Attend the 2015 Queerness And Games Conference at UC Berkeley, October 17-18

QGCon 2015 at UC Berkeley has just put up their list of speakers and sessions. If you'll be around the Bay Area that weekend (in about a month!) then I highly recommend attending, it's a compelling mix of game developers and academic theorists, and there's no other games conference quite like it. Here's some interesting-sounding sessions:

• “Soft-Skinned, Hard-Coded: Straight/White/Washing in Video Games”
• “Witches and Wardrobes: Femme Play in Games and the Development of Be Witching”
• “Games of Death: Playing Bruce Lee”
• “Sex Appeal, Shirtless Men, and Social Justice: Diversity in Desire and Fanservice in Games”
• “Queer Avatar Construction Leads to Homonormative Play”
• “Affection Games in a World That Needs Them”
• “Masculinity in Late Final Fantasy”
• “Infinite Play in Games of Love, Sex and Romance”
• “Degamification”
• “Writing and Selling Queer Bots: Sext Adventure Design Post Mortem”
• (... and so many more!)

Registration is free and open to the public, and they also accept donations in the form of "sponsor tickets" -- please support the communities and institutions you want to see in games!

Scripting the Unity Editor to automatically build to Windows / OSX / Linux and packaging the files in ZIP files.

I'm getting ready to release my next gay sex game, which means a lot of builds and testing. This game, in particular, has a lot of particular framework and infrastructure that involves copying over specific files directly into the built data folder. I don't want to have to copy over the files manually over and over, so I bit the bullet and decided to write an editor script that automatically does all this stuff for me, for all 3 desktop platforms that I'm targeting. This is really nice because it saves me a lot of time when making builds, and it also makes it more the whole process more foolproof since it prevents me from forgetting any files -- Unity is automated to include them for me!

Here are the main snippets + explanations of those parts of the pipeline, with the full script at the end of this post...

Unfinished business

On "The Loch" and anti-busybody small open world games

The Loch is a 2013 Scottish fishing RPG by Mitch Alexander. In it, you "fight" fish in turn-based JRPG battles symbolizing the experience of fishing. There's a variety of biomes to explore, each with different species of fish to catch, and it all takes place over a series of days with variable weather / variable NPC behaviors based on the weather.

It's pretty rough around the edges, partly due to short development time constraints (it was originally made for a 7 day Fishing Game jam) and partly due to the limitations of reskinning RPG Maker. There's very little tutorializing, and many core interactions don't feel very intuitive. No one really tells you you're supposed to go all the way south to advance to the next day and heal up, or that you have to equip X and then use skill Y to do Z... in this way, it departs a great deal from typical JRPG or RPGMaker game conventions.

But that departure from convention is also refreshing. Though "open world" carries connotations of large expensive 3D worlds, I'd like to expand the bounds of that genre and discuss The Loch as a "small open world" game. What marks an open world game is the repeated traversal of a space, and reflecting on how that space (or the player) changes over time. In this case, the world is a small Scottish lakeside village where everyone speaks in charming accents and encourages you to kick back and slow down.

Game Development Studies reading list, Fall 2015

In the vein of "Platform Studies" or "Code Studies", we might consider a "Game Development Studies" ("Console Studies?") -- a field of research investigating the technical and material aspects of video games, from early prototypes to production code to distribution. How have various processes of game development changed over time? How does that influence what games are, or how they are perceived?

Here are six books that, I think, do much of that work:

"Pillow Talk" keynote with Naomi Clark and Nina Freeman, at Indiecade 2015, October 22-25 in Culver City, CA

Me and fellow designers Naomi Clark and Nina Freeman will be running a keynote session at Indiecade 2015 tentatively called "Pillow Talk" -- in it, we'll be discussing relationships and intimacy in games. (Press release is here.) If you'll be around, come over and say hey, even if I'll mostly be busy stuffing as many free burgers as possible into my pockets at the Sony party.

Massive Chalice as pre-apocalyptic existential game industry dread

(SPOILER WARNING: this post has some not-really-that-important spoilers for Massive Chalice.)

Massive Chalice is a pretty OK game -- it's an XCOM with a much better base-building / squad-management component, where you can also convert squad members into resources -- collective XP buffs, faster upgrade times, bigger numbers. The same song and dance as any strategy game, but it also tries much more new stuff than the average strategy game. You breed your squad members like Pokemon, and when they age out of battles, you recycle them for new breeding stock or upgrades. It's an ideal commercial indie project, 50% old "solved" systems and 50% new systems.

So it's jarring to me that it averaged 6/10s 7/10s from games press (and probably not super-great sales) considering how much it tries to do and with relative success at it, this is at least an 8-out-of-10er, but I can also understand why gamers would look at this and think "it looks cheap." Here are all the checkboxes that Massive Chalice refuses to tick:

"Bodies, I Have In Mind" at ZEAL

My piece for Aevee Bee's micro-games-e-zine ZEAL is out. It's called "Bodies, I Have In Mind", and it's about my body, other people's bodies, video game bodies, gay marriage, physics, and a bit of Ovid quotation for good measure.

It actually took a pretty long time to write, because when I write about games I usually maintain some distance and don't include too much of my personal life, so it was challenging (but fun) for me to try to change my usual mode. I hope it's not too terrible of a read.

If you like my writing for ZEAL, and want to support more work like it by diverse authors, then please consider donating to the ZEAL Patreon, which commissions this work.

"That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve" at GX3, 12 December 2015 in San Jose, CA

Hello! My "Boss of Honor" keynote talk at upcoming gay game convention GX3 is called "That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve" -- in it, I will be talking about my gay sex games (hopefully I'll be done with 2 more by December) and connecting it with a rich history of other gay sex games.

The implication is that we shouldn't beg for crumbs from the AAA industry in hopes that they'll allow "us" the occasional cutscene or NPC or crumb of representation... the games we want to see already exist, and they are made by queer artists that the community needs to support.

If you're interested in hearing about this stuff, come see me in San Jose on the Saturday of GX3.

(And if you're interested in repeatedly giving birth to fully grown wolves, play Eva Problems' excellent "Sabbat.")

The molten rituals of Hylics

Hylics, by Mason Linderoth, is one of the best RPGs made in the last decade. Imagine a game finely distilled so as to consist solely of the weird funk of Earthbound plus some David Cronenberg technoflesh plus the young dread of Gumby... and when you've completely imagined that, now look in your weathered dusty hands to find the freshest nugget you've ever seen.

You should make it your duty to play it, and it's (refreshingly) short for an RPG at 2-3 hours, so go to it. (WARNING 1: SPOILERS FOLLOW. WARNING 2: LOTS OF HYLICS GIFS...)

A game is a brain is a forest

I just read this article about how plants are intelligent. It's a classic philosophical problem. Is a brain in a jar any different from a plant, and what exactly is intelligence or consciousness? Recent articles about how "plants talk to each other using an internet of fungus" are in vogue with recent thinking that corporations are dystopian artificial intelligences that have enslaved human society, or that we have to generally decentralize human-ness in human thought. The argument here is that self-sustaining complexity, usually in a network structure that resembles a brain (not that mere human brains are so great or whatever) must produce similar effects, so a brain is at least as complex as the internet or a forest or global capitalism.

Once something becomes boring, it is no longer complex because you have reduced it to boredom. So maybe another word for self-sustainingly complex is "interesting"... and, well, I think good games are interesting. Maybe a game is like an internet, or a brain, or a forest, or some shit?

PSA: free (and COMPLETE) photorealistic 3D character workflow from Mixamo

Mixamo got bought out by Adobe... as part of the merge, they've turned off all their billing systems... which means almost everything they have is now free.

"Fuse" is their (free) character modeling / texturing / creation tool that is miles ahead of the old Autodesk Character Generator -- from there, you send the character mesh out to their Auto-Rigger cloud service (also free) with 60+ bone skeletons and facial blend shape support -- and with every (free) account you register, you get 20 (free) animations, and you can potentially make unlimited free accounts. This is a complete character art solution from mesh to skin weights to rigging to animation, for free. It's pretty impressive, and you can easily make a game that looks like a prestige AAA FPS from late 2013. (These assets don't have the accuracy of photoscanned models or DX11 procedural hair, but they're very well crafted.)

Tentatively, they're going to shutdown this infrastructure on December 31, 2015 (I think, according to a cryptic e-mail I got a few months ago) when they've finalized more of the merge with Adobe, so make sure you grab as much stuff as possible while you can.

To celebrate, look at the brunch hunk I made in Fuse (above) and exported out to Unity. Again, it's pretty high resolution stuff with no restrictions. Make use of it for your games while you can.

I'm documenting this resource as a "PSA" because making the tools of photorealism accessible and widespread helps (a) sabotage game industry machinery that privileges fidelity as something valuable, (b) re-contextualizes realism as a stylistic choice rather than a "default" marketing tactic.

Have fun!

When failure sneaks into stealth games

The last moment of my last Invisible Inc run on "Expert Plus"; don't read the game text if you don't want spoilers

I'm facing my last obstacle on the last mission on the hardest difficulty of Invisible Inc. The past 5-7 hours of this campaign, and last 30-or-so hours of play over the last few weeks, have all led to this moment. There's a dozen alerted guards between me and victory... can I make it, or will I fuck it all up?

The last time I was this engaged by a stealth game, it was the first time I played Thief 1 (1998) in 2002... a pirated version I downloaded off Kazaa, with all the cutscenes, music, and voice-over removed to save on file size. What was left was the most avant-garde game I had ever played, a world of footsteps and silence. Between then and now -- Splinter Cells were okay but not my bag, Thief 3 was a sea of mediocrity with a single shining jewel, Dishonored was okay I guess, those bits in The Last of Us quickly wear out their welcome, and Thief 4 was rather unfortunate -- "stealth" has felt a little dead for the last 13 years.

If we look back at the systems design theory behind Thief 1, we can figure out who murdered stealth.

Some recent exhibitions

Some recent sightings of some sex games out in the wild... approach with caution.

Hurt Me Plenty at Two5Six in New York City. (May 2015)

Stick Shift at "Play Spectacular" at the Wellcome Collection in London. Curated by Holly Gramazio. (July 2015)

Succulent and Cobra Club in the back of a U-Haul box truck (and Stick Shift, in the driver's seat!) at Lost Horizon Night Market in Brooklyn (Bushwick). Curated by Stephen Clark + Babycastles. (July 2015)

Thanks to all the curators and events for having me! There's also a few more shows / appearances lined-up, so keep your eyes peeled...

Stick Shift has been Greenlit on Steam!

Thanks to all your support, Stick Shift has been greenlit for distribution on Steam! The gamers have spoken!!! Now to do this giant mess of paperwork and to figure out how to navigate the Steamworks infrastructure! (... Steamworks being a popular North American gay bathhouse chain, of course)

There is currently no ETA for this release. I've never implemented Steam infrastructure in a game before. I also want to bundle some extra games with this game, and it'll take some time to figure out any permissions / get the systems to play nicely with each other instead of deleting each others data.

Any ideas on what the game's name on Steam should be? I'm thinking: "Stick Shift GOTY Edition"