Denatured

Design Intern – Designer, Writer, Layout Artist

Jun – Aug ’24

Bully Pulpit Games

Available on Itch.io

   A published live action roleplaying game made while working a summer internship at Bully Pulpit Games for their August Patreon release.

Title "Denatured" in front of two trees

Denatured Game Print & Play

   Denatured was designed and written over the course of three months. It went through multiple iterations as I worked with multiple members of the Bully Pulpit team including Jason Morningstar. During development I ran multiple play tests with other designers in industry like Lizzie Stark, winner of the Best Scenario Otto at Fastaval 2020, and Will Hindmarch, author on Sea of Legends. I also worked with Bully Pulpit’s Brennen Reece and Jen Martin to learn how to format both Denatured documents; and sale pages on itch.io for multiple games they published over the course of my internship.
   I was very nervous to be working alongside such seasoned designers on my own independent project, but I learnt so much during my internship, and grew my confidence as a designer. Once the game was published I was ecstatic to find that Karen Twelves, author of Improv for Gamers, was hosting my game at Big Bad Con. Thanks to scholarships from Big Bad Con and Bradley University I was able to attend and host my game twice during the convention. I also won the Dean’s Award for a presentation I gave about the event. Attending and being an exhibitor at Big Bad Con was truly one of the highlights of my career as a game designer.

   Denatured was created in conversation with a scene from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and a friend of mine from High School. Plath describes the paralyzing fear of deciding who you want to be when you have so many possible options standing in front of you, using the metaphor of a fig tree, where the figs begin to rot and fall the longer you wait to pick your path. My friend compared this to how she felt picking her major in college, infinite possibilities and only one definitive decision.

   As I entered college I found myself constantly coming back to this conversation and relating to the fear. So I designed a game about clones. Clones who were all the same person, who got to go down a ton of different paths, and now had to come back together and see who they could’ve become. Clones who knew that only one person would survive the end of the experiment. In this way instead of having to pick who you want to become in the future, you have to choose whose past path gets to continue.