why?
shortly after i finished the Feet I Annotated Bibliography i began writing the first version of Fag I. Asexual I was really enjoyable for me to write, and personal in a way that was different from Feet I; in this sense, the scope and subject matter of Fag I were a natural evolution for me.
the sorts of things i was influenced by are evident in that bibliography, especially EROSTASIS. i had also made a point of playing most of the entries to smilejam. not all entries stuck to the optional theme of "first memories," but i found that enough of my favorites did that they imparted on me both the desire to trawl my own memories and the belief that it doesn't take much to be impactful. i've said it before: if their small weird project made me feel something, surely my small weird project will make someone else feel something?
what that something was differed for me from game to game, but the experience of jumping from one to another and reliably feeling anything was really special. at once delightful, melancholic, exploratory, collaborative, solitudinous. i name Strawberry Flavoured SATA Cables: PARTITION 0: Vagevuur in the credits because it was so offputting in comparison to the others. this goes beyond its qualities as a game and a narrative - which i admire strongly - as i like to think the mere fact of finding it and playing it after a streak of mellower titles is what stirred that memory of getting jumpscared by Wikipedia articles late at night.
i should have re-played this sooner to editing my audio, i didn't even come close to the feeling its music gives me.
prelude: childhood game development
i very much wanted to make a game when i was little. i couldn't tell you why; i didn't have any ideas, either for compelling gameplay or stories that would benefit from the medium. the process i've described on this blog of being inspired by a work never occurred when i was young, to my recollection.
as with much of my life before transition, i think i simply had no expectations for myself. in their absence, i was doing my best to interpret and fulfill the expectations others had of me. i was good with computers, so i was expected to do something meaningful and useful with that. i played a lot of video games - and caught a lot of flak for it - so making a game would not only fulfill those expectations, but justify playing video games in the first place. win-win.
it worked, to a degree. my parents paid to enroll me in a week-long summer game development class for tweens, where we were all dutifully walked through through the GameMaker: Studio built-in tutorial together. something i had done on my own months ago! my parents couldn't fathom why i found this an insulting waste of my time and told me i should be grateful. (you were the ones who told me to value money; why don't you value yours?)
for a long time i tried to find someone who would make a game with me. i advertised myself as capable of doing the programming (i wasn't, but i figured this made me exceptionally valuable) and that all i needed was someone to help with art and sound (the internet's full of artists isn't it?) and we could make something! we could do something big together!
nobody ever bit. some years after this, videos on youtube lambasting Unity asset flips became popular, and the associated stigma against using premade assets at all lodged itself in my brain.
so, lacking a partner or the belief that i could do anything without one, i never really made a serious attempt at game development. i considered modding various games, but for what i played - TF2, Garry's Mod, Dungeons of Dredmor - i stopped quickly when i realized how far out of alignment my skills were with my ambitions. i didn't want to model or animate, and didn't know where to even start with making textures for guns or NPCs or whatever. i opened Hammer one time and didn't last an hour. modding for Dredmor is just really janky and frustrating.1.
not only did i know i couldn't make this, i knew i didn't really want to. both of those feelings only kinda sucked. by AVM on GameBanana.
i did love my copy of WarioWare DIY. i even worked on some projects on the internet with people, passing the file back and forth over Nintendo Wi-Fi. i'm pretty proud of my one solo creation: using the SMB assets, either a mushroom or a poison mushroom would spawn and travel left or right. the player had to run Mario either towards the power-up or away from the poison mushroom, accordingly. i think it makes for a pretty solid microgame. a friend at the time also showed me Inform 7, and the fantasy of its "natural language programming" grabbed me for a bit, but nothing ever came of it other than a few aborted projects.2.
if you've been following along with me, i've talked before about how my uncertainty over handling various aspects of game development i'm unskilled in has gotten in the way of me making one. Girl Purgatoriem gave me the confidence to make my own backgrounds (as did Nadia Nova's guide on how she makes hers, which is admittedly not a terribly involved process but is affirming to see written down and recommended regardless). no one title is responsible for affirming me that a short game is worth making and putting out there; the whole ecosystem of transgender art on itch is what did that. the music of SFSC:v is what inspired me to dig out my bass and record my own track for the game. i knew from the start that using royalty-free music wouldn't be looked down upon necessarily, and hardly anybody foleys their own sound effects, but hearing LexieLand's own fingers on her own bass was such an important part of that game's effect on me and hey, i have a bass!
so, while writing the text for the article, i reached a point where i realized that what i had in front of me would be of manageable size for my first visual novel. i could either keep going and make a longer article, or stop here and start on the game. thanking myself for my own roman numeral convention, i resolved that i could return to the subject later and started marking up what i had written.
how?
once i had added my notes for mood, visuals, sound effects, music, and sequences to the original text, i had to actually put it all in an engine. i originally wanted to use tape window. the part of EROSTASIS that has stuck with me the most was its use of a per-word text sound - i hear it now, as i write these words - and i thought the shorter sentences i had would be an especially good match for such a technique. this is obviously not unique to tape window, but i had resolved not to use Ren'Py or similar. so i downloaded it, took one look, and said uhhhhhh i'm not doing that.
luckily, again thanks to smilejam, Videotome was on my list of engines to check out, HOT WET was on my list of games to play, and Freya Campbell's first article on the Videotome engines was on my list of articles to read.3. HOT WET is really something, another one of those games that effortlessly made me uncomfortable in a way i hope to someday replicate. and with so little! too little for my game - all you get is three positions of scrolling text, sound, and backgrounds. while i didn't need much more, i did need more.
enter Super Videotome, which has the one thing i really needed it to have: arbitrary text placement. i played through a bit of its exemplar game, Victim Doll, to get a sense of its features, and mercifully found upon looking at the instructions for its use that i immediately felt more comfortable. it's very straightforward to use and up-front about the things you cannot do with it. true to its ethos, i found that i really could just mark up my text with the requisite commands and have it all render as i expected it to.
it's restrictive, but those restrictions were almost all a source of comfort for me. while i was more confident about making background art, the 640x400 resolution helped me forgive my personal expectation for visual fidelity almost immediately. when you're working with my source material, photographs and game screenshots, not only do you not have the room, but scaling anything down to that size is pretty forgiving, especially to filters and amateurish editing. perfect is the enemy of good, after all, so what better way to stop worrying about it than to make my idea of perfection literally impossible?
speaking of which, the kitchen and the bedroom with the CD player were both made in House Flipper, lol. what i needed was a representation of being underneath that kitchen table, lying on my grandparents' linoleum, and a representation of my childhood bedroom. my first thought was actually to use Tower Unite, since i knew that i'd be able to make exactly what i wanted, but i quickly ruled it out for having too large a possibility space. in other words, perfect was possible, which meant i'd never finish. instead i loaded my House Flipper starter house, enabled cheats, and got to work getting rid of absolutely everything. i tiled it, painted it, bought the furniture, set up the lights, snapped a few photos, took it all down and did it again for the bedroom shot. it was kind of like making a set, now that i describe it like that...
those pictures, like all the others, were treated to some toying with the levels in GIMP, a pixellize filter for the Wikipedia articles, and a 0.5-0.7px gaussian blur to top them all off. i rather like the end result. this did not make the creation of them fun; in fact, the fact that i didn't love working on the art or sound (not to say that i hated it) is the second biggest factor that made this game a July release instead of June. (in first place: depression.) the backgrounds based on Wikipedia and the free photos got done first, then the House Flipper flips, then much later the title, just before release.
the original title card. if i'd had it my way, my only change would have been to make it "dark mode."
i had hoped that the engine would support GIF backgrounds, which would let me use Wigglypaint for the title card. when i found out i couldn't i was stuck for ideas until i came up with the Desireless cover flip. while i'm proud of it and i think it's effective, i admit that it has a slightly... Homestuck-y quality to it. i suppose that's only a bad thing if you want it to be, and i'm not ashamed to be inspired by transfem art.4.
what's missing?
my biggest disappointment was the conclusion to the Wikipedia section. Super Videotome has very few ways to take control away from the player, and i couldn't find a way to make any of them do what i wanted. the final background art was intended to display for only a few frames before cutting to black and playing the sound effect. while people have told me that they resonated with this section, the fact remains that players can, if they choose, stay on the page for long enough that the shock factor is nullified.
likewise, i wanted to force the player to sit through Save Tonight for far longer than was comfortable in order to progress. although i believe the major sentiment of the scene comes through, i don't think the visceral, sinking feeling i experienced as a child does. i could have hacked this somewhat through a slow zoom, which is supported, but even that can be skipped by clicking through.
i can think of partial remedies for both of these using Super Videotome (Modded!). although i technically knew this existed because of the references to it in the Super Videotome changelog, those references are also in the context of merging its additions, so i assumed it was obsolete :( finding out that i couldn't achieve these effects was disappointing, but i think it was important for me to accept that and carry on without them. committing to using a limited tool made that acceptance much easier.
this is a little thing, but if you start a music track, then later a second one, the first track basically gets paused. invoking the command to start that track later will unpause it rather than start from the beginning. for the life of me i couldn't find out how to start the song over. i wanted to for the credits, so i attempted to work around it making a copy of the Lovelattice MP3, renaming it, adding a new entry for it in the javascript file that defines the game's assets and using that instead. the engine did not like this and began crowbarring upon load. i have a feeling that i could have opened it in a tagger to change something and that would have fixed it, but i just wanted the game done by this point.
will i do it again?
i think so!
once i connected that the idea i had would be good for a game, making the majority of the assets and putting it all together was rewarding and fairly natural for me. i don't know how long it'll be before i make a "visual novel," like with characters and dialog, but i want to return to this format. separate from but not unrelated to my desire to make a game has been, lurking in the dark corners of my mind, an interest in making video essays. what separates them from what i or any of the interactive entrants to this year's manifesto jam have made? they both attempt to improve the delivery of the text through multimedia.
Videotome (non-Super) was used to make this entry to manifesto jam, Artisinal Gruel, which i thought was effective.
choosing games as my medium rather than video actually has a number of benefits. voice acting is not presupposed the way a voiceover is, for one. i quite like my voice, but i have no interest in everything necessary to record, edit, and process a voiceover of acceptable quality. the corollary to this is that there is an expectation to read at least a little when you play a video game, much more so when it's billed as a visual novel. while both are visual mediums, you're primarily engaging with the visuals when putting together a video, and i was engaged primarily with text. i've edited videos before and the latter is my strong preference.
i consider Fag I flawed. some of those flaws are a matter of my ability, and many of them are limitations of the tools i chose. i think that's good. i needed to make something flawed because everything i will ever make will be flawed in some way that i simply won't be able to avoid. my original vision was compromised the instant i found out i wouldn't be able to script sequences like i wanted, so who cares if the graphics and sound i come up with could be better? Super Videotome's restraints are what allowed me to accept those flaws and just get it made regardless. now that it is i can say that i'm proud of it no matter what, that it has value to me.
the advice you will hear repeatedly from any small game developer is to just finish a project, no matter the size, no matter its problems. i loved 3kliksphilip's Game Making Journey series when he was making them and it's an idea he reinforces constantly throughout. you have to make something to prove to yourself that you can make something, and until you do, you'll have no framework for what's possible except the work of others, whom you are not. establishing that framework, learning what you're good at, what you enjoy, what you wanted to do and couldn't, is what makes the next one easier, and the next one, and the next one.
it's great advice for any creative endeavor. my biggest challenges in expressing myself, through writing and now through a game, have always been psychological. that what i'm doing isn't worth my time or others', that i couldn't possibly make something meaningful enough to justify the time and effort. there's no real remedy for that feeling other than to make it anyways so you can feel what it's really like.
1. development on Dredmor has resumed after more than a decade, and i think modding improvements are part of their overhauls - exciting! if you like traditional roguelikes, buy the complete edition, first of all, then switch to the latest beta branch. (then name the expansion pack. you have to!) go back
2. some people hate Inform 7. i don't. i just think they're wankers i think it's a capable engine with a number of use cases. if you want to make a text adventure or text-focused interactive
fiction, i wouldn't tell you not to choose Inform 7. if you want to use it because you think you'll avoid the need to learn to program, however, you will not. go back
3. and here's the second, which includes discussion on games made in the interim period (2022-2024) and the development of the youngest Videotome sister, Videotome Heartbreak. i have yet to read this. go back
4. i have no skin in the Homestuck game specifically, i didn't even get halfway through Act 5, but i do support transfem art and i think the impact it's had on the internet has been important and interesting. go back