I’m still trying to find a chance to inflict my flailing imagination on some poor sap by acting as storyteller in the two-player freeform adventure game Sleep Is Death, but I know that when I do I’ll be spoiled for choice for art assets. (Do games have art in them? “Yes.”) The recently released version 1.4 is complemented by an incredible amount of player-made content for you to steal, you light-fingered wee blighter. Some of it goes way above and beyond what we ever thought the game was capable of. Pretties!



Pictured above is a scene from a story by former Maxis man Shannon Galvin, an artist on Spore and lead artist on Jonathon ‘Braid’ Blow’s upcoming The Witness. He’s absolutely gone to town, pouring an incredible amount of effort and detail into the game’s pixelly editor. If you thought SiD by necessity looked like a C64 game, think again – and read the charming, weird and beautiful tale Galvin played with SiD’s creator Jason Rohrer. SiD games can read so well after the event, like tiny, mysterious comics from another world.

You can download all the assets for your own games by accessing the private download page you’ll have if you bought SiD. There are currently three other packs lurking there too, which I’ll investigate in due course. You can read the stories they fuelled here.

Then there’s the fan portal sidtube.com, which aims to become an epic repository for SiD resources, stories and finding people to play with/against. If you’re thinking of making your own SiD story, you’re bound to find a head-start there. If you don’t own SiD yet, remember that buying it snags you two copies, so you can unquestionably play with a friend. Or wife/husband/cat/alternative psychotic personality/whatever.

What about you lot? How’s it going? Any fine SiD tales you’d like to share with the rest of us?