I love Tokyo Godfathers! One of my regular Christmas season favourites. Satoshi Kon never missed.

Always happy to be of service!

Ankh-Morpork and all of Mieville's cities are great! But if I had to pick just one it'd be Viriconium from M John Harrison's cycle of novels and stories - I'm always ready to recommend those to anyone who hasn't read them!

Yeah that's always the trade-off when working with university presses other than the big US/UK ones, but it increasingly feels like one worth making.

Also I love fictional cities (even co-wrote an academic paper on cities in fantasy RPGs) so I took the decision to set the entire base game in one city to really let players explore every facet of the place and really try to build depth, atmosphere, texture, history and sense of place.

Lots of things! First time working with an existing IP so it was nice to have others' work to react to and engage with. It's fun to let the existing world suggest ideas and themes, dig into the hooks that resonated with me and use those as the starting-point to craft stories that still feel 'mine'.

Good one to keep in mind! Have you had experience working with them?

Ah, I'm thrilled you picked up Fateforge and expansions, really hope you'll have fun with it!

The trick is to curate your timeline until it tells you about the new Agriculture album instead.

Dm an email address and I'll send it your way!

Embrace the unexpected! Ride with what life throws at you! Be a yes man!

On the Tech side, there's a focus on game engines, procedural content generation, machine learning and computational creativity.

The M.Sc. programme blends academic and practical orientations, with units on experimental game design, designing gameworlds, writing and narrative, and group-based game dev projects. On the Analysis side: subjectivities and games, game ontology, representation, game sound, presence & involvement...

At @indigitalgames.bsky.social at the University of Malta we have a taught M.Sc. in Digital Games with a central Game Design track combined with either Game Analysis (humanities based game studies) or Game Technology. Also an M.Sc. by Research option and PhD study. www.um.edu.mt/digitalgames/

I almost feel like I've been carefully suckered into a sales pitch now (and it's working...)

Ahh, now I'm gonna have to go and play the Trails games :-D Not a franchise I'm familiar with, but this is definitely an interesting take (which also aligns with the theme of the library in the community, one of the aspects we discuss in the paper!)