Chandler Groover is an interactive fiction author, known for his influential games such as Eat Me, Toby’s Nose and Midnight. Swordfight., as well as his contribution in Fallen London’s storylines. He recently released The Bat, which won the 2024 IFComp.
Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and how you found Interactive Fiction?
About myself? That’s a can of worms! I suppose the basics are: I was born in Georgia (USA), moved to New York City in my twenties, always wanted to write for a living. At first, I was thinking traditional fiction: novels, short stories. But then I discovered interactive fiction, and I pivoted.
My friend Adam Bredenberg (who is also a writer and game developer) was the first person to recommend a text game to me. I’m pretty sure it was a Kitty Horrorshow game, but I can’t remember which one. I didn’t quite “get it” yet. Then he recommended howling dogs by Porpentine. When I played that, it blew open my mind and changed my life.
This was in 2014. After I played howling dogs, I was ravenous for more. I found IFDB. I would play one or two games each morning before work. That pace has slowed down a little, but I still play more text games than video games to this day.
In that same year, you published your first game: HUNTING UNICORN. Can you tell us a bit more about it?
After playing more text games, I got the urge to write one. Like an itch. I’ve been fascinated with unicorns for a long time (I watched The Last Unicorn a lot as a kid), and I had been toying with a unicorn-themed short story for a few years. But it never quite gelled. As a branching narrative, though? When I pictured it that way, it suddenly made sense.
I wrote the game with Twine because Twine seemed like The Way To Write Text Games. I was unfamiliar with other authoring tools, and I must confess that the code for this game is needlessly cumbersome. It uses no variables because I didn’t know how to implement variables. Nowadays, if I were writing something similar, I would program it much differently.
A design challenge that’s always on my mind is: “How do you build a game with multiple endings without making the player feel obligated to collect all the endings?” HUNTING UNICORN has multiple endings, but most players seem to reach one and then stop — which is perfect! That’s a bit of structural finesse that I’m still very pleased with.
It wasn’t long before you started participating in competitions, with Down, the Serpent and the Sun for the ParserComp. How was transitioning from a choice-based/hypertext format to the more classical parser IF?
I wasn’t aware that I was making a transition, to be honest. I didn’t know that “classical parser IF” was even a thing! It was all just interactive text to me.
Inform 7 was pretty easy to learn. About as easy as Twine, I’d say. But I certainly hadn’t mastered Twine when I picked up Inform! I figured out both programs well enough to produce a game, but the code for Down, the Serpent and the Sun is even worse than the code for HUNTING UNICORN. It hangs together, it’s playable, but it’s not pretty.
The gameplay is not great either. I was vaguely aware that Inform 7 games were supposed to have puzzles, so I tossed in a few puzzles. The whole game is haphazard. It was basically a coding exercise that I made up as I went along, but I entered it into a contest — because I was oblivious!
Why the ParserComp as your first competition/game jam entry?
I put a lot of work into HUNTING UNICORN, but it got almost no attention. I had released it (obliviously) during IFComp. Since all the games in IFComp were getting played while mine got ignored, I fell under the impression (partially mistaken and partially not) that people would only play my games if I also entered a contest. ParserComp was simply the next one on the calendar.
By the time I learned about ParserComp, though, it was only a few weeks away. And it apparently had this rule: only parser games were allowed. So I would have to make a parser game if I wanted to enter. When I went looking for tools, I found Inform 7. Down, the Serpent and the Sun was my crash course.
Do you still feel the same way about that impression, that people would only play games if entered in a contest?
A little, yeah. You’ve got outliers like Superluminal Vagrant Twin, which had a cold release and shot to the top of the charts, so to speak. But I still feel like entering a contest is the most reliable way for new authors to attract eyeballs. Once you’re on the radar, dynamics can change, but getting on the radar is the challenge.
After the ParserComp, you entered Toby’s Nose in the Spring Thing, which happened pretty quickly after. Was the process of creating the game as fast-paced as Down, the Serpent and the Sun?
I entered Spring Thing for the same reason I entered ParserComp: it was next on the calendar. But I had a longer runway to design a game.
I wrote Toby’s Nose in roughly two months, and the whole thing was planned from the start. I plotted out the mystery ahead of time. I knew all the suspects, all the major clues, and how everything would connect. Then I just had to discipline myself to sit down each day and fill out the descriptions for the aromas. Each aroma is coded as an object; there are hundreds; I went down the list methodically until I was done.
With Toby’s Nose, I had way more control over the story, the mechanics, and the code. I actually knew what I was doing, in contrast to the Serpent where I was throwing stuff at a wall to see what would stick. Even though two months is still a tight timeline, the design process wasn’t nearly as rushed.
Speaking of your first SpringThing game, you not only won the Main Festival Ribbon, but also XYZZY nominations. How did you experience this reception of your game?
I still didn’t understand how the “awards circuit” worked in the IF world. I remember someone contacting me after Spring Thing and telling me that, if I had waited to submit Toby’s Nose to IFComp, it might’ve won IFComp. At the time, I thought: “Why would that matter? What difference does it make?”
In my mind, all these contests were equal. They were just a way to distribute my games to potential players. Winning the Spring Thing certainly bolstered my confidence as a designer, but I didn’t appreciate what it really meant until more time had passed.
Do you feel like you were on people’s radar before this year’s IFComp?
Before 2024? Oh yeah. I think Toby’s Nose put me on the general IF radar. I still have to work to stay on it by releasing new games. But I gained enough momentum in 2015 to receive job offers from quite a few studios. I’ve been earning my bread and butter as a narrative designer since then.
For the next three years, you created dozens of games which were submitted to different Competitions (namely the IFComp, Spring Thing and EctoComp) and Game Jams. Is there an event that you liked best?
EctoComp is my favorite. Sorry, Spring Thing and IFComp! I’m just biased toward horror games. EctoComp is also less stressful. With Spring Thing and IFComp, you feel that something is on the line. With EctoComp, it’s all in good fun.
Even though EctoComp has lower stakes, it still produces incredible games. Lime Ergot, one of my all-time favorites, was an EctoComp game.
Do you still feel like these contests are equal?
Not anymore. When I first stumbled into the IF world, I didn’t know the history of the different contests, but IFComp certainly has the most weight. It earns the most media coverage. It’s the oldest and most prestigious. Participating in IFComp eventually started to stress me out, but the first time I entered in 2015, I was still rather oblivious — for better or worse.
Your next major title was your first time entering IFComp. Midnight. Swordfight. had very peculiar gameplay and garnered quite a bit of attention, reaching 3rd place in the IFComp and also winning your first XYZZY for Best Implementation. Can you tell us a bit more about this game?
When I wrote Down, the Serpent and the Sun, I was flailing. When I started developing Toby’s Nose, though, I had a more focused intent. By that time, I had played enough parser games to understand what worked for me and what didn’t. I wanted to do something with Toby’s Nose. I wanted to tell a story via telescopic descriptions.
I had more mechanics in mind for Midnight. Swordfight. I had played a few one-move games, couldn’t get into them, and wanted to implement the one-move concept differently. That’s usually how my design process goes. I’ll start with a mechanic. I’ll ask myself: What story does this mechanic tell? And then I’ll write that story.
So the one-move mechanic — that was the start. But the game grew in strange directions. I had outlined Toby’s Nose, but I didn’t outline Midnight. Swordfight. Whenever new ideas occurred to me, I’d graft them onto the game. It’s a game with multiple endings, which meant it could accommodate much grafting.
I still don’t think people have found everything in that game. Some reviews on IFDB claim to list all the named endings, but these reviews don’t take into account that different endings might share the same name.
I think I was in a “sweet spot” when I wrote Midnight. Swordfight. I had learned how to program parser games confidently, but I didn’t feel beholden to parser conventions. I felt like I could do whatever I wanted — and I pretty much did!
Is there a particular ending or path that you liked working on the most in Midnight. Swordfight.? Or that you have a fond memory of?
You can change many things about Midnight. Swordfight., including the ending, but this flux allows things that don’t change to stand out. I was writing the game loosely, allowing my inspiration to take me anywhere, but when I got to Matilda, that’s when everything clicked together. The scene at the fountain is the heart of the story.
I’m also fond of Dmitri. He’s one of my best NPCs. The player-character’s relationship with Dmitri is the game’s emotional backbone; it’s something else you can’t change.
That year, you didn’t just submit Midnight. Swordfight., but also Taghairm, written in Twine, which is a completely different vibe from the former. What was your goal with this game?
Taghairm is historical fiction. It presents a real magical ritual to the player. Not a ritual invented for a story, but a ritual that people actually performed in the 17th century.
It’s also a horror game. Rather extreme horror. In the same company, in my mind, as films like Begotten. I thought it would be appropriate to release around Halloween, and I entered it into IFComp because contests still seemed like the best way for games to find an audience. I knew some players would dislike it, but when people called it a “troll” entry, that caught me off-guard. It took months to develop. I thought the effort would show.
People have called it a complicity tester, which I think is inaccurate. Well, it might be accurate for them. But the game, gruesome though it may be, works best if you’re on board. Once you get on board, that’s when it can start to do its thing, whereas the label “complicity tester” frames the getting-on-board part as the main point.
I thought Taghairm was my best game when I released it. I replayed it recently for the first time in years, and I still think it might be my best.
What did/do you wish people would see in Taghairm?
There’s no way to answer this question without sounding like a snob. People will see what they see, but it’s beautiful to me. Beauty and terror are closely entwined in my mind. Even synonymous, sometimes. I try to produce certain effects with my games, and Taghairm is the most pure experience that I’ve managed to achieve. Even if people dislike the game, though, I wish they would at least see it was made with care.
Your first entry at the EctoComp, Open That Vein, landed you in the first spot of the La Petite Mort category (for games created under 4h). How was your experience creating a game in such a short period of time?
I got the idea for Open That Vein in the shower. The whole game, down to specific word choices and mechanics, popped instantly into my head. As soon as I got out, I sat down to write it. My hair was still wet!
Sometimes writers talk about “taking dictation,” as though some outside voice or entity is feeding words into their mind and they’re just transcribing the words. That’s how writing Open That Vein felt. I barely even thought about the game. Suddenly, it was just there.
Do you have any advice for creators looking to attempt this Speed IF competition?
Steal someone else’s code. Seriously.
I stole Joey Jones’s code from Danse Nocturne. His code is open source, and I credited Joey Jones in Open That Vein, but it was still theft. Blatant and unapologetic theft!
Open That Vein is another limited parser game, but its limitations are actually Danse Nocturne‘s limitations. I lifted out Danse Nocturne‘s mechanical skeleton and added my own flesh. This probably saved me an hour. With EctoComp’s tight deadline, that’s a huge chunk of time.
In 2016, you returned to the IFComp with two new entries, Mirror and Queen, made with Inform, and The Queen’s Menagerie, made in Texture. How did you come up with these two?
Mirror and Queen is a retelling of “Snow White” from the Evil Queen’s perspective. This concept had been on my mind for years.
I love fairy tales. I love villains. I do not love when fairy tales are retold from the villain’s perspective and the story is wildly altered to make the villain more sympathetic. This seems, to me, to defeat the purpose. If you’re trying to understand the villain, but you have to change the story to get a grip on the villain’s motive, then you haven’t really understood the villain.
Mirror and Queen attempts to delve into the Queen’s mindset within the original fairy tale’s parameters.
As for The Queen’s Menagerie, the idea for that one came to me when I was considering how to use Texture’s drag-and-drop mechanic. I asked myself what you might drag and where you might drop it; with consumption on my mind (as usual), I realized that you could drag food through a zoo and drop it into an animal’s enclosure.
Are there other fairy-tales you’d like to explore through interactive fiction?
Not necessarily. Maybe I’ll get another fairy-tale-inspired idea. Maybe I won’t. Even if I did want to explore more fairy tales, though, I feel like mentioning anything specific would almost guarantee that it wouldn’t get made. I’ve done that before: spoken about future plans, only for the future plans to fizzle. Better to keep a lid on things. Let the concepts ferment and the pressure build.
Do you have any advice for authors thinking of submitting more than one game to the IFComp?
Go for it! There’s no downside that I can see.
Of course, you have to manage your production timeline. If there’s too much on your plate, the quality might suffer; you might feel crunched; you might not be able to beta-test properly. That’s no good. But if you have an idea for more than one game, and if you have enough space on your calendar to make it happen, I’d take the plunge.
There’s nothing wrong with submitting a game to another comp like Spring Thing, though, if the IFComp deadline proves too tight.
Let’s talk a bit more about Eat Me, your most rated and most awarded game. How did you come up with it?
I initially wanted to write a game called Bag where “bag” was the principle command. You would play as Morgan le Fay. You would have a bottomless magical bag. You would start the game imprisoned in Camelot, and you’d gain your freedom by “bagging” objects — your chains and manacles, the door to your cell, the prison guards — moving from small to large until, finally, you “bagged” the castle itself. This was partially inspired by Katamari Damacy.
But then Katherine Morayati released a game called Take with similar mechanics (an excellent game, by the way, that I highly recommend). The verb “bag” was basically just the verb “take,” and I didn’t want to write another take-based game on Take’s heels. So I shelved the concept — until Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna had me on their podcast Clash of the Type-Ins. We briefly discussed candy dungeons. I realized that I could reconfigure Bag with “eat” as the main verb instead, and Eat Me was born.
The game has since become a favourite of the community. Did you expect such a reaction to the game?
I certainly hoped players would enjoy it! That’s what you always hope when you design a game, I suppose. It’s a funny game, in my opinion.
Is there a comment or review about your work that has stuck with you?
Whenever I learn that one of my games introduced somebody to IF, that makes me feel like, Okay, yes, I can go to the grave in peace. This medium isn’t something from the 1970s or 80s for me. It’s not nostalgic. I discovered it in the 2010s, and it opened my eyes right there in the 2010s. I hope it’s still exciting for new generations in fifty or a hundred years. And when people are inspired by my games to make their own — that’s really all you can ask for.
While most of your publications were solo-authored, a couple of games were released in a group. NotablyCragne Manor, a group-authored tribute to Anchorhead. Can you tell us a bit more about this experience?
Dirty little confession: I’ve never played Anchorhead. I don’t much care for Lovecraft, and Lovecraft-inspired media is a hard sell for me. But everyone was contributing to Cragne Manor. I thought it would be fun to work on such a massive “exquisite corpse” project. And it was! There was a group chat for all the authors to coordinate. The positive energy was infectious. But the room that I wrote for the game is fairly small. I wanted to keep it short and simple, to make it easier to stitch into the collaborative quilt.
Another dirty little confession: I’ve never played Cragne Manor. I helped beta-test some rooms during development, but the finished game is so long, and Lovecraft is still a hard sell…
Did you have a specific inspiration for your room in Cragne Manor? Or a set idea/puzzle ahead of coding?
I was assigned the “Outside the Meatpacking Plant” room. I had the sense that Ryan and Jenni assigned me this room because “meatpacking” is a gross horror-adjacent topic, and I had been writing gross horror-adjacent games. So I tried to live up to my reputation by writing something gross and horror-adjacent. Based on what I’ve heard about the other rooms, however, I’m not sure that mine even ranks very high on the scale!
How was working in a group/team compared to your solo projects?
The group chat with the other authors was fun, but writing a room for Cragne Manor was still mostly a solo effort for me. Ryan and Jenni were very loose with the parameters. My room needed to be called “Outside the Meatpacking Plant,” and it needed certain exits to connect with other rooms, but apart from that? I basically had a blank canvas.
With so many people working on the game, we had a built-in beta-testing pool. So that was a little different. Beta-testers were right there to tap. No need to go searching and schedule anything.
Most of my client work involves collaborating with a team, though. It’s a slightly different skill set — rather than developing my own stories, I’m usually writing with a predetermined theme or mechanic as the central kernel. But I’ve always loved narrative collage. Borrowing material from elsewhere, disassembling and reassembling it into something new, is one of my favorite little tricks. So when a client has a concept for a game, and it’s my job to bring it to life, that falls right into my “narrative collage” wheelhouse.
One thing that’s important with collaborative projects is to carry and pass the baton. If I’m writing for Fallen London, for instance, and I need to mention a dockside pub in a story, I probably won’t invent a new one. Instead, I’ll use one that another author has already established, like the Syphilitic Parrot. But if I do invent something new, I try to leave room for other authors to pick it up and run with it too.
Two years later, you released JELLYand Deus Ex Ceviche with Tom Lento. How did those projects come to be?
Tom is a good friend. I can program text games pretty well on my own, but I’m not a hardcore Programmer with a capital P, and Tom is. We had talked about collaborating on a game for years, and then we finally did!
JELLY and Deus Ex Ceviche both lean way more heavily on programming shenanigans than my solo games. The ASCII map in JELLY — that’s all Tom. The game won Spring Thing with a “Best Twine Abuse” distinction, and also got nominated for Best Innovation at the 2020 XYZZY Awards; those accolades are really his.
Deus Ex Ceviche was partially modeled on Fallen London. By the time we made that game, I had done a lot of work for Failbetter, and Tom and I were dabbling with ideas for similar card-based stories. He built the system with Unity. I wrote the text. We wanted to make a magical game that was forward-looking. Not something based in the past with medieval trappings, which is common for the fantasy genre, but something that resonates with the present and points toward the future.
JELLY was inspired by Grease, and Deus Ex Ceviche by SpongeBob SquarePants.
Let’s talk about The Bat. Why do you think it was an exception to your other projects (in terms of the length of time needed to make the game)?
My career as a professional developer had taken off by 2020, and I simply didn’t have as much time to focus on personal projects. It’s still hard to squeeze things into my schedule. Game design is now my full-time job.
What inspired you to make The Bat?
One day, I asked myself, What if Batman literally acted like a bat? I had an image flash into my mind: a man in a tailcoat, hanging from a chandelier, and then jumping onto a buffet table to attack the hors d’oeuvres. I held on to this image for years, and the game gradually crystallized around it.
Mechanically, the game is inspired by old-school parser conventions, particularly compass navigation. I typically dislike compass navigation, both as a player and as a designer. But I took it up as a challenge. I wanted to feature the compass as a centerpiece and see what I could do with it.
I’ll often have a few game ideas marinating in my head at any given time. The Bat was one of many. The reason I prioritized it, back in 2020 when I started writing, was due to the political climate in the USA. As the years passed, it felt more and more relevant. Now, in 2024, it feels like the most important game I’ve written.
Could you expand on this last point?
To put it bluntly: The Bat is an anti-fascist game.
All of my games are political in one way or another. Which isn’t to say that they’re only political; they have many layers. Sometimes, perhaps they’re too layered for their own good. Most people seem to have missed the “consumerism” angle in Eat Me, although I didn’t think it was subtle. On the other hand, a game like Rape, Pillage, Makane! is sledgehammer-like with its message, and The Bat is equally blunt.
The USA is currently in a very dark political place. That’s due, in no small part, to the country’s culture. When people are in pain, where do they look to find a hero? To the billionaire class, apparently.
The superhero genre has normalized “heroic billionaires” for decades, but the very concept of a “heroic billionaire” is a poisonous oxymoron. The Bat is my attempt, small though it may be in this niche corner of the world, to inject pop-culture with an antidote. It’s not enough to criticize billionaires, or kings, or dictators. The criticism doesn’t stick. People still worship the money, the power; and if they can’t have it, they try to ally themselves with it; they want to enjoy it vicariously, by association. It must be pulled down, stripped bare, and revealed as ridiculous, petty, and weak. People should flinch and recoil, as they would from an infected wound.
Right now, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which games like The Bat are suppressed. But it won IFComp. It will stand, at this moment in time in the history books, as a slap in the face to our own “heroic” billionaires who are anything but.
Is there a specific scene/puzzle/action in The Bat that you enjoyed creating the most? Inversely, was there something that you particularly struggled with making the game?
Learning how to move Bryce Wyatt with the compass. That’s probably the best puzzle in the game. It’s one of the main reasons I wrote the game — just to include that puzzle!
The climatic rooftop sequence, however, which also requires you to move Bryce Wyatt with the compass, was the hardest part to get right. When I play games with compass directions, I’m often disoriented; I end up bashing my way around the map randomly. I wanted this rooftop sequence to mimic my own experience, so that other players would feel my disorientation. But I still wanted it to be fun. The idea was: “Slam Bryce Wyatt around anywhere! Chaotically stumble into success!” In practice, however, many players seemed to only experience the disorientation without the fun. I added a ton of nudges during beta-testing to clue the player about what to do. But some players wanted this to be a methodical puzzle, where they could study the map, pinpoint the landmarks, and make calculated decisions about how to navigate — which would have directly opposed my own design goals.
With more time, perhaps I could’ve finessed this rooftop sequence better. Considering the four-year development period, “more time” seems like a preposterous thing to need. But I only learned about this sequence’s deficiencies during beta-testing. By that point, with IFComp on the horizon, I only had a few months to adjust, which wasn’t long enough to iron out all the wrinkles.
What were things you learned while creating those games? A fun fact about a topic?
I learned about casu marzu when I was writing Midnight. Swordfight. It’s a cheese filled with live maggots, considered a delicacy in Sardinia. Dmitri talks about it. His dialogue covers a wide range of topics, from the Toba eruption to garden hermits, but this cheese is something special.
It might be a wrong observation, but it seems your parser games are more mechanically focused, while the Twine/choice-based ones seemed to have the story more in the centre of it all. Is there a particular reason for this?
I’m not sure this is the case. HUNTING UNICORN is story-focused, but that was my bridge from traditional fiction to text games. But for a game like The Queen’s Menagerie, the mechanics came first. Ditto Bring Me a Head! and Rape, Pillage, Makane! and JELLY and Deus Ex Ceviche.
The Griffin and the Minor Canon is another story-focused game, but that was adapted from a story.
In general, though, it is easier to just start typing text into a Twine game. With a parser game, more implementation is required for basic functionality, which may put an emphasis on the mechanics.
Horror is a common genre in your early games. What about it inspires you so?
I’ve always been drawn to the horror genre. I feel like it allows you to confront the world’s ugliest aspects in a safe, controlled context. And not just confront them, but study them, process them, and learn from them.
Horror also tips into the fantastic. Ghost stories are my favorite horror sub-genre, and ghosts, well, they’re neither here nor there. Are they real? Are they imaginary? Even if you meet a ghost, you may not know! They haunt the threshold, and that’s where the magic happens.
Another common theme or mechanic in your games is the highlight on the senses – whether it is to smell (Toby’s Nose) or taste (Eat Me). Why do you think it is recurring?
I’m not sure, to be honest. I suppose it’s just a basic component of writing. We experience the world through our senses; therefore, writing about the senses can help bring a story to life for the reader.
Sight gets a lot of attention, but perhaps taste and scent are more neglected? So when I use them, they stand out? I don’t consciously try to emphasize them, but they are linked to consumption, and consumption is one of my major preoccupations. Perhaps, by dealing with consumption as a theme, these senses get pulled along for the ride.
You say consumption is one of your major preoccupations. How so?
It’s one of the Great Themes, like Death and Love, if you can forgive the portentous uppercase letters. In this era of human history, driven by the marketplace, which is driven by consumption — of goods, resources, labor, land, data, attention, time, people — it might even be The Theme. But it’s universally resonant. Drill down deep enough through every hierarchy, every culture and religion and philosophy, and you’ll find the eater and the eaten. This hard-coded power imbalance, baked into biology’s bedrock, is constantly on my mind.
In less grandiose terms, it’s also on my mind because intestinal ailments run in my family. My own stomach almost killed me when I was a teenager. One day, it might finish the job!
How does your production timeline usually look like for a game? Or more generally, how would you describe your process of making IF?
It’s different now that I do so much client work. Deadlines are external. Mechanics and themes are often predetermined.
When I’m working on a personal project, though, I’ll usually start with a mechanic that I find interesting. The mechanic itself will generate the surrounding narrative. I’ll draft a rough outline — very sketchy, with pen and paper — to diagram the game. Then I’ll start coding and follow the outline, writing the story mostly in order.
It might take me a few weeks or a few months to write everything. Depends on the scope. Beta-testing for a parser game probably adds another two months to the process, on average.
The Bat was a significant exception. That took me closer to four years. I kept having to start and stop, working on it between other projects whenever I had spare time. Not ideal. Sometimes I would forget what I had been doing, and I’d have to wrestle with the code to reacclimate myself. I prefer shorter development periods.
Being a game designer now, are there knowledge/processes/lessons you’ve incorporated in your personal projects?
I still do so much client work that any knowledge/processes/lessons largely flow the other way: from my personal projects into my professional work. The Bat is the only “100% me” game that I’ve managed to release in years. I would really like to write more of my own stuff — I have so many ideas — but finding the time is not easy.
I would say, however, that I have a better understanding of the “winning formula” of game design. After writing so many commercial games, I can sense which subjects or mechanics or narrative structures might appeal to people the most. I’ve developed a sort of instinct for it, and I wrote The Bat by following that instinct.
What do you think is the “winning formula”?
Calling it a formula is probably overselling it. It’s not scientific like that. Definitely more of an instinct. But there is a little science, in a way. You release a game. You see how the audience reacts. You release another game, with tweaks. Repeat. Repeat. I’ve made something like 20 commercial games at this point. The Exceptional Stories for Fallen London alone have provided a massive testing pool. You need to really listen when players say: “This is how X felt for me.” Don’t argue. Accept and analyze. Even if X doesn’t feel that way for you, it does feel that way for players, and you may need to adjust your design.
I’d say humor is one of the main ingredients for success. A dead-serious game is always fighting an uphill battle. You can smuggle something serious into something humorous, though, like a Trojan Horse, which might truly be the best way to reach people. You want layers to peel away, so the player is always discovering something new. And there shouldn’t be much space between each interaction-point. Players like to press buttons. If there’s too much text, they will skim it just to press the next button. (Leave room for exceptions, of course.)
That doesn’t really touch upon subject matter, though, which is what I was thinking about at first. Sometimes a premise for a game just has more potential. It’s dramatic in the right way. Weird enough to grab someone’s attention, but familiar enough to provide a foothold into the weirdness. This is the thing that I’ve learned how to sense over time. A story like HUNTING UNICORN might appeal to me, but it won’t appeal to a wide audience. Not in the same way as The Bat.