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. Currently writing on contract with Lightspeed LA on Last Sentinel, she's also edited 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, Susan O’Connor’s the Narrative Department, and the Indie Game Academy. Currently working on a micro-masters from the University of Cambridge, 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.

HIGHLIGHTS

Open-world game
Atmospheric Horror 10-min.
Character, Location, Barks
Items, Dialogue
Dialogue

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Open-world Game

Last Sentinel
—Lightspeed LA

Narrative-focused, open-world action game set decades from now in a reconstructed Tokyo.

Crafting narrative content to support open-world and mission content, including but not limited to VO writing, character bios, POI narrative overviews, and player feedback dialogues. Writing world-building documentation. Providing Japanese cultural and linguistic insights to a largely Western development team targeting a primarily North American audience.

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Atmospheric Horror (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.

Project Details

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.

Project Details

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."

Project Details

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.

Project Details

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

"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.

She leaves deathly serious fingerprints on her short stories and interactive fiction as well as AAA games like Last Sentinel. But she's fond too of buckling swash and cooking up whimsy for Bare-Bones Apothecary and other indie gems.

She’s also trimmed and heightened dialogue for the English localizations of indie 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.

FAVORITE THINGS

Original Dragon Age and Mass Effect trilogies, 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), Sugar, 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

IGDA Foundation Velocity Recipient | Selected from several hundred applicants as one of 13 Velocity grantees in the 2022 International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Foundation Virtual Exchange.
UBC Writing for Video Games Certificate | Awarded a professional certificate in writing for video games for completing all six courses from the University of British Columbia.

Game Writing Masterclass I | Received instruction from Susan O'Connor of BioShock fame and workshopped portfolio pieces with peers.
UCSD Copyediting Certificate | Awarded a specialized certificate in copyediting for completing the 12-month program from the University of California, San Diego Extension.

IGA Level 2 | Completed introductory bootcamp with Indie Game Academy and made a Spyro clone Unity.
University of Cambridge MicroMasters in Writing for Performance and the Entertainment Industries | Completed 30 credit hours toward Master of Studies (MSt) in Writing for Performance (ECD 2025)

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

Organization	Markup/Tools	Engine
Jira/Confluence	Ink	Unity
Perforce	Articy	Godot
Trello	JavaScript	Twine
Airtable	HTML
Figma
Miro
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

Commercial projects

Narrative

Last Sentinel

Narrative-focused, AAA open-world action game set in a dystopian Tokyo.

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Project sky burials

Indie origami platformer inspired by Gris.

Collaborative creation of player character and major NPCs.
Designing the spine of a linear narrative to cohere and resonate with platforming and origami mechanics.
Writing worldbuilding and magic system bible.
Supporting creative direction and pre-production.

Localization

AAA RPG

English localization of a AAA mobile RPG. Under NDA until 2027.

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

English localization of an indie mobile farm sim with a fuzzy twist. Under NDA until 2026.

Edited and proofread localized narrative and marketing copy.
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.