For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to make a video game. As a kid and teen, I devoured flash animations and games, spending hours sifting through the two leading flash repositories of that era: Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep. I even made a few .swfs myself (some of them vaguely interactive), but I never had a fully playable piece of my brain on the internet until now. Or... almost now, at least at the time of this writing.

Working on this game has made me think a lot about who I was back then and who I wanted to be, set against who I am now, who I'm becoming. Once you get to play Penrose, I think all of that will probably be pretty apparent.

I've had a very roundabout journey on my way to game design. As a kid, I wrote and drew comics, dabbled in flash and made my first attempt at game development, considered going to school for animation before falling headfirst into fiction, then finding a passion for screenwriting, going to film school (and winning a couple awards in the process), later finding my way back to fiction after graduation, getting three novels published and now, finally, achieving my lifelong dream of making a video game.

It's been a journey.

Some of my favorite creations from that wild west internet era were those that felt like tiny, self-contained universes. Stuff like Salad Fingers (or anything by David Firth for that matter), Rubber Johnny, the Group X stuff, Dad's Home, Banana Phone, the list goes on and on...

I've always been drawn to outsider art because, well, I've always felt like an outsider. The ending of the dedication I wrote for my first novel, Here's Waldo, reads: "Here's to all the non-belongers out there." And those words, I'd say, hold true for Penrose too. This game is as much a love letter to the early days of weird internet games and animations as it is a tribute to long nights spent looking for Easter eggs in Game Boy games, the only light in the room coming from a third party accessory that made the handheld an unwieldy (if highly-optimized) brick.

Penrose is a dissection of nostalgia, memory, identity, trauma and loneliness and painful growth and, somewhere along the way, it managed to become one of the most personal things I've ever created. Playing through it over and over while bug testing, and later just for fun, I realized that it's the exact kind of game I loved playing way back when. A self-contained, strange exploration of an artist's unique inner state. I hope you all enjoy it too. For me, October 1st can't come soon enough.