For this meetup our guest speaker will be professional writer and game developer Heather Albano. She hails from Boston and is deeply immersed in the world of interactive fiction. Writers interested in the tools and techniques of interactive fiction will not want to miss this!

Heather will be giving a talk on how narrative design and player agency need not always be at odds with each other.  One thing to note: Many games choose narrative design over player agency or vice versa. For instance, Minecraft wholly embraces player agency but provides no story itself. This talk provides a third path that applies to many game genres.

Heather Albano has co-authored five titles released by Choice of Games, including the award-winning Choice of Broadsides and Choice of Zombies, and was lead writer on the critically-acclaimed interactive radio drama Codename Cygnus, released by Reactive Studios. She has presented on game design at GDC 2015, at the East Coast Game Conference, at the Boston Festival of Indie Games, at Women in Games Boston, and at MIT. See her bio for more details.

• Heather’s full talk. Watch. Here are the slides.

• Show and tell (slot 1): Tim Shaw shows off his game Wizlord. Watch.