"Cheeky Designs: How to Make a Video Game About Spanking The Heck Out of a Dude" at NYU Poly Game Innovation Lab, December 11

I'm giving a short tech talk about making my hunk-spanking game on December 11th at the NYU Poly School of Engineering's "Game Innovation Lab" in Downtown Brooklyn. Here's a description:

This talk will discuss the design development of "On Your Knees" "Hurt Me Plenty", one of the very few video games ever made about spanking men. How do you adapt concepts from BDSM culture into a game? How do you translate the politics of consent and power exchange into game code, 3D animation, and motion interfaces? What if video games imagined sex as an interactive process instead of a cutscene "reward" dispensed by a talking vending machine?

I'll talk how each part of the game works / why I made it the way I made it / interesting questions this kind of work brings up. Hope to see you there if you're in the New York City area!

December 11, 2014 at 7:00 PM
5 Metrotech Center
Brooklyn, NY 11201

I've never made anything viral before

At this time of writing, this Vine now has 540,000+ loops and 19,000+ notes on tumblr... and my life is pretty much exactly the same. It's so exciting -- the numbers are so big! On the other hand, they're just numbers.

Postcards from: "Discipline and Punish"

Here are some work in progress images / footage for "Discipline and Punish", a BDSM spanking game using the Leap Motion. It'll also go into questions of consent, and it'll be mildly educational for those who know nothing about BDSM culture. Character model by Kris Hammes, character shader by James O'Hare.

On branching dialog editors and narrative design tools

I was prototyping a game concept with branching dialogs for conversations and/or CYOA story events, so I started looking at various solutions on the Unity Asset Store. Dialoguer looked the most decent, but generally all of them just made too many assumptions or enforced bad workflows, and seemed to ignore what made Twine so accessible.

So I've decided to make "Bramble", my own editor plug-in and system for Unity! Here are some factors in its design:

Notes on working with Source SDK 2013 Singleplayer Base

I've been working with Source SDK 2013 base for the past few months, and I thought I'd share some notes on workflow for any future modders who google to this post:

• If you are making a simple mod that uses default Half-Life 2 features, then you do NOT have to compile your own binaries. You can just tell Steam to use the ones that come pre-compiled by Valve from the already included "sourcetest" mod instead. Steam automatically downloads the correct binaries for the client's platform when they download the Source SDK 2013 Base -- which means you presumably get free and painless Windows / OSX / Linux support, as well as any new changes Valve merges into the codebase... As far as I can tell, most of the basic Half-Life 2 entities work in sourcetest, though env_screeneffect seem to be broken due to some missing shaders.