Newsletter 2, Nov 2025

WELCOME TO THE TERRORDROME. It is lovely to have you.

TERRORDROME DISPATCHES are sent out once a month, and are a great way to keep up with my latest mischief.

(I’m also on Bluesky as @cyborgurl.)

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ANNA ANTHROPY PATCH NOTES: NOVEMBER 2025

• I needed a way to draw simple, monochromatic wireframe characters for a project I’m working on, and couldn’t find one that did what I wanted. So I made my own. Details + images + source code below!

• Released Damnatio Ad Bestias, a game about faith and martyrdom that you play by giving a toy to your cat (this represents a follower of a religious minority being thrown to a lion).

• Finished some contract work for a game that I can’t announce yet, but I’m really excited how it turned out! You’ll hear all about it in a future Terrordrome dispatch.

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WELCOME TO WIRE WORLD

I needed a simple tool to make vector characters for a project I’m working on, similar to Akalabeth or Dungeons of Daggorath. Like, take a look at this guy. Top notch vector character design.

I couldn’t find a tool I liked enough so I wrote my own in p5.js. Here’s what it looks like:

I’m pretty happy with how the snapping tools in particular came out. It’s easy to attach new lines to existing vertexes or to drag them around canvas after placing them.

Here’s a little guy I drew:

The tool exports finished drawings as a series of comma-separated vectors, which I can then import into my project:Image description: The same wizard character in a 3D maze. “‘Try and keep the noise down,’ says the small wizard.”

You can find the source code for my wireframe tool here. Hit play to run the program — there are instructions in the code comments. The canvas is small because it’s sized to my game, but you can change the canvas dimensions by changing the values in line 16. It shoooould still work fine, though I haven’t really tested it.

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THE MARTYRDOM OF THE HUMBLE LORD

When the Humble Lord’s father, Dominion Basilica, offered Him a quick death by poison, He insisted instead to die a common criminal’s death, strung from His ankles and bled out agonizingly
from dawn to dusk.

(Dominion visited Him every hour, on the hour, to plead with his Son and offer him escape, but the Humble Lord refused.)

Like the true Lord, you will die bravely, a martyr, in atonement for Emperor Vesto’s folly. He has ordered Basilicans thrown to the lions.

— from Damnatio Ad Bestias

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AND NOW OUR PANTHER CORRESPONDANT, ENCYCLOPEDIA FROWN, WITH THIS MONTH’S FROWN REPORT:

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THE WHAT HAVE I BEEN PLAYING CORNER

• The Séance of Blake Manor. A mystery game set in an Irish manor full of mystics and occultists at the end of the 19th century. I should have loved it but it was built around an incredibly half-baked time system. In The Last Express, the ticking of the clock means having to pay careful attention to the other passengers’ movements. Here, it just means sometimes the person you need to talk to to advance your investigation is hiding in their room for a chapter.

• Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. An early standout game in its genre that I only recently played for the first time. What I love about these games (and Blake Manor is quite good about) is getting to rummage through people’s private spaces, read in-world advertisements and posters. The spaces in Rapture are empty and mostly identical, just staging areas for the radio-play-style cutscenes scattered through the world like trinkets. Felt the wrong kind of empty.

• Kinophobia. A Roottree-like by Bruno Dias. Like most parser-based IF that tries to push into other genres, it runs up against the boundaries of the form: It’s very cumbersome to try and consult research materials you’ve seen before when you have about a hundred of them stuffed in your inventory. I love made-up movies and movie history, though, what can I say?

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And that’s this month! From our terrordrome to yours: Stay soft, stay strong, stay nasty.