Interviewing Anna Blackwell
By Alex White
- 6 minutes read - 1188 wordsPlease tell me a bit about yourself
Sure! My name is Anna Blackwell, I’m a game designer from Scotland and I’m the creator of Apothecaria, DELVE, and For Small Creatures Such As We, which was nominated for an IGDA and CRIT award. I’m also a writer and released my first novel last year, Wolf & Fang Detective Agency: The God Thief.
Outside of that, I’m a circus performer, I do parkour, kung fu, and love being out in nature.
What do you like best about designing games?
I love seeing a world come together. Getting to start out with this vague idea of what I want something to be and seeing it become real as I hammer away at the different bits of it. I always feel so excited seeing a project go from a couple of 12 point Arial words in Google Drive to a book full of art, worldbuilding, humour, and potential. I really love hearing people’s feedback at conventions and seeing their genuine enjoyment and excitement about the stories they’ve created with my games.
What are you working on at the moment, and what excites you about it?
Right now I’m working on so many different things that it’s hard to keep track. My main focus is finishing up the Kickstarter stretch goals for my Becky Chambers inspired RPG, For Small Creatures Such As We. It’s a game all about travelling through space, visiting alien worlds, and trying to make ends meet while caring for and getting to know your alien crewmates. It’s a game about discovery and understanding and while the base game has been out for a while, I’m really excited to see how things will change once players have all of these expansions to play with as well.
The other big thing I’m working on is the sequel to my game DELVE which is a solo map drawing game where you make a dwarven stronghold and dig into the earth to find a rare gem. The sequel, DELVE: Reforged is going to be bigger and (hopefully) better with a lot of care taken to teaching new players the ropes and gently introducing them to all the new mechanics and content. I’m really excited by this project because the Youtuber Kruggsmash is providing all the art for it and it is his Dwarf Fortress videos that inspired DELVE in the first place!
Then of course, I’ve got my side projects which currently includes the mostly complete Shirefolk which is my cosy solo Hobbit-inspired RPG where you build your burrow, collect gossip, and explore the shire and surrounding lands. I’m really excited to clear my current projects so that I can get working on Shirefolk again. The last thing I did for it was add a competitive mode where players could play squabbling cousins fighting over their Grandmother’s silver cutlery set with each piece of cutlery having its own ridiculous unlock requirements and I can’t wait to flesh that out more.
Can you tell me more about the mechanics of "For Small Creatures Such As We"?
So, in the solo mode, you play as the Captain of the ship and generate up to 3 alien Crewmates. As you play, you get Events that prompt you to learn more about their culture, biology, personalities, and so on. So you could get an event that's like "You hear someone playing music from their homeworld. What does it sound like?" and that encourages players to think how that particular crewmate's species would handle music. Maybe they're an Immaterial Aquatic species, sort of like ghostly jellyfish people. How do they make music? As you play, you develop these characters and their relationships to each other through the Events you face and the story you write.
In the co-op mode, you are encouraged to each play as alien crewmates instead. That way whenever an Event provides a scene prompt, one of you can volunteer (or demand in some cases) the spotlight if it inspired you. You would then roleplay the scene with anyone else who wanted to be in that scene and reveal / improvise this part of your character's story. NPCs are handled by whoever wants to control them in that scene or by whoever they "belong to", it depends on the group. Some people have a captain while other choose to have a more democratic ship.
I've also ran one competitive game where we had 8 players in a gaming cafe in Glasgow. They split into two separate crews and ended up creating very similar goals and crew makeups that I gave them the chance to compete. Their starting mission was a Bounty Hunt where they had to get from the shipbreaking world of Grave to the in-progress terraforming world of Progress to capture a drug dealer. One crew ended up making it there first which prompted the other crew to invite them onboard to celebrate and ended up with the winning crew getting kidnapped. It was a fun time but very chaotic.
What experience(s) are you trying to give to players?
I’ve ended up quite firmly in the Solo RPG niche and I’m happy there because I’m trying to give players an experience that feels unique and personal to them. All of my games are designed to be a collaboration between the game and the player and to foster their creativity. Whether that be getting them to create a story in games like Apothecaria or For Small Creatures Such As We; getting them to be creative with their journal materials like in Death Road Services which forbids the usage of notepads and instructs players to use actual rubbish instead; letting them free their artistic nature in DELVE; or to think creatively about the objects in their house like in Mistorical Museum.
Is there anything you would like to promote right now?
We’re just about to go to print on 3 expansions for For Small Creatures Such As We which include Love & Lust, A Guide To Fauna, and War! Each expansion introduces a number of new Planets, Events, Ship Systems, Skills and Traits for your Captain and Crewmates as well as new Mission types and mechanics around each expansion’s core theme.
We also recently released a Mad Max: Fury Road inspired solo RPG called Death Road Services which I think slipped under the radar for a lot of people as I suck at marketing! It’s a black comedy journalling RPG without the journal. You are tasked with rebuilding and running the Death Road Service Station and serving the awful Road Masters and their gangs of colourful weirdos. All the while you’re secretly plotting to kill the Road Masters in order to build the God Car which will let you take over the wasteland.
Where should people go to follow you, and to find your products?
I put out a newsletter every two weeks or so over at https://blackwellgames.substack.com/ and I give behind the scenes previews, discounts, and other Patron specific content at https://www.patreon.com/c/AnnaBlackwell
My games can be bought at https://blackwellwriter.itch.io or https://blackwellwriter.com and we give free UK shipping!
I can be found on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/annablackwell.bsky.social