Surface of Scum: A Necrotic Character Generator
by Uma Breakdown and Sammy Paloma

Surface of Scum has limited functionality when played on a phone, to experience the full game we recommend you to play on laptop or desktop.

“Surface of Scum: A Necrotic Character Generator”, is a hyper-lo-fi digital storytelling tool which forms part of Breakdown & Paloma’s current video-game project The Well of Sickness Shimmering. Surface of Scum takes the start of a role playing game -where the player makes choices and rolls dice to build their character - and expands this into an experience about the unstable self, and identity as both collaborative process and compost heap.

The game references St Anne’s wood and holy well in Bristol (once considered a potent holy site in Medieval England), and more generally the folk magic of healing Clooty Wells. Surface of Scum is made entirely with free, open source, browser-based software.

Uma Breakdown is a Gateshead based artist, writer and game developer withinterests in horror, care, and écriture feminine. Recent projects include video-games for Arebyte Gallery, London, and Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge, and short stories for TEXTUR, Berlin and Market Gallery, Glasgow.

Sammy Paloma is an artist, poet, tattooist & witch living in Bristol, UK. She is into listening to faeries, divination messing with linear time, table-top RPG's, grief rituals and necromancy. Her book, There’s Always Things Falling Out The Sky, illustrated by Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould, was published last year with Pink Sands Studio. She currently has work being published and exhibited with Art Licks, Abingdon Studios (Blackpool), & Folklore For Resistance.

Game made using Bitsy (by Adam Le Doux), with these additional hacks: Mixsy by Ruin, Bitsy audio hack by Mark Wonnacott, Custom Key Handler by Sean S. LeBlanc

Images made using PIXILART, then converted into Bitsy rooms using this tool: https://hideous-cave-goblin.itch.io/room.

Music made using BeepBox.

Special thanks to the Bitsy Discord community for advice and troubleshooting.

Commissioned by MAYK as part of MayFest 2022, and Bristol + Bath Creative R+D via the Trailblazer Fund.