What is the game university for?

I did not go to game design school -- not that I had a choice, since only a handful of game design programs existed when I attended college. Like many in the industry, I'm "self-taught" -- which is to say, I relied on informal learning from a network of creative communities and random online tutorials. Today, I teach in one of the better-rated and better-funded game design programs in the world. With my self-taught background, I'm often suspicious of the idea of formal technical education. So here's my experience with teaching game development for the past 5-6 years:

There's often very loud implications from students, parents, and industry developers that we, as universities, are never doing enough to prepare students for the "real world". This criticism exists alongside the skyrocketing cost of US higher education, the ivory tower elitism of academia, and a societal shift toward privileging "practical" "hard" skills like science and engineering, instead of "useless" "soft" skills like literature or ethics. This anxiety is understandable, but it also plays into a very politically conservative vision of universities: that we exist only to train a productive and compliant workforce.

Danette Beatty recently tweeted something that seems very reasonable and actionable, and her thoughtful thread started a long important conversation on generalism vs specialization and how we ought to teach game development... but a lot of people don't read beyond the first tweet in a Twitter thread so I'd like to get into why "set your students up with the skills to actually get jobs that are in demand in the industry" has been complicated for me as a game dev teacher.

A MAZE 2018 after-action report

This year I attended A MAZE 2018 in Berlin. It's still probably one of the best video game events in the world; it happens in one of the coolest places in one of the coolest cities around. In the day, you basically hangout in a beer garden and drink some surprisingly affordable beer. At night, hordes of punky post-apocalyptic Berliner teenagers hangout and dance. This unique audience and format makes it all feel pretty special, and I think this year's award show host Tim Rogers put it best: usually people at games events are frantically planning where they're going afterwards, but at A MAZE, the after-party is the festival itself, and many people often linger into the wee early hours of the morning in true Berlin fashion.

There's also a strong participatory focus at A MAZE. Each night, there was an open booth for anyone to plug into and DJ, and "open screens" for anyone to exhibit their projects. There were also stand-up comedy routines, hypertalks, and a "devolution" show featuring various old builds of Superhot to understand its 3-4 year dev cycle. In that spirit of experimentation, I ran a "democratic lighting workshop" where I solicited lighting suggestions from the audience, and then attempted to realize their designs in a Unity scene. We laughed and we learned!!!

But wait, that's not all...

Dispatches from GDC 2018

In keeping with a tradition I've done for GDC 2012 and GDC 2015, I like to try to condense general moods and topics at GDC. What happened there?...

Post-indiepocalyptic. In past years, I've remarked on the tension between AAA developers vs commercial indie devs vs non-commercial "artists" -- that tension isn't gone, but it's certainly not as big of an issue anymore. Everything everywhere is kind of terrible for everyone. So many people are making so little money that it's hard to distinguish their precarity from another precarity. Besides, a massive political shift is now underway in the form of...

Unionization. I was one of maybe 150 people who attended the unionization roundtable session. My live tweet thread is here if you want my version of what happened. Throughout GDC I heard so many stories that made me realize working conditions are worse than I imagined, and there's a shocking sense of resignation when I spoke to one AAA dev who predicted they were going to burnout with their next 100 hour workweek / 6 month crunch, like it was just this inevitable natural disaster that was definitely going to happen... As someone who trains students in game development, I guess I'm extremely concerned about throwing my students into this giant machine that will mercilessly devour them! (For what it's worth, the IGDA moderator Jen MacLean seems to have walked-back some of her anti-worker positions as a result of the roundtable.)

Generations. I don't know how a lot of other "established" indies feel, but this year when I went to a party or looked out into a crowd, I didn't recognize as many faces as I thought I would. Maybe this is just what happens in every industry, as more people burnout or find something better or in some cases even die. I spent a good amount of my GDC trying to meet new people, and that was utterly exhausting, but I'm still glad I made the effort, because this year felt...

Gayer? I met so many queer and trans people at GDC this year. And one night when I asked someone whether they were going to "the gay party", they asked me to clarify my question: "which gay party?" (!)... As always, I'm reluctant to praise diversity efforts because that implies diversity has been achieved and no more work is needed, but I did feel like there were generally more LGBTQ people everywhere at GDC, or at least more than before, and it was kind of nice.

Overall. Everyone was tired, but there was a sense that maybe it was worth staying.

Submit your impossible demands to #ManifestoJam by February 13

Just a brief note that a bunch of folks are doing a "Manifesto Jam" (which is maybe possibly inspired by my survey of manifestos in games blog post from last year) and there's about 1-2 days left to participate.

I even participated myself, writing a short screed called "KILL UNITY; WE ARE ENGINES." It was fun to try to figure out a specific aspect of games that I cared about, and to try to distill that into entertaining hyperbole. Remember: no nuance, no relativity, just pure belief! Go ahead and let your flag fly, and perch it on the swollen corpse of the old world order!

Here's the inspiring blurb, copy and pasted from the itch.io page:

THIS JAM IS FOR COLLECTIVELY UNCORKING OUR UTOPIAN ENERGY IN 2018

In times of crisis, uncertainty, conservatism and even just standard personal disappointment people overwhelmingly retreat to saying “be practical!” This doesn’t necessarily imply a way that is meaningfully better than any other but instead coerces you to chirpily go along with the way others are already comfortable doing it, or comfortable with you doing it, and keep and alternatives or resentments on priv.

Manifestos are important precisely because they are impractical. Whether positive or negative, whether embracing potential worlds or outright rejecting the one you’re in. They are visionary, they demand, they refuse. Manifestoes can be of any scale, defining your personal aesthetic or how to fix the entire world, but they cannot be satisfied.

Lol we're all poor

Some recent posts on indie dev failure have been going around lately -- Introversion Software talks about how their experimental exploration game "bombed in a big way", and also Cliff Harris argues "Your Indie Game Will Flop And You Will Lose Money", while Greg Wohlwend writes in his Tumbleseed postmortem about how they will likely never recoup their development costs, and each collaborator earned maybe $10 / hour. You can also connect these threads back to Hugh Monahan's Full Indie 2016 talk "What Scuttled Brigador's Launch", as well as Daniel Cook's theory of "minimum sustainable success" right around when the Indiepocalypse talk was in full gear. I think it's fair to say that the general mood in commercial indie game dev land has been kind of dark for the past few years, and it's getting darker.

I've written in the past about how I don't expect to make a living off of my games. I give away my gay sex games for free because (a) they're short-form games in a market that demands "replay value" even though people don't even touch most of their Steam libraries, (b) I don't want to invest all my time and hope into commercializing it, just to earn like $5k a year if I'm lucky, which does not go far in NYC, (c) when an indie game has poor sales, then that often becomes the game's entire legacy forever. I don't want the conversation around my games to orbit around the awkward pity of my SteamSpy numbers! To me, there's a certain peace of mind in not trying to make the next gay sex minecraft blockbuster happen.

And yes this is totally a weird defense mechanism on my part. I understand that everyone has a different living situation, and I'm not holding myself up as a role-model to emulate. We all have different ways of working in games, but personally I feel like I can't access the same tools or methods as successful commercial devs, so why should I bother trying? If Cliff Harris and Greg Wohlwend can barely make it work, what chance do I have?... I want you to understand why I ask this question:

Why is it so important for us to make our living from selling our games? Why can't we make our living from doing something else?

Against simpler times

Years ago, I wrote about a hypothetical 2013 Queer Feminist Agenda for games. What an innocent time that was! Back then, I argued that we needed to pursue industry-wide reform, build-up theories of queer games, and combat gay apathy about queer politics.

Obviously a lot of that didn't really pan out, and now the world feels totally different: since 2013, Gamergate, Ferguson, Pulse, and Trump all happened, to say the least. Many people have now left video games for greener pastures, or have taken on more urgent politics beyond games... and anyway, Twitter just feels so much more stressful now. It's honestly kind of hard for me to still care about video games like I did back then. (Did we really use Twitter to argue about formalism in games? That's what we used Twitter for? Wow.)

Four years ago, we were talking about #1ReasonWhy, and GDC started the Advocacy track. Did any systemic reform actually happen? Did the industry end up hiring and retaining more women and black people? Did it get better for minorities? Some good-intentioned straight white male allies probably believe that "we won" because several games at E3 have black women in them. But beyond video game characters, I still feel like we're still having the same old conversations about the same old basic shit. The "discourse" feels extremely stagnated. It's hard to feel like there's any progress when every new Milkshake Duck of the Month pulls us back to basic questions like "wait why is it bad to harass women again?" and then suddenly the gamers are torn between supporting women / minorities vs. liking games about Blade Runner. As I've argued before, games probably aren't going to get "better" through this kind of desperate moral math.

Four years ago, we were also talking about a "queer games scene" and thinking about how to direct that momentum. For a variety of reasons, that energy ended up dissipating. On the plus side, there are definitely more people doing this work now, which is good, but there's also much less appetite for concentrating it into a "scene", which hurts our visibility and solidarity. Well, at least there's now a loose body of thinking and theory about queerness in games? I contributed to a new book literally called Queer Game Studies, which came out of the first Queerness and Games conference in 2013. When people ask what "queer games" are, I can now point to that book and event, even though it doesn't really feel so urgent to me anymore.

These days, I imagine a lot of us are very tired and disappointed, and I get it, and yeah I feel it too.

But however we feel, we definitely shouldn't nostalgize that supposedly simpler time, that now-mythical era before monthly milkshake ducks and anime frog nazis. That promise of 2013 (or 2012, or 2011, or 2010, etc.) is long gone and we can never go back. Instead, we must forge new kinds of promises and new kinds of trust.

We're still alive. We can still make new energy, new movements, and new alignments. And yeah, it won't feel the same. It won't feel like what we had before, or even what we think we had before. But I promise you, at the very least, whatever it is -- it will be ours.

The war in heaven: a three-dimensional VR culture clash

Virtual reality is a weird collaboration between several different fields / industries, and each practice brings its own assumptions and baggage. When I go to VR events and conferences away from the influence of games, I often feel bewildered and confused by the different language and norms.

One time I was at a businessy VR event near Wall Street and some tech-biz guy said he had a "VR-ready industrial robot" deployed in a warehouse, and would any angels [investors] be interested in taking a tour? I was so confused (what the hell is a VR-ready industrial robot?) so I joked aloud, "is it a sex robot?" -- but no one else reacted at all, they just continued with the conversation and asked him about market caps or something, as if I didn't even say anything! Not even a pity smirk or furrowed brow or roll of the eyes!

This is part of a larger skirmish about language, and about how to talk about VR. The PC manufacturers have adopted "VR-ready" as a euphemism for "expensive gamer computer"... In tech, you have to be able to refer to an investor as an "angel" without laughing and bursting into flames. These are kind of trivial examples that don't seriously impede communication, but I do think they hint at how we're trying to shape cultures and norms for VR. There's not even agreement about whether to call VR "VR" -- maybe VR is just a subset of "AR" (augmented reality), but really those are both just subsets of "MR" (mixed reality) -- or maybe let's unify under the recent umbrella term "XR" (x-reality?)... terminology and labels and language matters.

And since angels are involved, I guess this is a war in heaven.

Theorizing local games cultures in a post-TIGSource era

Colin Northway tweeted this about a week ago:

This GDC I strongly felt there's a large movement of young indies that I know nothing about.

Is there a cultural nexus I can visit?

— ColinNorthway (@ColinNorthway) March 8, 2017

As Colin implies, I suspect there is actually no real equivalent of a central "cultural nexus" like TIGSource today. In fact, I've been in on the ground floor of several attempts to make new TIGSource-likes, such as Super Friendship Club and Makega.me, and both of them eventually petered-out in the end for one reason or another. I'm still not sure why, but maybe it's possible that internet forums are a poor fit for what we need these days?

The indie games moment arrived, and has now stabilized into a satellite commercial industry of the game industry. We don't need a central place like TIGSource to imagine it or to advocate for indies to exist. Commercially indie showcase events like Day of the Devs, The MIX, and Indie Megabooth have been been running for a while and will probably keep running.

Today, what would be a public game organization's "mission" now? Everyone has so many different needs and concerns. It's kind of absurd that we even imagined one global "public" that TIGSource was supposed to serve? Local games community problems here in New York City are very different from local problems in, say, Pittsburgh or Capetown or Teheran or Shanghai. One single internet place cannot hope to address all of that.

Many local communities and friend groups have Slacks and chatrooms, but most of these are private and unlisted -- they don't have the "public" face that TIGSource provides / provided. What, are you going to invite Colin Northway to your Slack now? Even if he accepted the invitation, he likely wouldn't stay very long, because Slack requires constant (hourly? minute-by-minute?) engagement and labor to function as a community -- and it'd still be difficult for Colin to understand the tone of your Slack, or what it's really about.

To me, a public games culture should serve two functions: (1) help a local community cohere together, and (2) articulate that community's voice(s) and concerns to the rest of the world.

Call for games / installations: Now Play This 2017 in London, England

I highly encourage any designers and developers reading this to submit their games and things for Now Play This:

Now Play This is a festival of experimental game design, showcasing some of the most interesting games and playful work being made around the UK and the world. It will run for the third time at Somerset House in London from 7-9 April, 2017, as part of the London Games Festival. There’ll be an exhibition of games running throughout, plus special events including a board games afternoon, a strange controllers showcase, and, on Friday, a day for discussion between practitioners. Tickets will be available from February 2017.

It is a curated show, but they're also open to submissions and contributions. There's "a small honorarium of £75 for work [... they] also cover limited travel and production costs." Here's the basic brief, which seems to encompass, "basically anything interesting":

We’re interested in everything you can play: videogames, boardgames, street games, performances, paintings or drawings that invite you to play while you look, responsive sculptures, artist-designed toys, interactive installations, games for one person, games for twenty, things that probably aren’t technically games but never mind, strange contraptions, unreleased work, old favourites. Our 2015 and 2016 lineups given an idea of what Now Play This is like, but for 2017 we’re particularly interested in:

• Games that look at landscape in an interesting way
• Games that experiment with duration – very short games, games that build up gradually over time, games that are different depending on when you play them
• Games that were never made: thought experiments, doomed proposals, prototypes that never received a public release
• Play objects: things – digital or physical – that invite players to invent their own games or decipher the rules of the object and its interactions
• Games around embodiment which consciously consider the physical existence of the person playing
• Games with strange controllers
• Games that can take place in the outdoor areas of Somerset House

We’re also particularly interested in work that uses paper in interesting ways, or that’s fun to play as well as watch, or which can accommodate a large number of players (whether through short play sessions or many simultaneous players).

Last year, they featured my dick pic game Cobra Club HD in their exhibition, and I'm told lots of giggling moms hogged the kiosk and kept shooing their kids away. Sounds really fun! If you're in London, make sure you don't miss it!

A progressive future for VR: why VR is already getting worse, and how to make it better

Last time, I wrote about how I think of game culture as too conservative and too product-oriented to truly change or redirect toward more artistic ends -- and I confessed that over the next few years, I'm going to start transitioning out of working in games, and more into"virtual reality." Why? First, let's talk about what's happening in VR right now.

The audience isn't really flocking to VR yet. Only about ~0.21% of Steam users have Vive headsets, which means about ~200,000 users in the entire world. This slow VR adoption makes sense, considering how the Vive is still really expensive at $800.00, and there's still a lot of unpleasantness to using VR, from simulation sickness to judder to obtrusive tethers, but these are all engineering problems that the industry thinks they know how to solve. In 2017, we'll start seeing tetherless third party headsets, and then in 2019-2020 one of the big three (Valve, Oculus, Sony) will presumably sell a technically-refined "VR Jesus" headset that will finally save us all... or maybe it'll just turn out to be another Kinect rotting in your closet.

Until then, even the most embarrassing VR evangelists are preaching patience for 3-5 more years. But it would be a huge mistake to "wait and see" until VR is a success or a total waste of time. Artists and queers and weirdos need to hit VR now, and hit hard, before VR culture ends up as conservative as the worst of gamer culture. Why is it worth saving?

Please nominate Radiator 2 for the "Whoaaaaaa Dude" category for the first annual Steam Awards!

Hello everyone! If you enjoy pointless exercises of internet democracy, as well as artistic depictions of male sexuality, then please consider nominating Radiator 2 for the "Whoaaaaaaa Dude" category for the first ever annual Steam Awards!

To nominate Radiator 2, simply visit the Radiator 2 Steam store page and log in to your Steam account. Once you're logged in, just click the big purple box button below the video embed, and select the "Whoaaaaaaaa Dude" category.

Thanks everyone for your support! Tell your friends! Let's make Steam sexy again! Resist capitalism!

Games exhibitions and talks in NYC and Vancouver, Oct 28 - Nov 2

My new year's resolution for 2016 was to do fewer events and focus more on finishing my projects... so I guess that's why I'm doing 4 different events across 2 different cities over the next week or so:

On Friday night (October 28), we're running the 7th annual No Quarter exhibition, NYU Game Center's free video game party that I curate. The RSVP list just got a few more open slots added, but if you don't register in time, you can always arrive on the tail-end (at like 10-11pm) and hopefully it'll clear up by then. (Free, RSVP required.)

On Saturday night (October 29) the night after, I'll be doing a quick casual artist talk at ArtCade Con, an independent game festival around the East Village in NYC. There'll be lots of cool great games there, some of them fresh from a tour at Fantastic Arcade, so it should be a pretty exciting night. ($5-$16, use promo code 'PANELS' to get 2 for $20)

Then the week after, I fly to Vancouver for, like, one and a half days. It's a very brief whirlwind visit, unfortunately.

That Wednesday (November 2nd) I'll be giving a talk "You Can Have Gay Sex in Video Games And Eat It Too" as part of the UBC Noted Scholars Lecture Series hosted by the Social Justice Institute. I'll be talking about how I view the problem / question of "sex games" in relation to wider video game culture -- like, in a sense, Overwatch is probably the most popular sex game ever made? What does that mean for how games approach sexuality? (Free, RSVP recommended.)

Later that same night, I'll be hanging out at cool hip Vancouver pop-up alt-arcade Heart Projector run by some fantastic alt-games folks, where I've curated a selection of games about "first person drifting". I'll also be on-hand to readily complain about Civilization 6, so I hope to see my Vancouver readers there? (To be honest, I'm not actually sure where the exhibition is, but I guess you should sign-up for their newsletter to find out where and when the show is!)

Phew. Busy busy busy. I'll make time for this urinal game after this week, I promise.

No Quarter 2016, October 28th in New York City

I currently curate No Quarter, an annual games exhibition sponsored by NYU Game Center. We basically pay 4 game designers to make whatever they want (and they keep ownership over whatever they make) and then fly them to New York City for a big fun party.

This year the party is in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the current street art capital of the city, and we've commissioned Brendon Chung, Holly Gramazio, Catt Small, and Stephen Clark to make awesome games for us.

It's going to be a fun night, I hope you can join us. Entry is free and open to the public, but RSVP is required.

Why I am one of the most banned game developers from Twitch, and 3 steps they can take to fix their broken policy

EDIT, 14 July 2016: this original post has been cross-posted (with a few additional excerpts, for context) to Polygon.

A few days ago, Twitch banned my newest release Radiator 2 from all broadcast by anyone throughout their entire site. This is the third release of mine that they've banned. I am now the 3rd most banned game developer from Twitch (or perhaps the 2nd most banned, if you count each part of Radiator 2 separately).

I'm no stranger to Twitch game bans, but this is new even for me: the games bundled in Radiator 2 are actually kinda old! For the past year and a half of press coverage, interviews, game festivals, art exhibitions, and viral videos, these games were OK to broadcast on Twitch. I had thought I found a safe ground of "acceptable sexuality" (an extremely dangerous concept in of itself) but with this move, they've now banned basically everything I've made. Now, nowhere is safe for me as a creator.

What's too gay for them, what's too sexual for them? Why did they change their mind when I re-mastered my games and put them on Steam?

I have no idea, and that's the biggest problem: Twitch never says anything. No e-mail, no notification, no rationale, no reason, no pity tweet. Am I just supposed to keep refreshing the ban list page to see if they banned me, for every single game I make, forever?

This is humiliating and dehumanizing treatment, and I wish Twitch would stop it.

Working with custom ObjectPreviews and SkinnedMeshRenderers in Unity

Unity's blendshape controls -- basically just a list of textboxes -- were going to cause me a lot of pain. After wrestling with broken AnimationClips for my previous attempt at facial expressions in my game Stick Shift, I decided to actually invest a day or two into building better tools for myself, inspired partly by Valve's old Faceposer tool for Source Engine 1.

To do that, I scripted the Unity editor to draw a custom inspector with sliders (based on Chris Wade's BlendShapeController.cs) along with an interactive 3D face preview at the bottom of the inspector.

The workflow I wanted was this:

Report from the field: A MAZE 2016

I was told to look out for things that are stereotypically representative of Berlin -- a poster for a "party against racism", a nearby music venue called "Suicide", a group of children walking a large dog on a rope. Berlin seems a bit like the nostalgic ideal of San Francisco or New York City that 30-40-somethings routinely mourn to any nearby insolent millenials -- because Berlin is relatively cheap, young, and raw. It's basically the place for young creative people to be right now.

A MAZE 2016 began with festival director Thorsten Storno decrying the business-ification of indie games and dominance of commercial attitudes in festivals, and arguing for the necessity of non-commercial spaces in games. Then, literally, flamethrowers began shooting up pillars of fire behind him.

This is a very different tone from most US games festivals, which often try to accommodate monetization-types and commercial indies alongside non-commercial artists and students. There is no such pretense here. Here, there are no posh "meet with Sony" events, no chicken caesar wraps sponsored by Microsoft, not even any bored attendees clutching their Nintendo DS -- instead, that kind of stuff is at "Quo Vadis", a nearby industry-oriented conference that's named after the final dungeon in a Final Fantasy game.

So there's a funny "purity" to A MAZE. It knows what it wants to be, and it has the space and resources to actually be that thing. And apparently that thing is a bunch of artists and game makers huddled around a garbage can fire, clutching tepid 3 dollar beers as the distinct smell of ambient-disco-trance wafts through the air at 3 AM...

I think I kinda miss it already.

Radiator Blog: (belated) Sixth Year Anniversary

In keeping with tradition, I do a round-up of this blog's "notable" posts from the past year, and offer a bit of reflective commentary. This year, it arrives about a month late, because I forgot. (Oops.) As always, past years' roundups are accessible here.

For 2015, I promised myself I was going to blog more regularly than in 2014. I started pretty strong for the first half of the year, but then my output began plummeting toward the end. (Oh well.) Here's to a bloggier 2016!

TALKS / PUBLICATIONS

• "We Are Drugs: on speculative dev tools and psychedelic hologram futures"
  (IndieCade East 2015) This talk surprisingly went ok, even though it involved live-demoing more than a dozen different weird tools for the audience. At the end, I combined output from all of the tools into a horrible cacophony, which was pretty fun to do.
• "Bodies, I Have In Mind"
  (ZEAL) I usually don't write in such a directly autobiographical / "personal" way, so this was a bit of a change for me, but it was an honor to write for ZEAL, which is chock full of really great design analysis and critical essays.
• "Local Level Design, and a history / future of level design"
  (GDC 2015, Different Games 2015) I got to be part of the Level Design in a Day track at GDC 2015, which was an amazing experience. I later drastically edited down that talk for a much shorter theory-focused talk for Different Games, which I now treat as the authoritative version.
• "That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve" ("Sex Games")
  (GaymerX3) I delivered a keynote about indie gay sex games to a diversity-focused fan convention, where I discussed 25+ different non-mainstream games that are actually about sex, rather than sex as a brief outcome or mini-game.

The limits of a conceptual VR student game; and what would a "better" game about 9/11 look like?

The internet has been abuzz about "8:46", "a narrative driven experience designed for virtual reality, which makes you embody an office worker in the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 events."

The game itself suffers from a lot of problems. If I were to ignore the politics, there's plenty of production values to critique -- the characters have blobby sculpts, inconsistent lighting, and stilted voice acting -- the particles are really really awkward -- and the one thing I like is the floorplan, especially the cramped corner office you begin in, which feels like a pretty authentic detail of old NYC office buildings.

But who are we kidding, this game is totally a political work, and it is much more generous to the developers to interpret it that way. Most people are just going to talk about this game instead of actually playing it, which is OK, and that's what compels me to write about it: I think this is a very flawed conceptual work, and I want to talk about why that is.

(1) TECHNOLOGY. Using virtual reality was not a good idea for this project, especially in this early generation of VR where it is mostly positioned as a nascent platform and consumer market that desperately needs to prove itself. Anything using VR in these early years is, inherently, saying, "look at me, I'm using VR!"

That's an OK thing to say, but it centers the technology instead of what you're saying with the technology, which is probably not what you want to do for a 9/11 game that's supposedly about respect for the dead rather than how this cool new peripheral? To be clear, I think you could make a game that powerfully critiques Western attitudes toward the dead and who is allowed to talk about the dead; I don't think this is that game.

Tips for implementing / coding an in-game options or pause menu functionality in Unity

 

I recently implemented an in-game options menu in Unity. Mine looks something like the thing above. A surprising amount of the required functionality is already implemented in Unity, you just have to write some code to hook into it. In the cases when Unity didn't already have a static variable for a particular setting, like mouse sensitivity or menu language, then I'd implement my own static variable that worked with a specific PlayerPrefs key.

Anyway, here's a bunch of workflow / specific API calls that I found very useful when I did it...

On my games being twice banned by Twitch

My newest game, Rinse and Repeat, was banned from all broadcast on Twitch about 4 days after it was released. It joins my previous game, Cobra Club, which was banned shortly after its release as well. I am currently one of the most banned developers on Twitch.

On one hand, it is extremely validating as an artist to be acknowledged as "dangerous" -- thanks, Twitch. On the other hand, the Twitch policy about sex and nudity is shitty and I'm going to complain about why I hate it and feel it's unfair, and also really unhealthy for video games as an artform.