Stars Black as Ink is a narrative-driven puzzle game loosely based on Robert W. Chambers' short story collection, The King in Yellow. It was made for Chicaghoul 2025 using the prompts "Haunted Castle," "The King in Yellow," and "Shifting Rooms." It contains three endings.

Narrative Design

Going into this project, I knew I wanted to make direct reference to the source material of The King in Yellow. I chose the first two stories of the book, "The Repairer of Reputations" and "The Mask," to pull characters from, given the book is now in the public domain. All the characters in the game can be found in those two stories and while their appearances in the game represent my own take on them, I still intended for them to recognizable to players familiar with Chambers' work.

Carcosa, the kingdom of the King in Yellow, was a different matter. While I enjoy the depiction of Carcosa as descriped by Ambrose Bierce in An Inhabitant of Carcosa, I wanted to give my own take on it for this project. In Chambers' work, the titular play is a piece of fiction which drives one to madness just by reading it. As a writer, that spoke to me a great deal. I decided, then, that this Carcosa would be a kingdom of prose; the fabric of this universe would not be fabric at all but paper. Conceptualizing this place defined by narrative is what led me to decide on my protagonist's identity as a writer and her journey to discover that she too is merely a character in a story.

Puzzle Design

That's also what led me to figure out what sort of puzzles would be best for the game. Since I only had three weeks, they couldn't be anything too intricate which would take long to design and playtest. But since my story was already focused on the power of words, it seemed natural to focus the design around riddles (or similar such word puzzles). They were relatively simple to come up with and easy to test on friends and family to ensure they were solvable. I was a bit disappointed, as I don't find riddles the most engaging form of puzzle, but they worked well for my needs and with my theme, and in the end I had a blast writing them.