Lichene

TR-49 on Steam Narrative deduction meets audio drama, from the creators of Heaven’s Vault, Overboard! and A Highland Song.

We don't know. What we do know is the wiring diagram works. We built it, virtually, in @godotengine.org. We fed it scans of the books we found.

And the books are very, very strange. The "game" that resulted is also strange.

We're hoping people can make sense of it for us.

The IFComp 2025 logo is an ornate gold-framed mirror with silhouetted profile, stylized text ‘IFComp,’ crown, stars, moons, and a banner reading 2025.

🎉 The 31st Annual #IFComp is live!

85 new interactive fiction entries are ready for you to play and judge. (You only need to rate 5 to cast a ballot!)

Read more about this year's competition at blog.ifcomp.org

Or just dive straight in: ifcomp.org/ballot

The IFComp 2025 logo is an ornate gold-framed mirror with a silhouetted profile, stylized text that says ‘IFComp,’ with a crown, stars, and moons, framed by draped turquoise curtains.

Got plans tomorrow night? Like stories? Browse ifcomp.org/ballot and pick something that fits your mood and schedule! Do that just 5 times before Oct 15, leave a rating for each, and you’re officially an IFComp judge.

The Mysteries of the Horizon

I lasted exactly four 'major' projects before slipping in a road cone as a major part of the experience, please clap

Walk across the sands. Almost there...

#comingverysoon

Trundling, imagining

#spark

Or rather...

This time we're character designing for real...

#lichenegames #wip #nextproject

Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

André Breton

First mockup of something new...

#wip #buildingsite #kaysage #surrealism

Belated love to @amazefest.bsky.social and everyone in it! @briefsge.bsky.social team, you were the best. A joyful first time at the festival (meeting the mandatory flamingo quota ofc ofc).

AMAZE 2025 / Berlin / Day 2 YouTube video by A MAZE.

Back from A MAZE and from Berlin! Here's @briefsge.bsky.social‬'s panel on short games feat. our @laughingpinecone.bsky.social www.youtube.com/live/xDZCnfM...

4/4

Kind of an anti social darwinism that is still inspired by ecology and biology but acknowledges that cooperation is probably as present and important as competition both in nature and society.
Akin to Pëtr Kropotkin's perspective about the importance of mutualism in evolution, if you will.

3/4

community.

We also use the name Lichene for our studio as a broader statement of intent, even kind of a political metaphor.
It alludes to a different idea of society, a different way of interacting with each other, an alternative social contract opposed to the capitalist one.

2/4

The term symbiosis was invented in the nineteenth century when that relationship between algae and fungi was discovered to be at the origin of lichens, just to describe this phenomenon which at the time was perceived as new.
A concept that was initially met with skepticism by the scientific

1/4

When the pitch for Death to Venice won its BRIEFS grant, it was time for our development studio to have a name.

As most lichens are the result of a symbiotic relationship between algae and fungi the term is fitting to represent our artistic relationship.

#logo #artisticduo

BRIEFS Special: Death to Venice // Studio Lichene In this episode of ArtWire, host Evgeni Pozankov interviews Eva and Andrea of Studio Lichene, the creative duo behind Death to Venice, a visually rich Twine game developed for Briefs 2024: Death.Studi

🎧 THE ART WIRE – BRIEFS Special: In this episode, host Evgeni interviews Eva and Andrea from Studio Lichene, the creative duo behind "Death to Venice", a visually rich Twine game developed for our microgame series BRIEFS in 2024:
buff.ly/O9rcO1y
#podcast #goldextra #theartwire #microgames #twine

Negotiate your dream by Mc-Kid on DeviantArt

6/6
But it doesn't have to be necessarily the last one. It all depends on the choices of the player, on the perspective on death they will outline during their playthrough.

More about them and their relationship at the link (also, pic at a better resolution...)
www.deviantart.com/mc-kid/art/N...

5/6
the result of their interactions. It's the sedimentation of innumerable stories of those who lived there. But for a long time those stories have been dwindling, they're being reduced to mere memories. The dying human is another of those beings and the encounter between them one of such stories.

4/6
It's a conscious concretion of elements and ancestral matters, the sequence of the shapes that human work has given them and of the alterations those artifacts were subjected to by, again, the elements.
It's a multiplicity of different beings and their reciprocal influences,

3/6
This second protagonist is far from being just the city of Venice but it's also the Lagoon, the surrounding area, what remains of its ecosystem.
Even just calling it a place is reductive.
It's rather a conglomerate of everything that that zone has hosted during the centuries.

2/6
The person might be attracted by the decadence and the abandonment of Venice, they might feel an affinity to it because of that.
They seem fascinated by this symbol of the catastrophes of their time, an unspecified future in which the city lays uninhabited and in ruin, slowly sinking.

1/6
Death to Venice is about the encounter and the exchange between two dying characters: a person and a place.
The person is in the final stage of a terminal illness and decides to spend their last days in Venice, which is the place.

#interactivefiction #textgame #keyart #workinprogress

3/3
The collages we put here comprise only a small selection of the shots used to create those backgrounds of the game.

On top of that, the textures (first pic) that are applied everywhere were in almost all cases also directly taken as photographs around the city and the lagoon.

2/3
Some of them are more faithful to the originals, others (like Porto Marghera here) basically result in something new.

Then editing them a lot, and painting over them, in a long and generally painstaking process to try to reach a convincing image.

1/3
A little backstage of the process leading to the visuals of Death to Venice!

First, taking countless photos in the Venice area.
Then making a montage of different bits and pieces to obtain a more or less original landscape.

We're bowled over to be among Artribune's best 10 games of 2024!
@mlupetti.bsky.social's list is outstanding, our little Death to Venice being one of their favourites of the year means a lot.
Go read it. All of it.

bsky.app/profile/mlup...

Sneak peek into the final version of Death to Venice we
@lichene.bsky.social are working on: the beginning.
Entering the so-called "gronda", point of transition between land and sea in what was the Venetian Lagoon.

#interactivefiction
#photomanipulation
#lebareneviventifannociao #vallidapesca