Rotten Kigdom - FAQs

                                 Originally written in response to a few questions about the project.

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Rotten Kingdom is a dark fantasy game built in Python. It’s stripped-down, text-driven, more like a lorebook or a D&D session than a polished release. You explore a collapsing world where the rot — a core, undefeatable force — spreads through matter, minds, and morals. The following are my answers to a few questions about the project.

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Where did Rotten Kingdom come from?
It started with a dark fantasy obsession and watching the interactive Black Mirror episode about the game one too many times. I wanted something unstable.

Why does it look like it came from a floppy disk?
Because it should feel found, not released. It relies on imagination. More like a D&D session than a polished product. It began as a lorebook — the world came first.

Why Python?
Because I knew just enough to make it work. I used AI to fix bugs. I’m not ashamed of that. The point was to make it run.

Is it finished?
It’s finished enough to stand.
But it’s a constant updating kind of thing.

Do you expect people to like it?
Some will. Some won’t. Most might ignore it because it isn’t flashy. It feels right to me. That’s enough.

What is the rot?
It’s the core mechanic and the core threat. You can’t defeat it. It’s decay — of matter, minds, morals. The world isn’t exploding. It’s eroding.

If it disappeared tomorrow?
I’d build it again.









You can get the latest release here - 

Mazda MX-81 Aria

Bertone built this on a Mazda 323 chassis in 1981 — the most sensible car of its moment used as a skeleton for something that looked like it had no business existing. Marc Deschamps ran the design, and the result is a gold wedge that still looks a little unhinged forty years later.

 

The thing that actually gets you is the glass. The greenhouse is enormous, almost aggressively open, and it bleeds all the way down into the rear fascia — body and glass split roughly fifty-fifty, which gives the whole car this strange floating quality, like the roof isn't quite attached. The pop-up headlights and the tall vertical tail lights at the C-pillars eventually made it into real Mazda production cars. The drag coefficient was 0.28, which for 1981 was genuinely impressive.

Inside, they got rid of the steering wheel entirely and replaced it with a rubber belt running around a rectangular frame — you slid it left or right to steer. A small colour CRT screen sat in the centre where gauges would normally be. The front seats swivelled outward to let you in.

It debuted at the 1981 Tokyo Motor Show, then quietly disappeared into a Mazda warehouse for forty years until someone stumbled across it in 2020. They sent it to Turin for restoration, and now it exists again.

It just looks cool. That's the whole argument.

The Scully Sceptical Response Generator

I did a silly X-Files themed thing - here's the Scully Sceptical Response Generator!

Test it out and let me know if you like it! 


 https://scullyskepticalrensponsegenerator.netlify.app/

Suwarôteiru - (Swallowtail Butterfly) / 1996

 

Suwarôteiru - (Swallowtail Butterfly) is the film where Shunji Iwai stops being gentle and just lets things get messy.

If you come to it expecting his usual soft, melancholic teenage longing, quiet sadness (Hideaki Anno is that you?) — this will feel out of place.

The film drops you straight into Yentown, a near-future slum packed with immigrants, scams, bad money, and people trying to survive without much of a plan. It’s dystopian, but not in a sci-fi way. More like a city that’s already broken and just keeps going.

The heart of it is simple and kind of brutal. Ageha loses her mother and ends up with Glico, a sex worker who agrees to take her in because she needs the cash. There’s no big maternal awakening, no clean arc. They stick together because they have to. For a while, it works. They build something that almost feels stable — which, of course, is when it all starts to fall apart.

The film refuses to sit still. It jumps between street drama, crime story, pop-idol fantasy, and back again. Characters show up, matter a lot for a moment, then disappear. It can feel unfocused, even frustrating, but that chaos feels intentional. It isn’t telling a neat story — it is letting you drift through a place, a world where nothing stays fixed for too long.

Visually it’s rough, noisy, sometimes weird - there is quite a lot of Handheld camera, crowded frames, and no gloss. The soundtrack is deeply embedded in the film, especially Chara, who feels less like an actress and more like a presence the movie is built around.

What stuck with me isn’t the plot mechanics, but the feeling: the belief that money, success, or the next big break will make everything settle down — and the quiet realization that it won’t. Swallowtail Butterfly lets you enjoy that fantasy just long enough before it pulls it apart. It’s flawed, chaotic, and very alive. And somehow, years later, it still lingers - maybe it is the evident reasoning about capitalism and it's consequences, maybe is that exotic fascination we get from a certain aesthetic, still, it's a movie worth your time and that deserves more international recognition -