Remember “Does Canned Rice Dream of a Napkin Heap?”, our digital storytelling game? It’s live now, along with the 14 other sci-fi-themed games created for Antholojam I!
Pay what you want to download Antholojam I (support your local devs!)
Alternately, play all 15 games online for free!
The premise of Canned Rice: Two aliens, a robot, and a canine cosmonaut walk into a spaceport bar, and to convince them to pay for your drinks, you have to entertain them with a tall tale of galactic intrigue. Your audience will ask clarifying questions as you tell the story, and at the end, they’ll decide whether to pay your bill or sentence you to parsecs of spacedishes.
You also get a transcript of your story at the end. Here’s one of my favorites from Twitter: the definitive story of Huey Lewis and the News.
#Antholojam's #CannedRice has allowed me to tell the definitive version of this origin story http://t.co/bLFnknUN8F pic.twitter.com/Y8ig6pD8H2
— Zatanna Cobblepot (@mixmastaflibble) February 21, 2015
The rest of the anthology includes…
- Tonight Dies the Moon: From the author of HORSE MASTER: THE GAME OF HORSE MASTERY, comes a Twine game about life during war between the Earth and Moon in the year 2000. Fall in love, subsistence farm, make spreadsheets, and wear colorful jumpsuits!
- Killing Time at Lightspeed: On a time-dilated voyage away from earth, one minute of your time can stretch for years back home. There’s only one thing to do: Browse social media, of course.
- Steal My Artificial Heart: On an android moon colony, a brutal murder of a metal madam seeds mystery in a cobalt-collar bar. Piece it together in this beautifully-illustrated neo-noir whodunit.
- Fire Theft: A government agent is sent to investigate a power spike in an industrial district, only to find a warehouse playing home to a group of runaway AIs working towards… Something.
- Planet of a Poisoned Past: Discover the true purpose of your mission as a member of a research and mining team sent to extract Ultra-Steelium from an alien planet in the far-off year of 2003.
- Valkyries of Vela: Keep your rayguns at the ready and join the Valkyries in this intergalactic card-based dungeon crawler.
- The Absence of Is: In a future world where humanity has developed the technology to explore the fringes of consciousness, a group of researchers takes the first journey to record the afterlife.
- Intergalactic Ambassador: Negotiate with alien lifeforms entering our solar system to determine their intent, build bridges, or torch them outright.
- The Lost Chrononaut: Craft a unique story as you pursue your destiny in this card-based time-travel adventure.
- A Call to Mars: A signal from another planet brings Earth’s nations together to send five representatives to alien soil. Met with a desert out of a dream, how will they reconcile with their environment and each other?
- A Planet Wakes: Work your way towards a space elevator off a barren alien planet in this base-building terraforming sim.
- Voice of Vamana: An lifeless alien ship, the first proof that we are not alone in the universe, enters our solar system on a collision course with the sun… And you are the first person to intercept it.
- Orison of Mercury: As a deep-space miner, you are duty-bound to extract and deliver a payload with limited resources. Your computer’s interception of several anomalous transmissions may tempt you otherwise.
- Space Journey!: A tabletop improv game where you and your friends star in a popular pulp sci-fi space exploration show… Where the director has lost the script. The show must go on!
My sincere thanks to Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz for running this project. It was inspirational, experimental, educational, and overall amazing, and I hope there will be more Antholojams in the future.