Game Design Consultancy
Black Cat provides practical game design consultancy for studios, teams, and organisations developing games or interactive projects.
Luke Richards has worked as a designer across twelve projects, covering original game concepts, systems design, narrative design, pitches, prototypes, and production-facing design work. Support can range from focused feedback on an existing project to helping a team clarify its core design, structure, player experience, and creative direction.
We aim to provide clear, useful advice grounded in development reality rather than theory alone.
Corporate Training
Black Cat provides tailored training for games companies and creative teams.
Our training can cover game design, production thinking, project foundations, scope control, narrative design, communication between disciplines, and the practical realities of bringing a game from concept into development.
Previous work includes professional training delivered through Mastered, alongside wider teaching and mentoring work across the games and education sectors.
Sessions can be adapted for small teams, departments, or larger organisations.
Guest Lectures, Talks and Panels
Luke Richards is an experienced guest lecturer and industry speaker, with appearances at universities, colleges, conferences, and games-industry events.
Talks can cover game design, narrative, the history of games, indie development, production, careers, project planning, and the wider commercial realities of the industry.
Sessions can be shaped for students, educators, professional developers, or general audiences, and may take the form of lectures, workshops, panel discussions, or informal Q&A sessions.
Get in touch about lectures, events, or speaking opportunities.
Narrative Consultancy
We're connected with some extraordinary authors with a passion for games. Their skills are proven and audiences won in the tough-as-nails market of the written word. As a Game Designer, I'm keenly aware of the differences between Narrative Design and literature more broadly, however I know from experience that authors of this calibre have a tremendous amount to offer the games industry. Novelists are master hypnotists, asking the reader to become another person and go on a journey in those shoes. That's exactly what we do in games. The medium is different, and not every game needs a story, sure. But the games that do need a story deserve a great one.
Contact us to hire a masterful storyteller, contracted to craft your narrative to your specifications, and unleash the power trapped in the story you want to tell. This isn't about telling their stories. They already do that. They're here to help make yours as impactful as possible.
They are guided wherever useful by highly experienced design leadership to ensure their stories become useable narrative designs. While traditional authors need this guidance, their imaginations, mastery of narrative effect, plot, pace and dialogue has the power to raise the standard of narrative in the games industry.
Click here to start the conversation, and we'll see how we can help you.
Scott Bradfield
Novelist, short story writer and critic, and former Pofessor of American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Connecticut. Works include The History of Luminous Motion, Dazzle Resplendent: Adventures of a Misanthropic Dog, and The People Who Watched Her Pass By. Stories and reviews have appeared in Triquarterly, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Baffler, and numerous "best of" anthologies. He lives in California and London.
He has stories and essays forthcoming in The Weird Fiction Review, The New Statesman, The Best From Potato Soup Journal, Delmarva Review, The Baffler, The Moth, Albedo One, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Flash Fiction Magazine.
Carmen Capuano
Carmen Capuano was born in 1966, in Govan, Glasgow and came to England at the age of eighteen. A full and varied working life saw her move from London to Birmingham and finally to the small Worcestershire town of Bromsgrove.
A prolific writer, she has penned twenty novels in just six years, covering every genre from chick-lit to science fiction. Works include Ascension, Split Decision, Alone, and Storm Clouds.
Eighteen months ago she began writing screenplays. Lyv is her film debut.
Robin Wyatt Dunn
Born in Wyoming in 1979, Robin Wyatt Dunn is an author of 26 books, and producer of 3 feature films. You can find more of his work at http://robindunn.com/.
He was a finalist for Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2017.
On top of being an accomplished author, Robin is editor in chief of Chrome Baby, an e-zine that has seen monthly publication since 2012. You can find Chrome Baby here: http://robindunn.com/chrome-baby-index.html
Brian Evenson
Novelist and short story writer with a dozen books to his name, including Song for the Unraveling of the World, Immobility, The Open Curtain. Under the name B. K. Evenson he has published two novels based on the video games Dead Space, a Halo novel and a book set in the Aliens universe. He has co-written novelizations Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem and James Demonaco's Feral. He has been a five-time finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, a finalist for the Edgar Award, and a winner of the International Horror Guild Award. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches fiction writing at CalArts.
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Kim Newman
Kim Newman is a movie critic, author and broadcaster. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines. His books about film include Nightmare Movies, Millennium Movies, Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon and BFI Classics studies of Cat People, Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit. His fiction includes the Anno Dracula series, Life’s Lottery, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, An English Ghost Story, The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School and Angels of Music. His comics include Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland and Anno Dracula Seven Days in Mayhem. As ‘Jack Yeovil’, he wrote the Vampire Genevieve and Dark Future novels for Games Workshop. His most recent novel is Anno Dracula 999 1Daikaiju. He has written for television (Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema), radio (Afternoon Theatre: Cry-Babies) and the theatre (The Hallowe’en Sessions), and directed a tiny film (Missing Girl). His official web-site is at www.johnnyalucard.com. He is on Twitter as @AnnoDracula.