LISA Hosokawa

Game writer, narrative designer, passable houseplant

An author with publication credits in some of North America's top literary magazines, Lisa Hosokawa is a professional writer and editor of 10+ years in print and digital publishing. She has edited for English-localized indie and AAA mobile games since 2022 and designed narratives for indies since 2023. (No, she's not allowed to talk about them.)

An avid solo developer of interactive fiction, she recently published a 17,000-word noir reimagining of Supergiant Games's Transistor. (She loves talking about this.) She also loves helping studios center unique experiences and identities in games—the stuff that makes players feel compassion for difference, resonance in likeness, and joy in agency.

She's an alum of the IGDA Foundation’s Virtual Exchange, Writing for Video Games by UBCx, and Susan O’Connor’s the Narrative Department. Currently the narrative designer on an unannounced, Gris-inspired narrative platformer, she's the weirdo plus-one at your party who does your dishes and plays with the cat.

Atmospheric game (10 min.)

The Lake

A despicable man must test his luck against the curse of a haunted lake, or else lose a bet, his marriage, and maybe his life.

The Lake is an interactive retelling of an eerie Japanese folktale. Play it in Twine with headphones in 10 minutes.

Painted cover art for THE LAKE, its title in English and Japanese faintly glowing in a corner. Most of the cover is taken up by blue-gray water, framed by bare branches. A woven basket floats in the lake's center, abandoned.

Character, location, barks

Junction

Play as a private investigator: track down a runaway heiress before a legion of infectious machines turns her into one of the glamorous but troubled city’s disappeared people.

Junction is a neon-noir interactive fiction game kicked off by a series of writing exercises. It is the 45-minute opening act of a larger fangame not currently intended for development.

An abstract, green and black pixel background drawing attention to an image of a nighttime cityscape in its center, foregrounded by "Junction" in all caps.

Items, Dialogue

Bare-Bones Apothecary

By day, craft potions based on irresponsibly vague descriptions. By night, rob the graves of clients you've "accidentally" poisoned.

Two parts potion puzzler, one part visual novel, Bare-Bones Apothecary placed 3rd in the IGDA Foundation 2022 Game Jam, themed "combination."

Digitally painted cover art for BARE-BONES APOTHECARY: a confused skeleton in a cloak stares at a bubbling cauldron, surrounded by a happy frog and four customers of dubious intent.

Dialogue

Solas, Gascon, and the boxer

Gascon and the Boxer's attempt at corporate theft hits a snag, but with Solas in the malfunctioning elevator with them, running out of air is the least of their problems.

A 4-page screenplay prompted by Susan O'Connor's Game Writing Masterclass.

A color illustration of the back of a pale, bald elf clad in impressive leather armor, standing under a red tent

Serious game (5–10 min.)

Wrapped in a Silhouette

Grandma’s in the hospital. It’s okay; it’s just a broken arm, not like Grandpa. She’s getting released tomorrow. You’re getting her clothes from her house.

Wrapped is a game about family secrets after the war, made in roughly 96 hours using Ink and Unity.

A sepia photograph of a young, fair-skinned woman in a buttoned dress, standing beside a man with tanned arms holding an infant in a polka-dot dress. Faces are obscured. The title, "Wrapped in a Silhouette," is superimposed in a somber font.

Looking for more games experience?
Check out my editing and localization work or my company website.

"Not a word is wasted, not a single breath, as [Lisa] 'translates' between the living and the dead, speaking for those whose letters are lost and whose stories have not been told."

Drop me a line if

  • You're looking for a writer to help you craft unforgettable characters and interactive stories with all the feels;

  • You're in need of an editor to help you clean up your game's script; or

  • You want a free haiku about cats or whatever.

ABOUT

Lisa Hosokawa

Konnichiwa, y'all.

Born in a town halfway between a US military base and Hiroshima, Lisa Hosokawa is an award-winning writer of stories about belonging and resistance in hostile worlds.

Although she leaves deathly serious fingerprints on her short stories and interactive fiction, she's fond too of buckling swash and cooking up whimsy for games like Bare-Bones Apothecary.

She’s also trimmed and heightened dialogue for the English localizations of adorable indies and AAA mobile games since 2022. Before that, she collaborated with multicultural, remote teams as a professional writer, editor, and translator in the print and digital publishing world for 10 years.

She’s an alum of the IGDA Foundation’s Virtual Exchange, Susan O’Connor’s the Narrative Department, and Writing for Video Games by UBCx, as well as a former artist-in-residence at Socially Distant Art and the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities.

An erstwhile translator and a card-carrying editor, she's the weirdo plus-one at your party who does your dishes and plays with the cat.

A picture of author and games writer Lisa Hosokawa, a mixed-Japanese and White nonbinary person with a shoulder-length, curly sidecut, dark eyes, and light beige skin, standing in front of dark-brown wooden siding.

FAVORITE THINGS

  • Dragon Age and Mass Effect, Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, Life is Strange: True Colors, The Last of Us, Gerda: A Flame in Winter, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

  • Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, James S.A. Corey and Miller's hat

  • In Bruges, Andor, Samurai Champloo, True Detective (season one), Totoro.

  • "The Uses of Anger" by Audre Lorde: "What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face?"

Activities

Select Publications

A picture of chapbooks and anthologies on a medium-brown wooden surface; the top book reads "Commutability" over a blurry, high-contrast photograph of the inside of a train station.

"The Blue Glow." khōréō, September 2023."The Night You Swallow the Moon." The Kenyon Review, Summer 2023. (Listen to the audio version on SoundCloud.)"Silent." Firefly Ridge Literary Magazine, 2016."Summer Triangle." Firefly Ridge Literary Magazine, 2015."Some Desperate Glory." In Debs: Four Women Writers on the Verge, edited by Caitlin Johnson. St. Andrews College Press, 2014."The Second Son." In Commutability: Stories about the Journey from Here to There, edited by David Jack Bell and Molly McCaffrey. Main Street Rag, 2010.Crosswind. St. Andrews College Press, 2009. (Alan Bunn Memorial Chapbook Award Winner.)

Software & Skills

OrganizationMarkup/ToolsEngine
TrelloInkUnity
AirtableArticyGodot
MiroJavaScriptTwine
FigmaHTML 
Obsidian  
Notion  
Scrivener  
MemSource/Phrase  
Google Suite  
Microsoft Suite  
Adobe Suite  

"Not a word is wasted, not a single breath, as [Lisa] 'translates' between the living and the dead, speaking for those whose letters are lost and whose stories have not been told." - Beth Copeland, author of Blue Honey, recipient of the 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize

EDITING

Localization

AAA RPG

Edited the English localization of a AAA mobile RPG (NDA).

  • Trimmed and heightened underdeveloped dialogue and marketing copy with 32- and 64-character limits.

  • Consulted wikis, game design documentation, and localization team to make editorial decisions regarding new and existing lore, items, skills, and NPCs.

  • Ensured consistency in wording, punctuation, and style.

  • Don't like embeds? Check out an NDA-friendly sampling of edited dialogue for this project here.

An image of a figure standing at night in front of a massive fountain carved with statues of robed and winged figures. The angle makes it look as though the figure is sprouting wings.

Indie Farm Sim

Edited the English localization of an indie mobile farm sim with a fuzzy twist.

  • Corrected mistranslations.

  • Consulted team to make editorial decisions regarding mainstream North American awareness of Japanese cultural references.

  • Ensured consistency in wording, punctuation, and style.

  • Was not above adding numerous fuzz-related puns.

An image of red apples in a plastic bag stored in the back of a blue truck.

Editing

Disappeared Towns, Tracing Memories

Copyedited, designed Disappeared Towns, Tracing Memories by Shigeo Moritomi, translated by Luli van der Does (2020).

A picture of two coffee table books, one an English translation of the original Japanese, arranged on a light-brown wooden surface. The covers show an illustration of downtown Hiroshima circa 1944.

The Soul of the Full-Length Manuscript

Copyedited, designed interior of The Soul of the Full-Length Manuscript by Zelda Lockhart, PhD (1st ed. 2015, 2nd ed. 2017).

A picture of a paperback book opened on a light-brown wooden surface. A brown mechanical pencil keeps the page on Chapter 5: From the Horizo to the Shore of Your Personal Plot.

Translation

The Works of Shizutaro Urabe

Translated essays by Hiroshi Matsukuma, Kazuto Kasahara, and Kiyoshi Nishimura in The Works of Shizutaro Urabe (2019).

A picture of a book on a light-brown wooden surface. The cover shows a picture of modern architecture and its title in Japanese and English: The Works of Shizutaro Urabe.

DesignArt Tokyo

Translated materials for local and national arts festivals like DesignArt Tokyo (2020, 2021).

A picture of the illustrated cover of the DesignArt Tokyo 2020 booklet. "Power to the creatives" is in baby pink and all caps against a black background and a white line drawing of a birdlike figure.

GAMES

The Lake

A despicable man must test his luck against the curse of a haunted lake, or else lose a bet, his marriage, and maybe his life.

The Lake is an interactive retelling of an eerie Japanese folktale. Play it in Twine with headphones in 10 minutes.

#story #linear #horror #audio #atmospheric

Painted cover art for THE LAKE, its title in English and Japanese faintly glowing in a corner. Most of the cover is taken up by blue-gray water, framed by bare branches. A woven basket floats in the lake's center, abandoned.

Junction

Play as a private investigator: track down a runaway heiress before a legion of infectious machines turns her into one of the glamorous but troubled city’s disappeared people.

Junction is a neon-noir interactive fiction game kicked off by a series of writing exercises. It is the 45-minute opening act of a larger fangame not currently intended for development.

#story #branch and bottleneck #character #location #barks #neon noir

An abstract, green and black pixel background drawing attention to an image of a nighttime cityscape in its center, foregrounded by "Junction" in all caps.

Bare-Bones Apothecary

By day, craft potions based on irresponsibly vague descriptions. By night, rob the graves of clients you've "accidentally" poisoned.

Two parts potion puzzler, one part visual novel, Bare-Bones Apothecary placed 3rd in the IGDA Foundation 2022 Game Jam, themed "combination."

#character #item descriptions #dialogue #story #branching #cute

Digitally painted cover art for BARE-BONES APOTHECARY: a confused skeleton in a cloak stares at a bubbling cauldron, surrounded by a happy frog and four customers of dubious intent.

Wrapped in a Silhouette

Grandma’s in the hospital. It’s okay; it’s just a broken arm, not like Grandpa. She’s getting released tomorrow. You’re getting her clothes from her house.

Wrapped is a game about family secrets after the war, made in roughly 96 hours using Ink and Unity. Play it in 5–10 minutes.

#story #branching #unity #quick and dirty #serious

A sepia photograph of a young, fair-skinned woman in a buttoned dress, standing beside a man with tanned arms holding an infant in a polka-dot dress. Faces are obscured. The title, "Wrapped in a Silhouette," is superimposed in a somber font.

Solas, Gascon, and the boxer

Gascon and the Boxer's attempt at corporate theft hits a snag, but with Solas in the malfunctioning elevator with them, running out of air is the least of their problems.

A 4-page screenplay prompted by Susan O'Connor's Game Writing Masterclass.

#character #dialogue #fan work #bald elf

A color illustration of the back of a pale, bald elf clad in impressive leather armor, standing under a red tent

Game Writers Write an Exquisite Corpse Chapter 3

Disoriented by her "ungluing," Autumn ignores the station evacuation order to scare up lost memories from a dream simulator, but her efforts are stymied by a shadow from her forgotten past.

A 2,000-word chapter written entirely in dialogue, in a collaborative project with other game writers.

#dialogue #suspense #scifi #quick and dirty

A photo with its left half bathed in black and the right half dramatically lit with a bright, unseen light source to the right of a single figure wearing a pale sweater, several cables, and a helmet with a visor

Looking for more games experience?
Check out my editing and localization work or my company website.

CONTACT

Drop me a line if

  • You're looking for a writer who loves crafting unforgettable characters and interactive stories with all the feels;

  • You're in need of a copyeditor to help you clean up your game's script; or

  • You want a free haiku about cats or whatever.

The Lake

A despicable man must test his luck against the curse of a haunted lake, or else lose a bet, his marriage, and maybe his life.

The Lake is an interactive retelling of an eerie Japanese folktale. Play it in Twine with headphones in 10 minutes.

#story #linear #horror #audio #atmospheric

A GIF of a text-based game in full screen, with white text against a black background with blue links, selected via Tab and Enter and fading eerily after input.

Don't like embeds? See the PDF here:

Process & Postmortem

Bare-Bones Apothecary

Having recently mistaken the arsenic for table sugar, your bones are resurrected to manage a bustling potion shop during its busiest season. But you can’t go to the fall festival looking like this. Good thing there’s enough time to rob body parts from the fresh graves of those you’ve “accidentally” poisoned.

Two parts potion puzzler, one part visual novel, Bare-Bones Apothecary placed 3rd in the IGDA Foundation 2022 Game Jam, themed "combination." Currently in alpha.

#character #item descriptions #dialogue #story #branching #cute

Painted cover art for BARE-BONES APOTHECARY: a confuesd skeleton in a cloak stares at a bubbling cauldron.

Don't like embeds? See the PDFs here:

Process & Postmortem

Item Descriptions & Dialogue

Wrapped in a Silhouette

Grandma’s in the hospital. It’s okay; it’s just a broken arm, not like Grandpa. She’s getting released tomorrow. You’re getting her clothes from her house.

Wrapped is a game about family secrets after the war, made in roughly 96 hours using Ink and Unity.
Play it in 5–10 minutes.

#story #branching #unity #quick and dirty #serious

A GIF of a text-based game in full screen: foregrounding a photo a traditional Japanese house interior is the interactive portion, cycling through changing story text and choices via mouse click.

Don't like embeds? See the PDFs here:

Process & Postmortem

Junction

Play as a private investigator: track down a runaway heiress before a legion of infectious machines turns her into one of the glamorous but troubled city’s disappeared people.

Junction is a neon-noir interactive fiction game kicked off by a series of writing exercises, seen below. It is the 45-minute opening act of a larger fangame not currently intended for development.

#story #branch and bottleneck #character #location #barks #neon noir #script

A gif of Junction's menu screen, featuring pixel art of a detective's back as he looks away from a neon cityscape and brightly lit terminal. The gif moves on to "play," which features a text-based game with pixel portraits and a green and black color palet

When a Game in Development Needs a New Story

Won't a New Mechanic Break the Story?

Narrative Flowchart: Levels 1 + 2

Writing a Character Codex Entry

Writing a New Character with the Team

Writing an Avatar's Relationships with NPCs

Writing a Memorable Location and Boss Fight

Writing Boss Barks

Writing a cutscene and gameplay script

Making the Game

Solas, Gascon, and the boxer

Gascon and the Boxer's attempt at corporate theft hits a snag, but with Solas in the malfunctioning elevator with them, running out of air is the least of their problems.

A 4-page screenplay prompted by Susan O'Connor's Game Writing Masterclass.

#character #dialogue #fan work #elfy stuff

A color illustration of the back of a pale, bald elf clad in impressive leather armor, standing under a red tent
A color illustration of the bust of an armored archer with a roguish grin

Gascon

Alias: Duke of Dogs
Occupation: Bandit leader, folk hero
Disposition: Roguish shit-stirrer

"How shall I put this? That cad, Count Caldwell, used yours truly and th' Strays as bait. Now, I'm hardly vindictive. Yet being played for a fool I cannot abide."

Image from https://www.thewitcher.com/en/thronebreaker-witchertales

A color illustration of a man in black slumped over a strange, digital-looking broardsword impaling him, while the torso of a woman in a gold dress can be seen in the background

The Boxer

Alias: Transistor, Mr. Nobody
Occupation: Bodyguard, universal lock pick
Disposition: Sweetest boy

"Look, whatever you're thinking, do me a favor; don't let go."

Image from https://www.supergiantgames.com/games/transistor

A color illustration of the back of a pale, bald elf clad in impressive leather armor, standing under a red tent

Solas

Alias: (spoiler)
Occupation: Unassuming mage, (spoiler)
Disposition: Filthy liar

"You enjoy seeing yourself as a villain?"
"No more than any other clever man who wonders what he could do if pushed."

Image from https://www.creativeuncut.com/

Don't like embeds? See the PDF here:

Game Writers Write an Exquisite Corpse Chapter 3

Disoriented by her "ungluing," Autumn ignores the station evacuation order to scare up lost memories from a dream simulator, but her efforts are stymied by a shadow from her forgotten past.

A 2,000-word chapter written in one week, entirely in dialogue, in collaboration with other game writers.

#dialogue #scifi #suspense #basically the expanse fanfic #quick and dirty

A photo with its left half bathed in black and the right half dramatically lit with a bright, unseen light source to the right of a single figure wearing a pale sweater, several cables, and a helmet with a visor

Summary: Chapter 1

Autumn accepts Charlie’s marriage proposal. Then a piano falls on her head, dropped by the irreverent, dangerously bored Maker of All Things.

The Maker demands Debra, an ophanim, “unglue” Autumn’s soul to be tortured, remade, and sent back to live a more interesting life. Threatened with termination, Debra complies. But she warns the Maker: Autumn has been broken too far. She and everything around her will glitch.

Summary: Chapter 2

Autumn wakes on a metal slab with no memory and two faces looking down on her. One gives her a scarf that belonged to her father, whom Autumn doesn’t remember. The mysterious pair decide a field trip and fresh air will do nicely.

Don't like embeds? Read Chapter 3 on the Game Writers Write an Exquisite Corpse website.