We’re BACK! AGAIN! And we swear we’re gonna post more episodes this year than we did last year! Alyssa (writer of fiction, comics, and games. Winner of the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award, finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson Awards. Comics credits include Marvel, DC, Star Wars, and Adventure Time, and she’s also written for Overwatch, and Story and Franchise Development at Blizzard Entertainment) and Lauren (Senior Writer at Insomniac Games where she is currently working on Spider-Man 2, and was previously Lead Writer on Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. Before Insomniac she was a writer at Telltale Game where she worked on The Walking Dead: The Final Season and Batman The Enemy Within) joined us to talk about how a theater studies degree is useful in games, shipping characters, writing hours, how hot Emperor Nefarious is, interacting with actors, writing characters and situations you hate, what draws them to horror storytelling, sexy monsters, what they need to nail down first in a story, what makes a good villain, worldbuilding, types of stories they don’t often see in games that they’d love to write, and a whole lot more!

Our Guests on the Internet

Alyssa's Twitter, and you should check out Doctor Aphra and Iron Fist!

Lauren's Twitter, and you should check out Spider-Man 2 when it comes out!

Stuff We Talked About

John Carpenter liked Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Paragon

Alyssa’s first tweet about Emperor Nefarious

Unpacking

Fears to Fathom

Devotion

The Walking Dead: The Final Season

The Boys

Starbound

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

Disco Elysium

Dragon Age: Inquisition

What You Left Behind by Alyssa Wong (the Overwatch short story about Baptiste) 

Our theme music was done by Isabella Ness, and our logo was created by Lily Nishita.