Hi, we’re Marli & David.
We’re a couple of married bookworms fascinated by video games. For us, interactive fiction and RPGs are some of the most exciting art forms out there. They help us imagine what it feels like to be another person, offering fictional worlds that prepare us for the ambiguity and challenges of our own.
What We Make
We make RPGs about complicated relationships between people and places. While our projects span a range of genres and tones, they all center branching dialogue with high emotional stakes.
Our first project is Penelope and Her Guest, a short and spicy interactive fanfic about literature’s wiliest couple reuniting after twenty years apart. Think The Odyssey meets Emily Short’s Glass meets that unbelievably sexy horseback fight in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.
What You’ll Find Here
Dev logs: what we’re learning, building, and breaking
Deep dives: looking under the hood at games we love (Disco Elysium, Citizen Sleeper, Scarlet Hollow, Monster Prom), exploring branching narrative, conditional story structure, and how systems create feelings
Shameless self-promotion: of our tiny, heartfelt games
Who Are We?
We’re at the beginning of our game dev journey, and we come from different backgrounds:
David makes documentaries — directing, producing, filming, and editing stories about science and nature.
Marli is a product designer with a background in full-stack coding and illustration.
We like unreliable narrators, slow burns, and pressure cookers.
Why “Surprise Iguana”?
Marli was washing dishes in her second-story LA apartment when she noticed an iguana blinking at her from a nearby tree.
Iguanas are not native to LA. No one claimed him. Animal Control said he looked like he was having a great time up there. He stayed for three days, then moved on.
It was a moment of surprise and delight in a familiar place. That’s what we want our games to feel like.
(Plus, the SEO is fantastic. You do what you gotta do.)
Our North Star
At their best, RPGs foster empathy. They resist reductive stories about other people. They invite disagreement. They’re a (relatively) new form of literature that we want to be a part of. Our games offer:
Unconventional perspectives on familiar problems
Empathetic and balanced portrayal of all characters — no simple villains or easy answers
Nuanced, well-researched worlds that parallel the absurd/brutal/wonderful one we live in
Playful genre mashups
Subscribe
If you think games deserve to be taken seriously (but you also love a good trope), then give us a try. We’ll be digging in, both deep and wide.
