All my life I’ve been a fierce force of imagination, persistence, and hard work: like a dragon hunting for gold. But instead of treasure, I’ve been searching for stories to tell and ways to make an impact.

Born in Belarus, I studied journalism in Bulgaria and worked in marketing in Russia, but storytelling has always been my true passion. I create narratives that allow people to explore fresh perspectives in a safe, immersive way.

As a queer, neurodivergent woman from a patriarchal country, I’m passionate about shedding light on complex topics through my work. Over the years, I’ve designed more than 100 LARP games, written 10+ original tabletop campaigns, and worked as a script supervisor on the short film Mein Name Akim (2024), which tells the story of transgender refugees in Germany.

During my MA in Serial Storytelling at IFS Cologne, I honed my skills across genres, working on solo projects as well as collaborating in Writers' Rooms.

Currently, I’m co-developing a visual novel game with a co-author as a passion project.

Now that I've completed my degree, I’m eager to bring my creativity to TV and gaming, crafting stories in both English and German.

Dragons never stop breathing fire. And neither do I, with an endless flow of ideas and stories I can’t wait to share.

Alena Lysiakova

🎧 Too much sound can ruin your audio game.

Audio designers love layering: music, background ambience, footsteps, breathing, radio static, wind, distant sirens, and emotional underscore. 

And suddenly your “immersive experience” feels like standing inside a broken washing machine. 

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most people don’t play audio games in perfect silence. They’re commuting. Cooking. Walking. Folding laundry. 

Audio storytelling competes with real life. If your game requires 100% concentration at all times just to understand what’s happening, you’re designing against the format.

Cognitive overload is real:
🐲 Constant SFX + dense dialogue = fatigue
🐲 Overlapping voices = confusion
🐲 Permanent music bed = emotional flattening
🐲 No breathing room = listener burnout

Immersion doesn’t come from “more sound.” It comes from intentional sound. Silence matters. Contrast matters. Clarity matters. Design audio like oxygen.

Good audio narrative design respects the listener’s brain, because the worst experience isn’t “hard,” it’s exhausting.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames

Alena Lysiakova 🐉

Narrative designer and screenwriter ▶️ Let's create stories that make an impact

Here’s something most audio writers don’t plan for 👉 players will mishear things. 


Names. Instructions. Locations. Important clues. And no, it’s not because they’re inattentive. It’s because audio competes with real life.

If your entire branching logic collapses because someone misheard “Mara” as “Nara,” that’s not player failure. 👉 That’s architectural fragility.

Designing for mishearing means:
👾 Avoid critical distinctions that rely on similar-sounding names
🐲 Reinforce important information through variation, not repetition
👾 Use context to clarify meaning instead of assuming perfect recall
🐲 Make systems resilient to imperfect listening

In audio, clarity isn’t about simplifying the story. It’s about building redundancy intelligently. The player shouldn’t need studio-level focus to follow your game.

If your structure only works in perfect silence with perfect attention, it’s not built for the real world.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames #InteractiveStorytelling

The uncomfortable truth about writing for audio: sometimes experience gets in the way. 🐲 


I coach a lot of writers transitioning into interactive audio, and I keep seeing the same pattern: the more experienced the writer, the harder it can be to adapt.

Not because they’re not talented, but because they’re used to controlling the frame.

In audio, you don’t have visuals to lean on. You don’t have text people can reread. You don’t have cinematic shortcuts.

You have a voice. Timing. Space. Silence. Choice phrasing. Cognitive load.

And if you try to force screenwriting logic or prose logic onto audio without adjusting, the story simply doesn’t breathe. 

💡 Audio is a different architecture. It demands different pacing, different exposition control and different emotional calibration.

That’s why transitioning with a coach helps. Not because you don’t know how to write, but because someone needs to point out the invisible friction early.

You can read all the documents you want. Clarity usually comes when someone listens and says, “This works. This doesn’t. And here’s why, specifically for audio.”

Different medium requires different muscles. And once they click, audio becomes addictive.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames #StoryCoaching

Dating used to be awkward dinners and nervous eye contact… now it’s co-op bosses and shared loot drops. 🎮💘

In my latest article, I dig into why playing together is becoming the new dating, and how games are quietly reshaping connection, chemistry, and even heartbreak.

👉 https://lnkd.in/eU6XgMn8

If you’re into storytelling, relationships, or just fascinated by how games intersect with real life feelings, this one might hit a nerve.

#GamingCulture #Storytelling

Open article: Why playing together is the new dating by meer.com

🎧 Your audio game must survive interruptions


People don’t play audio games the way they play visual ones.  They’re walking. Cooking. Commuting. Someone asks them a question. A notification pops up. The subway arrives.

And suddenly your carefully crafted scene is paused for five minutes.

🐲 When they come back, the player shouldn’t feel lost. That’s why good audio narrative design builds re-entry points into the architecture, those small structural cues that help the brain reconnect:

👾 A character briefly restating the immediate goal
👾A reaction that reminds the player what just happened
👾Environmental cues that re-establish the situation
👾A choice that naturally summarizes the stakes

These moments are navigation; because audio games exist in the middle of real life, not inside a perfectly controlled gaming session. 

💡 If your story only works when the listener gives it uninterrupted attention, you’re designing for an ideal player that doesn’t exist. Good audio architecture assumes interruptions and quietly guides the player back in.

#audiogames #narrativedesign #storyarchitecture

In visual games, players always know where they are. There’s a map, a UI, and a quest log. Basically, something grounding them.

In audio there is nothing like that. Which means if you don’t deliberately build structural anchors, your story starts to drift.

Structural anchors are recurring elements that help listeners orient themselves without realizing it.

It could be:
🐲 A specific location you return to
🐲 A character who always reappears between major beats
🐲 A ritual moment (a radio check-in, a diary entry, a nightly call)
🐲 A recurring sound cue that signals transition

These anchors are architecture. Without them, scenes blur. Branches feel random. The player doesn’t feel lost because the plot is confusing; they feel lost because there’s no spatial or emotional reference point. Audio needs repetition with intention.

When players hear that familiar voice, that recurring space, that structural checkpoint, their brain relaxes. Orientation returns. Engagement stabilizes.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames

All screenplays benefit from being visual. 
💡 But for vertical storytelling, it’s not a nice bonus: it’s survival.


In a traditional film or TV script, you can sometimes get away with dialogue carrying the scene. Two characters talking in a room can still work if the emotional stakes are strong enough. In verticals, that scene is dead on arrival.

The viewer is watching on a phone, often half-distracted, scrolling with their thumb, ready to abandon you at any second. If nothing visually happens, the story simply disappears. 👉 Vertical scenes need immediate visual signals.

You don't need long exposition or dialogue. Just one visual action that tells the entire story beat.

🐲 That’s the real discipline vertical storytelling teaches you: if the audience can understand the moment without sound, you’re probably doing it right.
#Screenwriting #VerticalSeries #Storytelling

Choices without context aren’t suspenseful. 💀 


They’re just guesses.

🐲 When a player is asked to make a decision, they need enough information to imagine possible outcomes, not the exact result, but the shape of the risk.

Take this:
“Should he hide or confront the burglar?”
That’s not a meaningful choice. It’s a coin toss.

Now compare it to:
“Hiding is probably the safer choice, but what if he can stop the thief right now? Should he hide or confront the burglar?”

Same options. Completely different experience.

💡 The second version gives the player something to weigh: safety vs. action, fear vs. responsibility, risk now vs. regret later.

Good narrative design isn’t about revealing consequences. It’s about framing decisions so the player can reason emotionally, not randomly.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames #GameWriting

I’ll be attending Series Mania Forum on March 24 to 26.


Do you want to talk series and verticals? 🎬  
🐲 Let's meet and talk over coffee in Lille. 

#SeriesMania #VerticalSeries #Networking

Acquiring Inbound Leads for B2B Founders with Personal Content Programs • Explaining Content, one Ugly Drawing at a time

Content steals focus, I know. Writing, formatting, visuals, posting cadence, and keeping up with comments. It becomes a weekly tax, then it gets dropped, then inbound stays unpredictable.I build an Authority Engine for B2B Tech Founders. It turns your existing knowledge into consistent content that makes you look like the category leader, without you writing a word.What you get:1) 100% custom AI voice cloneWe extract your voice from your real materials. Whitepapers, sales calls, internal docs, Slack messages, past posts, and anything else that reflects how you think and speak. No generic templates.2) LinkedIn Autopilot5 high converting posts per week, ghostwritten, formatted, and ready to publish. You do not write, format, post, or search for visuals. You approve drafts with a simple yes or no.3) Search Dominance pack2 SEO optimized long form articles per month, derived from your LinkedIn content, so your authority compounds beyond the feed.First week of content can go live within 48 hours of onboarding. You can see engagement on day 1. Your only job is approvals.I will write 3 posts for you for free using your data, so you can see the voice match before you pay. If the first week does not sound exactly like you, or better, I rewrite it until it does, or you do not pay.Best for founders who have real insight and a real product, but do not want content creation to compete with building, selling, and hiring.If you want to test the voice clone, message me: “3 posts”.

Kuba Czubajewski

IMO, this is the only realistic "future" of content marketers:

Every week, I see here new tools popping up that promise my clients they can let all their content team go because AI can do it all for them.

Not once have I seen it actually work, btw.

Content is a much deeper thing than writing a bunch of paragraphs that sound good or an infographic that looks nice.

For me, it's all about connecting the dots that are usually VERY far apart and turning it into a fresh, impactful message.

This is why I'm in love how Dropbox Dash is approaching AI for creatives.

Instead of proposing yet another "I'll do it for you" tool, they're solving one major pain most of us feel:

Not being able to connect the dots because the dot you're looking for is in a file you forgot the name of.

Sounds trivial, but OH MY GOD, the amount of time I used to spend on scrolling through my G-drive is embarrassing.

And this is where I think the whole AI for content conversation should land.

AI is incredible at recall.

Humans are still the best at judgment what matters, what’s true, what’s new, and what’s worth saying out loud.

You won't win because you can generate 50 posts a day.

But if you can pull the right inputs fast, then make a call on the angle, and ship a message people actually remember, you will win.

PS. this is not sponsored by anyone, I just saw their launch and loved it.

I’ll write 3 LinkedIn posts for free, in your voice. If it sounds like you (or better), we install your AI Authority Engine in 90 days.

Here's a 10-min flow I use with founders to create weeks of content for them:

The goal is to create one small, high-integrity narrative object that can survive multiple contexts without losing its meaning. 

The easiest way to do that is to start with a 10-minute CEO video (use Tella or Loom), because spoken answers preserve something writing tends to bleach out: conviction, nuance, and those small qualifiers that signal real experience. 

I beg you, don’t ask for “thought leadership.” 

Ask one tight prompt that forces specificity, like what buyers are getting wrong about a problem right now, what that misunderstanding costs them, and what they should do instead.

Once you have the Loom, the extraction step matters more than the editing. 

You’re looking for a structure:

Pull out:

- one contrarian claim that creates tension
- one vivid symptom that makes the claim relatable
- one constraint that makes it believable
- one before/after framing that makes the shift obvious
- one proof detail that anchors it in reality

That proof detail can be lightweight. It can be “we heard this on 12 calls this month,” or “this showed up in every deal we lost last quarter.” 

Now you take those five ingredients and you write one “source paragraph” in plain language. Don't think of any platform yet. 

Just articulate the idea clearly as if you were explaining it to a smart friend over coffee. This paragraph becomes the anchor. Every other asset is a translation of it, not a reinvention. That’s how you keep integrity when you repurpose.

From there, I like to create three outputs that each do a different cognitive job:

First, a short text post that opens with the contrarian claim and immediately explains the symptom. 

The mistake people make is opening with the claim and then drifting into abstraction. Don’t. 

Earn the reader’s trust by describing what they already see in the wild, the call snippets, the internal debates, the marketing copy that “sounds right” but doesn’t move anything.

Second, a simple carousel where each slide is a single unit of meaning. Not “tips,” but progression. The before model, the cost of that model, the constraint that keeps people stuck, the after model, and then one practical move they can try this week. 

If you can’t fit the idea on five slides without it turning into fog, the idea isn’t ready yet.

Third, a longer form piece where you unpack the constraint and the proof detail. 

This is where nuance belongs. Why the obvious fix fails. What tradeoff you’re making. What to watch out for. 

This is also where you can safely include a real example, even if it’s anonymized, because you have space to set context.

Two quality checks before you hit publish:

• If the post could apply to any company, it’s too generic. 

• If the reader can’t repeat your point in one sentence, it’s too complicated.

If you want, reply with your niche and I’ll give you 5 tight CEO prompts that reliably produce these “weeks of content” anchors.

I recently changed my banner to this one below and you might think I went insane:

This is not a typical path content people choose for their businesses.

“Free value” beyond a regurgitated ChatGPT lead magnet is a rare thing here.

My thinking is this:

I built an Authority System for copying B2B founders’ voice with AI.

It’s GOOD. Took me about a year to get here. 

And the easiest way to prove it is to show my potential clients how it works.

Yes, building a sample assistant is harder than posting fancy carousels and “vulnerable” fake-ass stories

But I’ve always been more of a show-don’t-tell kinda guy and not planning to stop now.

Curious how it works? Dm me “3 posts”

"comment on other creators' posts" is sh!tty advice:

I used to spend 2 hours per day here commenting on probably all of them big creators.

Most of them don't give a rat's a*s about me or my content.

And that's perfectly fine. Why would they?

Not once have I reached out to them in a DM, they have no reason to see my comment and think:

"I wonder what this guy is about?"

But the folks I exchanged DMs with are consistently showing up under my posts.

Because we established a more meaningful connection than a [put an insightful comment here so they see you're trying hard]

See what I'm getting at?

Connection > tactics.

Build the first one and you'll never need to think about the second one again.

A year ago I thought I had it figured out:

Build a content agency for B2B founders. Use AI to do the heavy lifting. Keep costs low, scale fast. Simple.

What actually happened: 

I spent months building something nobody wanted to pay for.

The first version of the system was basically:

1. take the founder's old posts
2. dump them into a prompt
3. generate something that kind of sounded like them

The output was fine. Technically competent. The kind of content that gets 15 likes and zero leads.

I wasn't impressed with myself tbh. Neither were my clients.

So I overcomplicated everything:

A 12-step onboarding process, 5 different content formats, a pricing page that looked like a software feature comparison matrix...

I was trying to cover every possible use case for every possible client, and the result was that nobody could figure out what I actually did.

The solution was so stupidly simple, I facepalmed when I finally got there:

I started interviewing founders instead of just ingesting their existing content.

Turns out the best content a founder can publish isn't what they've already written.

 It's what they say when someone asks them the right questions:

- the unguarded takes
- the specific stories
- the things they'd never think to write down but say out loud constantly

Once I built the system around that – extract the thinking first, then write – the output stopped sounding like AI trying to be human and started sounding like the founder on their best day.

That took about a year to nail.

The offer got simpler too:

Interview you -> Write it up -> Publish it -> You approve the drafts. 

That's the whole thing.

If you want to see what it looks like, DM me "3 posts" – I'll write them for free before you spend anything.

A thing we rarely discuss in marketing is how customers perceive our narrative through preloaded meanings:

We think we’re publishing a simple story about a benefit. They’re interpreting a signal about power, intent, and control. 

That gap is what Ring ran into with its Super Bowl ad about a lost dog found through a neighborhood camera network. The creative aimed for warmth and community. 

The audience, already saturated with years of privacy discourse and surveillance headlines, watched the same 30 seconds and didn’t primarily evaluate the plot. They evaluated the infrastructure implied by the plot. 

“AI + cameras” isn’t a neutral prop anymore. It’s a symbol, and symbols arrive with cultural baggage attached.

This is the real mechanism behind “losing the narrative.” It’s rarely about execution quality but about the interpretive surface area. 

When a story leaves room for people to fill in the blanks, they will. And they’ll fill them with the strongest available frame in their mind, usually the one that best matches their anxieties. 

In this case, the counter-frame was waiting in the wings, mass surveillance disguised as safety. 

Once that frame establishes itself, everything that follows stops being “new information” and becomes “supporting evidence.” 

That’s why Ring’s sudden move away from a planned partnership with Flock Safety was immediately absorbed into the same storyline. Regardless of internal motives, it read like validation, not coincidence.

The takeaway isn’t “be careful with your messaging.” That’s too shallow. 

The takeaway is that narrative is not a message you transmit. It’s a negotiation between your intent and the audience’s prior beliefs. 

And prior beliefs are not something you overcome with a nicer tone. They’re something you have to design around. If your product or campaign touches an area where trust is already fragile, you should assume your audience will run an adversarial interpretation, even if they like you, even if the ad is well made.

A better move is to treat messaging like you treat product design:

Reduce ambiguity. Anticipate misuse scenarios. Make the boundaries legible. 

Don’t just tell a heartwarming story about what your system can do at its best. Show that you’ve thought seriously about what it could do at its worst, and what you’ve done to prevent that. 

In 2026, “we’re doing this for safety” is not a persuasive claim by itself. People want to know who gets visibility, who gets veto power, and what recourse exists when the system is wrong.

Curious how you think about this. When was the last time you watched a brand’s “feel good” story and immediately felt the darker subtext the audience would attach to it?

Quick tip if you hate when AI says "It's not X, it's Y..."

This rhetorical device is called "contrastive reframing using antithesis structure."

Hard-prompt it into your content assistant to avoid it (example below).

Also, from my tests, Claude 4.6 is much better at this that GPT models.

PS. Let me know any other annoying things AI uses - I'll show you how to remove them from the outputs.

How I helped a B2B consultancy business (very niche) start showing up in AI search:

We focused on turning their LinkedIn content into long-form SEO articles built around real opinions, specific frameworks, and language that maps to actual buyer problems.

AI tools cite sources that are clear and substantive. Since their LinkedIn content had this already, expanding it into articles became much easier.

The results measured over the last 90 days:

Overall: 1,619 AI bot hits → 4,163. That's 3x.
Homepage: 514 → 946. Almost 2x.

Every hit is ChatGPT or Perplexity pulling from their site while a buyer is actively researching. That's pipeline you'd never see in a cold outreach report.

If you want to see what this looks like for your niche, reply ENGINE and tell me what you sell.

200,000 people just watched a creator get stood up by a brand's AI chatbot:

Reformation used AI to manage its influencer outreach. It confirmed a collaboration, set up a store visit, and ran weeks of back-and-forth with a creator.

She drove an hour to the store, shot video in the dressing room... The manager had no idea who she was.

TikTok called it "an AI bot that went rogue." Reformation sent her a sweater as an apology.

Here's my read on what actually happened: 

AI made commitments nobody at the brand had authorized. And no human was watching the inbox it was running.

The bot did exactly what it was built to do - respond, confirm, follow up. 

But nobody told it where to stop. That's a systems failure.

AI doesn't know when it's overstepping. The tool runs until you build a stop - and plenty of AI marketing setups skip that step entirely.

There are places where automation works well: segmentation, sequences, content drafts.

And then there are contexts that require a human in the seat: real commitments, real relationships, anything a creator or partner will hold you to.

I put a lot of emphasis on that while working with my clients on their content assistants.

First draft can (and should) come from the AI. But the human editor before anything goes live is a must. 

Doesn't matter how good your AI tool is. If there's no one monitoring what it's agreeing to, you're one post away from a mess.

The CEO of impact put it well: "Human credibility becomes more valuable, not less."

That's the thing marketing teams running AI tools aren't accounting for right now, imo.

I've been inside a lot of AI content setups lately. 

Usually, it’s a single prompt, no real architecture:

A prompt produces something that sounds okay one day and off-brand the next.

What I built for myself first, now for clients, runs on 8 layers:

1. A voice profile: formality level, POV, energy, humor notes

2. A writing style guide: sentence rhythm, paragraph rules, formatting settings

3. A preferred/banned word list: the exact vocabulary the AI can and can't touch

4. Content pillars: the strategic territory the brand owns (and what it doesn't)

5. A CTA library: specific closing lines and keyword triggers, not improvised

6. An editorial guardrails file: a list of hard limits for the AI

7. A reference database: curated post examples labeled by format, hook type, and why they worked

8. A master prompt: the architecture that connects all 7 layers and tells the AI how to operate

Each layer feeds into the next. Remove one and the output starts drifting.

For example, the voice profile without the banned word list sounds right tonally but uses language the person wouldn't say out loud.

If you want to see what each layer looks like in practice, reply "SYSTEM" and I'll send you the breakdown.

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Kuba Czubajewski

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The Battle

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