Freelancing! Blessing or curse? Today Laura (writer and editor of such games as Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Frog Fractions 2, Swan Hill, You Got This, Brutadon!, The Brigand’s Story, and more, and is currently an editor at Riot Games.) and Cat (writer and narrative designer of video games and narrative fiction, who's worked on titles such as Invasion, Pathologic 2, What Isn't Saved (Will Be Lost), Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, and the forthcoming Leader of the Pack) join us to talk about that independent life with topics like how to find work, what to look for in contracts, rates, renegotiating, the importance of maintaining a social media presence, whether you should go to festivals, why you maybe shouldn't go to the Write Zone at GDC, and non-freelancer stuff like how to match another writer's voice, reflective choices and how to make strong ones, how to give a player the feeling that their decisions have an impact on a story (especially when the story isn't actually changing at all), writing mistakes, the importance of editing, getting feedback, and I dunno, a few more things.

Our Guests on the Internet

Laura's Twitter and Website

Cat's Twitter and Website

Stuff We Talked About

The parser game scene from the Tom Hanks movie Big

Slug-In-Hand Tavern Twitter Bot

The Writers' Guild of Great Britain Videogames Guidelines

DoContract

Game Writers Facebook Group

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

Successful Reflective Choices in Interactive Narrative by Cat Manning

Planescape Torment

With Those We Love Alive

Invasion

Sub-Q

American Vandal

Brendan Patrick Hennessy

Our theme music was composed by 2Mello, and our logo was created by Lily Nishita.