch.io.