#Sarah Hiebl

[freeindiegame]

Ambient Mixtape 16 by Connor Sherlock, Pol Clarissou, Jack Squires, prophet goddess, Jord Farrell, René Rother, Sarah Hiebl, empty fortress, Animal Phase & Alice Lai

[videogameninjas]

Sarah Hiebl

Since 2012 Sarah is a student of time-based and interactive media in Linz. She is a programmer, game creator and writer.

I got to know Sarah at the A Maze festival in Berlin. I met her with a couple of developers from Austria and she gifted me a very fun zine. On every second page of the little booklet you see a screenshot from Chat Roulette - of course, it’s a dick pic (seemed like the secret theme of this year’s A Maze) - and on each opposite page one very funny, ironic Haiku about the situation, sex and exhibiting your ego with those pictures.

a longing thought and feelings of accomplishment but no one to see

I like the comment she gave the FM4 about why she chose to make a zine about that:

“The first thing I could think of associated with the internet are penises”.

(Image taken from Sarah’s Twitter.)

Through her little zine I was drawn into her works. Sarah makes very personal games about herself and her surroundings. Many of her ideas and interviews she gave deal with friendship, the awkwardness of daily life, being an outsider and quite often dreams.

Sarah says she does dream diaries (her prototype Close is based on these) and enabled herself to have lucid dreams - the ones you can control - even to a point that she needed to do reality checks. Little details to make sure, that she is still dreaming like using a light switch (which doesn’t work for her in dreams) or looking at her hands.

From that experience she created a game with art by Elisabeth Baumgartner. Mary woke up Today is a weird adventure about dreaming. And waking up again and again, not knowing if you are still dreaming or not. And realizing you can’t escape until you confront yourself with your biggest fear. I don’t want to spoil it, but I totally can relate! The game was created for the Adventure Jam on Gamejolt. You can play it here.

Forsaken is a another jam game she did in co-operation with a group of developers for Ludum Dare, themed “Entire Game on One Screen“. You explore the abandoned apartment of a person. While going through all the mess, details and objects you make up your own mind about what kind of person he might have been.

(Title screen from the jam game taken from Ludum Dare.)

Sarah is currently working on a game about her friends and the experience of making new ones and losing them. She started the project to explore her friends as an homage. Only that she stopped talking to them while working on the game, because of the time spent developing it. The game changed from an ode to her friends to a piece about overthinking and finding out what went wrong in relationships. You can follow Sarah on Twitter to see her work in progress.

More stuff about Sarah Hiebl:

Website Twitter Old Neon articles (in German only)

Alhazen, an older text-based game from her

You want to see more different game creators?

Then head over to my list, which is yet to be ‘completed’ and filled with more interesting people! You can help me by sending in yourself and women you know!