Skeleton Songs
A podcast that explores the intersection of games and literature, focusing on storytelling and game development. It is produced by Weather Factory, an indie game studio based in London. The current season follows the development of a CRPG being made by a two-person team.
Episodes
"Nuages"
'You're a miniature Herod, wading in the blood of the innocents every morning...'We launch Travelling At Night's first public demo! Along the way, we talk about the game's 'Black Museum', AK's tussel with Django Reinhardt, how Tom Stoppard influenced the Incorporates' song on the soundtrack, and what cozy gamers really think of Weather Factory games. Im
"Scarf Problems"
Travelling At Night reaches an important milestone: the minimum length of a novel! We talk I/O Interactive, 'Harrison violations' and phatic speech, balancing rich personalities with empty roleplaying vessels and how to make difficult characters likeable - here's looking at you, Hokobald of Pocsind...Support the show
"Mr Chi's Magic Emporium"
"It's never lupus."Take a turn with us through some of the kookier parts of the Second World War (dropping unmeltable ice into Winston Churchill's bath; how French fashion defeated the Nazis; the British Army's self-mythologising stage musician; etc). We also talk about the importance of art being bold, an infamous bug in Hush House, and why we're aiming for Jason Bou
"Hyperpimps"
What is the true 'artist's reward'? When are you pushing usefully out of your comfort zone, and when are you banging your head against a rock? Alexis and Lottie discuss developing your own creative talents alongside game design issues like the 'murderhobo' RPG outfit problem, medicine in Fallout: New Vegas and why John Constantine is a pillar of our crafting system.Support
"Down With Art"
Who are the 'old gods' of gamebooks? Why can we mess with rules in Travelling At Night but not in Cultist Simulator? What's 'combinatorial explosion', and why is it ruining your life?Join Alexis and Lottie for these questions alongside a potted history of text-based games, the perils of voiceovers in CRPGs and Lottie's most important rule for marketing.Support the sho
"Imaginarium"
What's the 'double or half' rule? Why is game design like Khazad-dûm? What the hell is a quaternion? No, really, we don't know. Join AK and Lottie for another jaunt through game dev, via narrative modifiers, infinite nuns and 'entering the Mansus', for the first time ever...Support the show
"The Kazoo Variants"
"There are games where the player is having fun and games where the designer is having fun." - Sid MeierMaps! Music! British pre-decimal currency! We discuss planning game narratives around major player choices, Mike Rosewater's 'complexity budget' and why putting little stamps on bank notes is not a good idea.Support the show
"Agave Aeterna"
"What we want is a sort of semi-glutide octi-frenetic image that is kinda made of lighting and also is a baby..."This week AK and Lottie discuss how art direction works, how to balance being weird with being commercially viable, how we're building Travelling At Night's entirely 2D visual world, and how to paint a tree. All while accidentally revealing what we suspect might be o
"The Sphinx"
'My fingers are worn to bleeding nubs. I am typing this with my tongue. my keyboard is sticky with game dev drool. Do you not understand...'Thus did 2026 begin. Welcome back to the world of game dev, this time about 'murdering darlings', the Curst curse and why Newt will always trump Aliens' M577 Armored Personnel Carrier.Support the show
"Snow in the Neath"
Our final episode of 2025! Talking Travelling At Night's alpha, the sine wave of game dev, where Fallen London's Overgoat came from and how we're attempting to solve the 'layer of plastic' in AAA RPGs.Support the show
"Don't Be A Cube"
This week in the life of jobbing game developers, we reach ALPHA. Cue period appropriate beatnik slang, a disagreement about potato croquettes and why 2D and 3D are such frenemies in isometric CRPGs.Support the show
"Dreamweaver"
Skeleton Songs is BACK with a game-dev-centric season all about the inside story of making an indie RPG. In this episode, find out why CRPGs are such hard work, why UI eats time, why we're scared of Disco Elysium, and what's up with Travelling At Night. Also we have a fight about jazz.Support the show
Only In Silence The Word
"The final victory of sci-fi is its final defeat," says AK, gnomically, before we sing the Beverly Hills Cop theme tune and talk about trombones. Join us for a discussion of 'the best fiction novel of the 20th century', A Wizard of Earthsea, and its masterful magic system: from Native American folklore to shamanism, demonic to natural theurgy, and eastern wyrms to western proto
The Wood Between the Worlds
Lord of the Rings + Narnia + Jane Austen = ? A smash-hit 800-page faux-Victorian novel of realist magic and alternate histories, of course! Welcome to the world of Susanna Clarke, whose rules-based, Mametian and very 'English' magic system is one of the best we've had the good fortune to meet. Join us for a discussion of made-up magical scholarship, urban versus natural magic, wheth
The Kilns of Smorgasbord
Author. Visionary. Dreamweaver. Plus bellhop. Meet Jack Vance, one of the most inventive fantasy authors we've ever heard of, and probably not a pirate king. What happens when fairies become too lumpen and earthy? Why are Lvl1 wizards in D&D so rubbish? Who is Larkin the Baby-Stealer, and why are you reaching for that kazoo?We talk Cugel the Clever, Vancean magic and why you shouldn'
Magic That Hath Ravish'd Me
"If magic works, why isn't the President of the United States doing it?"After a 'brief' hiatus, we're back! We pick up where we left off and talk about the magic of Doctor Faustus, whether magic is 'liberation or damnation', and the distinction between ceremonial magic and what specialists term 'Doing A Big Spell'. Games / books mentioned in this e
This Thing of Darkness
Welcome to a new season, all about magic and literature! We talk William Shakespeare's Tempest, from women-wizards from Algiers to royal demonology. Caliban's Moth, Ariel's Lantern and AK nearly dies in a spiegel tent.Games / books mentioned in this episode, for your gaming / reading pleasure:- "The Tempest", by William Shakespeare- Against Worldbuilding, and Other Provoca
A City Is Not A Tree
What makes games 'savoury'? Why is Twitter such a bad place to get game design advice? And is it ever sensible to push a count off a cliff?This episode, Lottie and Alexis talk art, games and critique, through architect Christopher Alexander to Jack Cohen and Brian Aldiss' fight over speculative xenobiology in Helliconia. Listen to avoid the perils of categorisation, and the pitfalls
The Glittering Lights of Wolfstack Docks
Hiraeth? Sensucht? Saudade? Listen to Alexis and Lottie cry as we talk nostalgia, sequels and games, from 17th-century Swiss cowbells to sailing away from your loved ones into danger. We talk transmission of experience from one generation to the next, the future of games as gamers get old, and the impossible loss of childhood - and why that's not such a bad thing after all.Games / books menti
Now Draw the Rest of the Owl, Part 2
The conclusion of an epic two-parter. Who would win in a fight between TRPGs and CRPGs? What happens if a giant worm swallows a city? Is a dolphin the same as a cat? We attempt to answer these questions with appeals to Simon Baron-Cohen's empathising-systemising theory, work out why TRPGs rely so heavily on rule-sets when lots of people don't follow them anyway, and end up convincing our
Now Draw the Rest of the Owl, Part 1
"I don't want to be Elfstar anymore! I want to be Debbie!"Join us for a romp through tabletop gaming's earliest origins and the effect its had on modern video games. Well, that was the intention. We actually stop around the 1980s with fundamental Christianity and a woman called Janine who is bad at charades. But we talk about the defining characteristic of nerdery, Star Wars vs
An Early Symptom of Schizophrenia
Real talk: APOPHENIA. Alexis and Lottie discuss subliminal pattern-seeking from its coinage by a Nazi psychologist to its use by modern indie game developers to cover up the fact we don't have any budget. Wait! We meant to make clever, co-operative immersive experiences. All via werewives, apophanies and Zhou Enlai.Games / books mentioned in this episode, for your gaming / reading pleasure:-
This Episode Is About Sex
This episode is about sex and games and the libertine novels of eighteenth-century France. From Talleyrand, the Napoleonic clergyman and diplomat, through to Cindy Crawford, Peter Bradshaw and Amouranth, the Twitch streamer scandal du jour, we talk erotica, porn and those anime sex games you see all the time on Steam. Listen for the power of 'not for me', the uselessness of banning thing
500,000 Sociopaths
Join Alexis and Lottie for a discussion of antagonists and villains! Via witches, Belgium, Simon Baron-Cohen, a charming Irish vagabond and, of course, Nazism. Alexis talks about how rubbish games are and destroys Lottie's argument; Lottie talks about five-hour Polish art films and producers stopping developers from kicking each other in the nads. Games / books mentioned in this episode, for
Twisty Little Passages All Alike
What's the connection between the Labyrinths of Night and the Bright Ditches? This question and many more we don't really answer in this episode on mazes, labyrinths and game design.Meet labrys, the lesbianic double-headed axe. Leave kittens in mazes and form human chains in swampy MUDs. Learn Alexis Kennedy's First Law of Narrative. Cake. Also, Lottie gets cross about a pretend man
Are Panthers Chairs?
Skeleton Songs season two, baby! This season's all about GAMES, but not as you know 'em. Join Alexis and Lottie as we discuss genre via Aristotle and Wittgenstein, cyberpunk and film noir, the Berlin Interpretation and, er, fish genitalia. Also there is an odd bit about tortoises in the rain but perhaps Alexis's medicine was wearing off then. Games / books mentioned in this episode,
Endgame
Ragnarok! Gotterdammerung! Armageddon outta here! In the final episode of season one, we talk eschatology, chocolate, fake news and the bloody gothness of Old Germanic literature. Sexy zombie apocalypses and millennial doomsday cults make an appearance too, because of course they do. And even though we say 'everyone's gonna die' a lot in this episode, we realise it's small acts
DIONYSIAN NO PICNIC
Maenads! Who are they, what do they want, and how do they wear their fox-skins? Kittens! How can they be so cute and so murderous at the same time? Join Alexis and Lottie as they discuss why frenzied Bassarids and Cutie McFloofcat are both the same Gothic trope of violent comeuppance. Via boring werewolves, Nosferatu and beautiful, naughty Clodius, of course. Also, there is a surprise storm half-w
An Inheritance of Stones
Join Alexis and Lottie on a deep-dive into WORLDBUILDING. Why it's menacing to be told to start with a timeline, how Twin Peaks' BOB came to be, why you must never call pulled pok 'flesh-spicing', and why the architect of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao probably didn't start with the toilets. Alexis, unsportingly, refuses to get cross.Games / books mentioned in this episod
Top Hat, Flight Guy & Tales
This week we take a break from literature and talk about the weird stories in our own lives. Join Sheep-Stealer and Big Head as they introduce you to Great Uncle Gilbert, the teenage flying ace and real-life Great Escape artist, and David the contract officer for the Sultan of Oman who brought a wolf to tea. All shot through with poisonous headwear, what Britain wants for Christmas, and gentlemen
(Un)reliable Narrators
Can you really trust anyone? Join Alexis and Lottie as they roundly conclude that you can't. We talk unreliable narrators via toilets, relevance theory, echoic mentions, the four levels of Star Wars canonicity and Lovecraft being surprisingly confident that his monsters were real.Games / books mentioned in this episode, for your gaming / reading pleasure:Cultist Simulator, by usRimWorld, by L
Women, Bloody Women
Madness, blood and ladies! We talk all things bloody, from Freud to Pliny to the Red Grail to Queen Elizabeth the First to murdering an entire hive of bees. The Madonna / whore complex? Check. Horrible Norse mythology about men being scared of ladies, and gods being made out of spit? Check. Etymology that devolves into single entendre riddles about vegetables? We gotchu. Also, Lottie gets increasi
Forbidden Knowledge
Join Alexis and Lottie for a run-down of forbidden knowledge: the type that's ipso facto dangerous and the type that's dangerous because of what you can do with it. We discover Christopher Marlowe was definitely a spy, nuclear codes are modern occultism and everyone's neighbour Mrs Thrumb writes a very boring diary.We skim past Papist plots, diabolical monkeys, why Lovecraft is like
Doppelgängers, Fetches & Ka
From ancient Egypt to modern web comics, döppelgangers haunt us all. Join Alexis and Lottie as they discuss the ins and outs of these look-alikey ghouls, from Scottish fetches to Capgras syndrome via Dostoyevsky, Silent Hill 2, neuropsychology and scary mirrors. All with a sprinkling of gothic literature.Oh! And if you run into a doppelganger in a graveyard, pray that it's the right time of d
The Terrible Tale of the Yale
Panthers, dragons, monoceri, yales, wendigos, hell-hounds and pigs! This isn't an occult incantation, this is a half-hour deep-dive into our favourite spooky beasts from medieval bestiaries, epic poems and early 20th century ghost stories.Whether you're into shapeless bear-cubs, dirty bonnacons or being grumpy about Elizabeth I, there's a feast of beasts here for you.Games / books m
Vampires, As You Don't Know Them
Vampires, vampires and more vampires! From the Malay 'polong' and 'pelesit' to the soucouyants and empousai of Cultist Simulator, Alexis talks the history of the vampire myth before Lottie jumps in with a rendition of Carmilla. Then she embarrasses herself by wishing everyone a spooky day.Games / books mentioned in this episode, for your gaming / reading pleasure:- Cultist Simu
Recommended
The Healing Childhood Trauma Podcast
The Documentary Podcast
The Rest Is Money
Newscast
Easy English: Learn English with everyday conversations
Learning English from the News
Who We Are Now with Izzy & Richard Hammond
Uk Mix RadioShow
CAA on General Aviation
Pod Save The King
Pride and Prejudice (version 6, dramatic reading)
InsideAIR
