This week’s Indie Game Spotlight has graced our Fandometrics list for the past few weeks. The Wayhaven Chronicles is a supernatural interactive fiction series with a focus on romance, characters, and narrative. Your choices help shape the world, those characters, and the story, as well as the romance you choose to pursue. The game is made to be something people can escape to, fall in love with, and immerse themselves in completely.
We spoke with Mishka Jenkins, creator, writer, and coder of the game. “It’s just me at Seraphinite Games, but I have great support from many people, including one of my closest friends and editor, Heather, my wonderful readers/testers, and the team at Hosted Games!”
What’s the difference between Book OneandBook Two (without spoilers!)?
Book One was very much the introductory book, kind of like the pilot of a TV show. Book Two starts delving into the intensity of the story and setting up the many paths the main character may take based on what they choose to pursue. It also starts to get more in-depth with the romances, which is not only my favorite part but seems to be many others’ too!
How does The Wayhaven Chronicles balance writing and game mechanics?
Interactive fiction allows for a great deal of balance between writing and game mechanics. The Wayhaven Chronicles is not a stat-based game. I wanted to move away from ‘point watching,’ where you play a game and try to reach a certain number of points with other characters or in certain stats. That’s not a mechanic that suits my play style, and it never truly lets me immerse myself in a story.
That’s why I made Wayhaven much more choice-based. The story is reactionary, based on the players’ actual choices, whether that is immediate or triggers something much later into the series. This allows me to add a much greater depth of narrative variation, which is personal to the player, rather than just changing or triggering due to points.
How does character creation work?
Character creation offers a wide variety of choices, from base options such as gender, sexuality, and appearance, to more fun options like apartment-style and clothing choice, to those deeper options such as your relationship status with different characters, your character’s background and opinion on many topics in-game.
In Wayhaven, these choices aren’t just all sprung at you at the beginning of the game in a character creation screen. They come up naturally during the narrative so you can enjoy fleshing out your character as they grow within the game.
New choices will come with each book in the series, to mimic the way people always change and grow with new experiences, which the main character will get plenty of.
If you could have any pop culture detective character make a special appearance in the game, who would it be?
My first reaction was Sherlock from the BBC series, but how well Sherlock would fit in with Unit Bravo—the team of vampires your human character is part of—has me chuckling. Some of the vampires of Unit Bravo don’t play well with others!
Are there any specific pieces of fan art on Tumblr that have been your favorite?
I adore all of the fan creations, and it would be a serious struggle to pick only a few. I could get lost all day, just looking at the incredible creations under the Wayhaven Chronicles tag on Tumblr…and I’ll admit, I totally have! Not only the fan art but the memes and comments too…they’re all fantastic and keep me smiling for hours!
You can get the newest release, The Wayhaven Chronicles: Book Two, from Hosted Games’ website, Steam, Google Play, the iPhone App Store, and Amazon. (You can find Book One in these places, too.) Want to jump into the community? Ask questions and get the behind-the-scenes look on their Tumblr here!
The Wayhaven Chronicles has been featured on tumblr’s official gaming blog in their Indie Game Spotlight section!!! Ahhhh!!!
