Tony Cooper's Blog

Right, I’m going to be honest up front: this is more of a note to my future self, who I know always looks back and thinks “But I’ve achieved NOTHING!” when I’ve spent years working on projects across books, comics and videogames and learned so much along the way.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not want to become some self-absorbed weirdo who is obsessed with his “legacy” (ugh), but I do tend to sometimes plain forget what I’ve done. There is also a huge side helping of “But I should have done more...

Nothing like a good list to finish off the year. “And this is nothing like a good list… etc.” – except I think it is! What I failed to capture in volume in 2025 I think I made up for in quality.

Between full time work and writing/making prototypes in what little spare time I have, I don’t really play a huge amount of games any more. And when I do, I often get 5-6 hours in and then abandon them, feeling I’ve “got the gist” of what it’s about. Part of that is because I’m old and have played man...

Another prototype? Oh why not

Pretty much 95% of my game ideas feature no combat at all. Is it because I’m a wuss? Well, that is true, but I just don’t naturally associate games with combat or fighting, which you’d think would be standard given the history of videogames.

Thing is, I’m more of a writer; I prefer story over conflict, characters over stat sheets, a curious object over a new weapon type. Yes, I was that kid in the 90s playing the og DOOM and wanting to know more about t...

Another prototype I’ve worked on recently is a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer, the central conceit being you are able to create life-limited clones of yourself to perform helpful tasks in areas you can’t reach. During gameplay you can switch control between your ‘original’ self and any of your clones, but only for a short time, until the clone dies.

The idea is vaguely based on an ol...

The next prototype I’m working on is something completely different! Set in a version of the UK where supernatural encounters and otherworldly entities are kind of known about, if not overtly acknowledged, you play from the vantage point of a drone sent into a London tower block by a team of specialists, after an incident stops all communication from inside.

And by incident, I mean black fog barriers on all the entrances with ...

The second of my ongoing prototypes is something a bit different: a “walking simulator” on a remote island. No, I am not inspired by Dear Esther in the slightest (no weird stories about kidney stones here thanks!), more by a game set in the depths of space: Outer Wilds.

Initially I fell in love with the mechanics of that game: the time-loop story, the translation tool, the loop-based design...

The second of my ongoing prototypes is something a bit different: a “walking simulator” on a remote island. No, I am not inspired by Dear Esther in the slightest (no weird stories about kidney stones here thanks!), more by a game set in the depths of space: Outer Wilds.

Initially I fell in love with the mechanics of that game: the time-loop story, the translation tool, the loop-based design...

Hello again! In my last post I did a ‘bloggers crutch’ and threw together a bullet-point list of prototypes I have been working on over the last few years.

After writing that, I figured it would be interesting for you, and useful for me, to go into a bit more detail about each of them. It gives you some insight into the types of games and processes I’m using, and writing about them helps me focus on what I’ve already done, what I still need to do and, to be quite frank, whether I’m still int...

Looks like my last post here was March 2022. That was probably when I decided to hide the blog here and focus on social media instead. Also, I had a couple of project-specific blogs on itch.io that I was updating in that time, as well as a fledgling YouTube empire.

They were successful enough, but there has definitely been a push recently to have your own space where you can say whatever you like, with people flocking to SubStack and other platforms. I did wonder whether I should dip ...

That’s right, I’ve got a new kickstarter campaign on the go

This time I’m returning to Lisa and Tom, my favourite psychopaths, and I am collecting together parts 1 and 2 of The Murder Club: Useless Deaths into a single volume.

Quickly follow the link here to take a look: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tonycooper/the-murder-club-useless-deaths-the-collected-volume

For those still reading, I have decided to do a single volume for two main reasons. Firstly, I had always intended th...