(hi guys,I am still trying to write about my daily story in english:-)
Can I write the new story of …?
I say I am professional game designer,but I feel I suspect my self often.
I had a strong frustration recently.
Because I could not get new inspiration for adventure game.
I was thinking next piece ,something new ideas of like moon or like Chulip past few months.
But I was not able to get something new idea.
Starbucks coffee dose not help me at all.
I was thinking in starbucks of shinjuku3choume. and I was thinking in my house a lot.
It was so difficult for me.
My brain melt down quickly.And,I slept automatically like death.
And I did not notice my head became like volcanos.
And…One day…
My Head exploded suddenly!
After explosion of my head
I thought I need help of my friends for making my head quiet.
I e-mailed to fellows and We had a meeting.
It was very long time.
First of all we were discussing about something new concept.
We had a various theme .
But,one guy said to me “I want you to talk about what you like to do now.”
“now? in real life?”
And I was talking about my ambition on the road in real life. And I started to talk about trauma of the past unconsciously.
And I vomited all what I was feeling.
For example,I was talking about dissatisfaction of Chulip, dissatisfaction moon,my childhood strange story,the story of communication with animals ,trauma of sex, major incident of adult era, and the strange peoples I have met in my life.
And strangely enough, I got one inspiration from this discussing.
“I should start to write about it. Even though I do not know it can become videogame or not.”
Today I read this article aboutWarface and how Crytek designed the in-game “female skins” based on regional audience demand—the result being purposefully sexualized female 3D models, of course. I refuse to believe that warped proportions, pearly flawless white skin and unrealistic cup size is actually how the majority of people on earth would “demand” the female body be represented. There is nothing wrong with a sexy woman, don’t get me wrong, but there is a clear bias and thus a problem here. After all, “sexy” is not a standard—what someone perceives as sexy is very personal. What we need is more diversity in the representation of the female body. That said, I want to see how WOMEN THEMSELVES want to be represented in video games—each and every one of them. This is a call to all people identifying as women—show us how you want to be represented so that these game developers don’t have to rely on “regional audience demand,” whatever that means.
This is a call to people who identify as women: submit art that expresses how you want yourself or women in general to be represented in video games.
This blog will accept anything from illustration to writing to video. Also, send games and games art that you think does a good job representing women. I’m especially interested in drawings and 3D models that show explicitly how diverse representation can be.
People who identify as male have asked me if they may submit as well—if you received direct input from a person identifying as a woman during the process of your artwork and have documentation of it, then feel free to run it by me. I’m really interested in how women want themselves to be represented, so having a woman’s input and direction during the process is the key part of the art this blog is attempting to explore.
Please specify exactly which parts of your e-mail you would like posted on the blog.
Also specify exactly how you want to be credited (e.g. anonymous, name, link to website, twitter etc).
I take no credit for any of the images and posts on this blog. I will not re-distribute any submissions beyond the initial posting. Any post will be deleted at the submitters request. For other questions or to request that your work be taken off the blog, please e-mail bustwaisthipbs@gmail.com.
If devs don’t ask us how WE want to be represented, then we need to show them ourselves.
Tin storage box from the German branch of Eberhard Faber. I’m uncertain as to the year, or if it was an anniversary product. Works perfectly well holding the smaller items:
i say this after having a wonderful time at IndieCade last week, and having just submitted my game Problem Attic to the IGF a few days ago.
the expectation placed on any so-called "indie game" to distinguish itself from the pack is much, much higher now. this might seem like a good thing, right? there are a lot more games now, so the stakes should be higher - and the games should be better, right? it, of course, depends on how you define "better". but this expectation has little to do with artistic or creative ambition and a lot to do with how professional-looking the game is. the end goal the forwarding of these games serves is to make "smaller games" become a new, viable, sustainable part of the games industry. everyone knows that Minecraft/Humble Bundle make tons of money, so a lot of people are pouring a lot of resources into getting in on that money.
this is a pretty violent shift from even five or six years ago, when a game like Passage was praised for being a unique achievement in game storytelling - where it was seen as a wildly left-field part of a new artistic vanguard. now it's becoming more apparent that a game like Passage was extremely lucky to benefit from there not being much else around to diminish it. now we can also see more clearly how conservative of the narrative of that game is in many ways - about a man and a woman and compromises they make, and how cliched the ideas behind it have become. now we can see how many games tried to be as artistically ambitious and less essentialist (i'm thinking of something like increpare's "Home") but never got nearly as much attention. now it would just look like a little experiment, one of many out there. it might get some coverage on a few indie gaming sites or get posted on freeindiegam.es and then that would be it. the conversation wouldn't sustain itself because there'd be something new to replace it in a week or less.
yes, it's easier to make a game than ever. the tools are much more accessible than they ever were before. and no, i'm not a person who believes that everyone making games (or art in general) is in any way bad at all. it's a wonderful thing, especially for the legions of the population who would otherwise be intimidated away from even attempting to try to make a game.
yet it's also hard to know in what spaces those games will be appropriately recognized and respected. things like the IGF and IndieCade might seem to be those spaces, but actually serve well those who have the ability to engage in a sustained PR to promote their games. this obviously benefits people with more resources and connections, who are almost universally not the type of people who would normally be scared away from making games. this is no secret. these festivals exist as a way to inject lifeblood into the games industry, or to legitimize games in the eyes of other industries like the film industry, not to subvert them.
festivals are supposed to be a bastion for new, ambitious developers to bring their game to a wider audience. but are festivals really developer friendly at all? for most developers, it's 95 dollars for the small hope that your game will reach a larger audience. except that it's more or less impossible for your game to be nominated unless you've waged an extended PR campaign for your game or are already a well-known developer. even for those who get in, they're expected to fly out to a conference and stay there (a flight which may or may not be paid for, other accommodations and food/drinks which almost certainly won't) and stand in front of a screen in a crowded expo floor for hours on end as people while people stumble their way through their game. this might be an acceptable sacrifice if there was just one festival - but there are many (the IGF being still the biggest) and there are a great number of games being exhibited at each of these festivals. each game is like a little tidbit, a little unit of ideas or concepts to be gorged on and eventually become absorbed into the industry. and so festival settings are fundamentally not served at all for slower or longer games - and particularly for text-based games. we don't value what these games may or may not have to offer. the nuances get glossed over because of the setting. we gorge on each one rapidly and leave. this is how we've been taught to treat videogames.
and personally, as someone who's designed a couple deliberately abstract games, there's nothing that sounds more like agony to me than being expected to explain and justify my game to any random person who walks by and plays it for five minutes. the Steam deal promised to developers nominated for last year's IGF was certainly a good thing, but that's only one festival of many - and a lot of the developers lucky enough to have the kind of PR clout to get in with the judges are also probably lucky enough to get on Steam without needing a nomination.
i admit it. some of these are my own realizations after designing a game (the aforementioned Problem Attic) that was in many ways unique and artistically ambitious, but i also recognized would not in any way be "festival-friendly". in itself, it might seem like a ridiculous idea that an artistically ambitious game wouldn't be "festival-friendly" - but in fact it makes perfect sense. festival jurors tend to self-consciously cherry-pick and reward the things with the most buzz. why? in order to make games more of a cultural event, for one - and to reward games which have managed to achieve some level of cultural penetration. there's also the practical matter of judges are going to naturally gravitate towards games or developers that they've already heard of, especially among the waves of games they haven't. and also to be what a good friend of mine calls a "photogenic indie" - something that's unique in maybe one or two ways but manages to overall have highly agreeable, unambiguous presentation. that's what people want to play, after all, right? they want the gloss, not the ugly, gross shit that shows its videogamey seams. that's what prominent members of the indie community or events like the IGF or IndieCade want to forward as examples of videogame expression.
i will say that IndieCade was in several ways a lovely, forward-thinking event. it made an effort to have events like Night Games that the public could attend (though the lines were way too long for them), and also stayed lax about checking badges, allowing people to go to talks they might not be able to get into if they really wanted to. but as far as the festival goes, i've also received some of the most condescending feedback i've ever had. here are the two worst offenders (click to make it larger):
one judge says i'm "asking too much of my audience", the other seems to interpret my very intentional aesthetic choices as the fact that i must be clearly an inept and/or confused beginner (that i'm female likely plays into this), or else i clearly wouldn't have made a game like this.
i want to be clear that i don't want to make it out like i'm an exception, or that this is just about me. in many ways i'm maybe pretty lucky. i have enough friends to where if i kept waging a public PR campaign i might actually be able to get recognized in spite of how strange the things i make are, or how unpopular some of the sentiments i express in writing are. but that's not the point. the point is to aspire to have some kind of fair chance for people who can't, or won't engage in this. the point is to emphasize the people who are really, truly doing the most ambitious and crazy and unique things with videogames, and not the ones who are friends with the most judges, or who are making the most "photogenic" games. and i don't think it's possible for this to happen in any real way in the climate of these festivals.
The other day I started playing Ace Attorney Investigations 2, thanks to a translation patch for the first two cases, and I was really enjoying the game. It was really great to play an Ace Attorney game again, especially one where I like the characters and writing so much.
I got to case two, and I was also enjoying that case quite a bit. Then I noticed something that made me incredibly uncomfortable.
The second case takes place largely in a prison where animal therapy is practiced. I actually like this, because I'm a big believer in rehabilitation over punishment. Wanting to punish someone for a crime is out of a desire for revenge, either on your own behalf or on behalf of the victim. I'd rather those people not hurt others anymore, even if that means I and others are denied our revenge.
Rehabilitation isn't practiced in America. Our justice system is very much one where justice equals revenge. To be perfectly honest, there are instances where I'd prefer perpetrators of a crime spend the rest of their days in prison, but it is specifically in cases where I do not think rehabilitation has proven effective yet. Until it does, I'd rather keep the people who cannot be rehabilitated apart from those they would harm. That said, even then, I don't believe anyone is helped by making prison a horrifyingly cruel experience.
So, returning to the game, it uses a form of rehabilitation and I support that. What made me uncomfortable is the rest of the setting. Animals are allowed to wander the prison freely. Prisoners are kept to their cells the vast majority of the time. Even then, I could forgive that, except for the line about how it's like a zoo except people are the ones in cages.
It was then that I noticed the signs. There are signs in front of cages that refer to the prisoners as tho they were zoo animals. One sign calls its prisoner "Species: Brutus Convictus" instead of by his actual name, and they talk about each prisoner's diet in the same way you would a zoo animal.
This is really upsetting. It's incredibly dehumanizing and the game isn't at all critical of hit. It's treated as just "more wacky Ace Attorney humor" and left at that. It could be used as commentary on the way prisons dehumanize prisoners, but instead dehumanizing prisoners is treated as a perfectly acceptable thing to do. "Isn't it funny?" the game seems to ask.
It's not funny. It's not funny for all sorts of reasons. It's not funny because it's gross and uncomfortable. It's not funny because the prison system we live with is gross and awful. It's not funny because you can't avoid thinking about the real life context of the dehumanizing prison system.
Yes, the Japanese justice system is undoubtedly different from that of the US. The main difference that I am aware of is that things are less likely to go to trial in Japan, but your chances of being found guilty in trial is much higher.
Perhaps Japan lacks the issue of privatized prison systems, where people are funneled into them for profit and the judges are bribed by the owners.
However, racism is certainly present in Japan. Sexism is certainly present in Japan. Transphobia is certainly present in Japan. With that in mind, I'd wager that chances are those bigotries intersect with the justice system in ways that hurt innocent people or even hurt guilty people in ways they should not be hurt. I doubt that another capitalist country with many of the same bigotries as our own has magically avoided doing some of the same awful things present in our own.
When I know that innocent people must certainly be hurt by the Japanese prison system, and that guilty people are surely being hurt by the Japanese prison system in ways that I would be disgusted by, then I can't just write off the dehumanizing of prisoners in Ace Attorney Investigations 2 on account of it not being an American game. It's reinforcing some of the thinking that hurts these prisoners, and treating the dehumanization of these prisoners as perfectly acceptable.
In short, Ace Attorney Investigations 2 does something really gross and awful, and I can't really imagine any sort of cultural context that would excuse it.
a lot of games and the media surrounding them have been lost forever. some of that ephemera has been thankfully captured, scanned, put online by armchair archivists. fan magazines, instruction manuals, art books, comics and trading cards and calendars, hint books, gamebooks. i’ve managed to accumulate whatever i could. recently – i’m avoiding details – one of the biggest sources of this stuff disappeared from the internet. leaving me with over 35 gigs of GAME HISTORY burning a hole in my hard drive.
no, really, my hard drive failed. i had to buy a new one.
meanwhile, the generous dana kipnis gave me some space to host an archive: not enough to hold thirty-five gigs, but hey, i decided, i can rotate stuff periodically. then colin marc wrote some quick python code to generate a list of links, and there was no reason not to do it.
ANNARCHIVE is now online! our first feature: the home of the underdogs gamebook collection, a bunch of gamebooks recovered from sarinee achavanuntakul’s late (but living) game archive site. sarinee is gaming’s first historian and archivist; it’s only fitting that annarchive be dedicated to her. check out the “be an interplanetary spy” series, a bunch of visual puzzle / comic gamebooks that attempted to ride the popularity of arcade videogames, and the fifth issue of diceman (a comic gamebook series), featuring a playable political cartoon starring ronald reagan and illustrated by hunt emerson.
Dickadoodle is a drawing game that I made with my friend Colin Capurso for Molyjam Deux, inspired by the following Peter Molyneux quote:
“Some people leave artwork, some people do rude things, other people then turn those rude things into nice things.”
So, what is the game? Well, a webpage opens up and a crude, lewd, and rude image is presented. The player’s task is to turn the rude thing into something nice with the available drawing tools. The image is then submitted to a public gallery where everyone can vote on its niceness!
Well, in theory. With a social experiment like this, of course it didn’t quite go that way. A fair few rude images snuck into the gallery, but we expected this to happen (whenever we told someone about the self-curation, they would raise an eyebrow), and it wasn’t nearly as bad as we thought it would be. Most folk created delightful art out of the crude pics of dicks (and various other naughty parts of the human body). Here is only a tiny fraction:
That last one has to be my favourite. They turned something crude into something sweet and beautiful.
It was far more popular than we expected. It was the first game created for the jam to be tweeted by Peter Molydeux himself, and has since been featured in a few round-ups. Over seven hundred images were submitted the first day. Blimey!
Oh, I should also note that this DIY Pinup Girl was an inspiration. The iconic Australian children’s show, Mr. Squiggle, was also a major inspiration.
Also, shout out to Emilia for coming up with the name.
Why not draw something yourself? It’s amazing what you can do with a penis!
What is your BFF thinking? Will today be a lucky day? How compatible am I with my crush? Electronic Sweet-N-Fun Fortune Teller is a nostalgic yet thoroughly modern horoscope and love compatibility game for play on the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES emulator for your PC).
To be honest, I should have done this ages ago but there’s always that niggling feeling that whilst you’re in there, observing what’s going on, you get a better idea of how it works. And that’s true. From being on Greenlight and from watching other folks experience with Greenlight, I did get a better idea of how Greenlight works and where it works. But Greenlight was increasingly becoming something I saw as a thorn in my side, niggling away at me for many reasons that I’ve already documented.
But, first things first, a few small points.
This was the catalyst for me removing DRM from Greenlight but not the reason. The thing is, what’s spoken about in the article is one of those situations which Greenlight brings about and I don’t think Valve are in the wrong here. If anything, Valve are acting to protect more developers by discouraging predatory publishers (I’m not saying anyone involved in this particular case are predatory but that the judgement as a whole is to discourage predatory stuff) from going around picking off developers and offering them less developer friendly or simply just less favourable terms than they would get by self publishing on Steam when/if the time comes to shift through Greenlight.
That the system exists to allow this sort of thing to happen is where things are massively fucked up. And the reason it’s fucked up is that unless you know there is a single clear advantage to going through Greenlight (ie – you can motivate a large amount of fans in a short space of time to punt you through or you have a dynamite zeitgeisty game concept that’s very PC-centric) then you don’t really want to be bothering with Greenlight, do you? It’s in your way, it’s a sticking point and the more convoluted the process to getting on a store, the more time a developer has to spend dancing a dance when they could be doing something, anything, far better than pissing around dancing for someone who doesn’t really need them to dance. And when you have that sort of system, yes, it does open itself up wide open to people trying to find away to get round it. I mean, we’re talking humanity anyway and we all try and take the path of least resistance wherever possible -anyway-, more so if it benefits us greatly but still…
And that’s why I both understand why Valve would make the choices they have to support Greenlight and developers on it but equally resent that it’s a broken system that creates this sort of problem at a time where we’ve been pretty close to stamping out that sort of behaviour and reliance on publishers from our ecosystem.
But no, I’ve been thinking I should do it for a while now, just pull the game because Greenlight irritates me so much. And what really, really tipped me over was a few days ago when this happened. SONY PRESIDENT TROLLS EVERYONE. That’s my game there, how fucking ace is that? Off the cuff silly bit of publicity that couldn’t be planned, couldn’t be bought but happened because human beings were human beings. And I immediately get a load of people telling me to get over to Greenlight and make something of it.
Thing is, I went out and sat in the park with my kid instead because the thought of going onto Greenlight to try and turn something that for an afternoon was massively hilarious and massively fun first and foremost, something I’d spent my day laughing about, to turn that into something hatefully cynical for tiny gains repulsed me.
That’s not how I work. Which pretty much means that Greenlight is clearly, as is, not for me, right? It’s a thing that makes me unhappy. It makes me unhappy because it’s generally vague and unfair for most people and barely a step above the previous black box process (now with $100 gatekeeper charidy fee) and it makes me unhappy because it sucks the joy out of things. It makes me unhappy because it takes time out of my life when I could be doing something I want to be doing, doing something enjoyable like working on my actual game or something and makes it a miserable chore. It makes me unhappy because I know there are games on that system where the only chance they have is to bypass Greenlight by the magical godfinger of Valve pointing at them because they somehow made the news for something. They’re not likely to make the news for something.
And that’s the main reason I pulled DRM from Greenlight because getting on a storefront, no matter how slim the chances of getting on it may be, shouldn’t be a horrid time consuming life sapping miserable chore. Yet that’s what Greenlight is, so goodbye Greenlight. Maybe I’ll see you again when you’re a bit less rubbish?
And mega thanks to everyone who voted for and supported Death Ray Manta in its time on Greenlight, you were amazing and I appreciate it greatly.
—-
Belated edit! Hello! A few people have asked why I can’t just leave the page there and let it accumulate votes of its own accord. OK, couple of things…
1: Greenlight doesn’t work like that. Since getting a brief bump from the Groupees bundle, the percentage of the way to the top 100 for DRM has gone back down to where it stood before the bundle. The only way leaving something there to accumulate votes without you having to personally work for them is if tomorrow everyone who is on Greenlight stopped working for votes and everyone who isn’t on Greenlight stayed off Greenlight. Realistically, it’s likely that the percentage will continue to drop or hover around where it currently sits and there isn’t more of a chance of it getting on Steam just through sitting things out.
2: It assumes that votes are anything more than one of many ways to get Valve’s attention for your Greenlight project. That’s not the case, you can accumulate votes until the day you die and Valve still don’t have to give you a place on Steam. This is the really, really important thing to know about Greenlight votes and one that Valve repeatedly stress, they are -one datapoint- not -the datapoint-.
3: Whilst obviously I’d like to give everyone who wants to buy the game on Steam the opportunity to do so and will freely admit that would be lovely, this isn’t me pulling my game because it can’t get on Steam. It’s me pulling my game because I believe the system is broken and potentially harmful.
Throwing indie developers into a competition for store space, one where they pay a fee and aren’t guaranteed anything more than the chance for Valve to look at their game and creating a system that bolsters publishers at a time when we’re working towards a healthier self publishing system is not.a.good.thing.
So forget about my game, it’s about a broken system and me not wanting to take part in that any more and wanting a better system, one that works for devs and for Valve. It’s about a system that makes me genuinely unhappy, not just for myself but having seen how it effects my peers also. It isn’t, in any sense of anything, me taking my ball home because I can’t get on Steam with DRM, it isn’t because people might not want to buy DRM (I’ve been around the block a few times, I know my audience), it’s because Greenlight itself is rubbish. I know this is the internet and people find this sort of attitude hard to believe but as anyone who’s lurked around these parts, met me in person or attended one of my talks will know, my interests lie more in having things be better for the people who make games.
And that’s why I can’t just leave the page there. Because it props up a system that’s not very healthy for most developers.
Taking DRM down might well be a piss in the wind whilst everyone else flocks to Greenlight but I can only do so much and to a large degree whatever will be will be etc…
"We don’t think it’s fair to limit our services to those that have the money stashed away." playism is good peoples
Last week, we posted a short post introducing Playism fans to The House in Fata Morgana, a VN by indie developer Novectacle. We asked all of you whether or not you truly wanted the game localized. It’s always been our goal to work our hardest on the titles our fans actually want, and we would be remiss in our duty if we spent our time localizing a title our fans had no interest in playing.
The response we got was overwhelming. We’ve always known that the Western visual novel community is rather vocal, but we didn’t expect the sheer torrent of support we got. Novectacle seemed incredibly excited by the response as well.
Before moving forward, of course, I did want to pull back the curtain, as it were, and offer some insight into our process. There are a lot of aspects of our work that are probably a total mystery to our fans, especially our financials. Hopefully this does help to explain our situation, specifically with Fata Morgana.
Because we deal with indie developers in our localization work, being paid up front for our localization work is not always possible. We don’t think it’s fair to limit our services to those that have the money stashed away. This is especially unfair when you consider that Japanese independent developers predominantly release their earlier games for free in Japan to gain a reputation, making no money in the process.
As a result, we try our best to accomodate our developers by offering a bevy of options. In the case of Novectacle, their interest in localization is obvious. They stipulated that they wanted 100% of the revenue of Fata Morgana’s sales on Playism JP to go straight towards its EN localization. That truly floored us.
As it stands, though, the sad news is that, so far, Fata Morgana’s sales on Playism JP are far lower than we’d need to fund localization. Is that the end of Fata Morgana?
No. Not really. We have a couple options.
Simply put, we could wait and see. We want Fata Morgana to be a success on both sides of the pond, but the cold hard facts are that it needs to succeed in Japan first, before we can bring it to the West. The game only recently went on sale in Japan, and we’re hoping that sales will pick up as we move forward into the summer.
Crowdfunding is always an option. Kickstarter and Indiegogo have proven to be amazing resources for niche titles with a fervent following, but no significant financial backing. To be clear, we’ve only considered this option because we want to bring this game to you guys any way we can.
@dwhannah @playismen Thank you for sticking up for us! We are glad you liked our game.
In the end, bringing Fata Morgana to all of you is something we’ve talked about heavily, and we have a lot of great ideas on how we can do that. We believe in the product, and we believe that those who have already told us they want it are not alone. We’re constantly having internal discussions about how we go about it, and we hope you stay with us through the process.
Until decide upon our course of action, keep tweeting and mailing us, and let us know that you want Fata Morgana!
Earlier this week we teased that we would be putting up a blog post about our recent two year anniversary (and NIGORO’s 6th). Fortunately for us, Shuhei Miyazawa (aka Room 909) beat us to it, putting together a fantastic post that showcased all the fantastic stages we had set up, and the host of developers that joined us for the event.
The following is a translated account of our 2 year anniversary party by Shuhei Miyazawa. You can see the original blog post here.
I imagine a good number of readers have found their way here via Twitter, so I’ll introduce myself real quick. I’m a friend of Mr. Daisuke Amaya, known to many as ‘Studio Pixel‘. I’ve known him since we were at college together, and over the years I’ve play tested a bunch of games for him, including Cave Story. I’m also producing the music for his upcoming title Glasses. After I graduated I didn’t really have anything to do with the gaming industry, until I attended an event called ‘Behind Cave Story’ at Culture Culture in Odaiba. For some reason at that event I was asked to speak a little, and that’s what drew me back into the world of game development.
So, I left my coffee shop in my brother’s care and headed over to Osaka. The event was held at an Italian restaurant called “Ezu”. The event was celebrating the second birthday of the Japan focused indie game distribution service Playism. (Jpn Site/Eng Site) This was the second time I’d visited this restaurant.
Mr. Itoh, a member of the Playism team who I met at the recent BitSummit event, greeted me at the door. Unlike a lot of Japanese style events, this party didn’t have a running order. I was told to eat, drink, be merry, and try out a load of games. In attendance were amateur and professional game creators alike, as well as company representatives and owners, and of course game fans. There were people from PLAYISM’s management company (a game localization firm) and a lot of people from the BitSummit meeting too. A lot of the visitors were foreign, making the whole event feel very international!
Once I got past the reception, I bumped straight into PANDA, from the company NIGORO. It was great to meet him. After that I put my bag in the coatroom, grabbed my camera, and jumped in.
The first thing that caught my eye was NIGORO’s display stand. They were displaying “Rose and Camellia”, in which you, a young lady, slap another young lady in the face by moving the mouse. Your character looks alarmingly like Mulbruk from La-Mulana, come to think of it. I remember the image NIGORO put up of his slapping game with Mulbruk in it as a joke for April Fool’s.
I can’t believe he actually put her in the game! He’s written a plot for the game, too. A plot. For a game about slapping people in the face. I think Mr. Naramura might have gone slightly insane. Ms. Kawanaka, who I’ll talk about in a bit, got totally addicted to this game and temporarily became a sort of face slapping guru. Fun stuff!
This is the property of Josh, one of the leaders of the Playism project. A Sega Saturn, a Dreamcast, a SNES, a PS3 and a ridiculous game collection. And… what’s this? A Virtua Stick Pro for the Sega Saturn!! Incredible! Interestingly enough, of all the consoles there, the Saturn was by far the most popular.
Slowly the place began to fill up with people, and it was time for the toast. Mr. Mizutani, one of the heads of the Playism project, said a few words, and was followed by a rather sneaky event hi-jacking attempt by Mr. Naramura from NIGORO:
“Actually, Playism turned 2 years old yesterday. Today is actually NIGORO’s 6th birthday!”
Classic Naramura. After that, the party was underway!
The DJ at the event was a guy called Justin Pfeiffer, (@xanadujin) who calls himself a ‘game music DJ’. I really didn’t know what to expect, but he quickly proved himself a genius when he kicked off with a track from the game ‘VIEWPOINT’, a classic. I had previously checked out some of his work and his extensive Japanese profile on his Soundcloud, but it was during his live performance that I finally understood how talented he is. Check his stuff out!
Shuhei Miyazawa@room_909 I went to the Playism second birthday party! Someone wrote a blog about it here! http://is.gd/RMmioj
deko @de_ko_@room909 Thank you! You made the after party sound awesome, I wish I could have stayed! (I had to run due to time constraints!) Instead, enjoy this picture of Naramura I drew! pic.twitter.com/D7rgRCdPoW
On the second floor, Studio Pixel was giving autographs. I figured it would be game fans who were lining up to meet him, but actually a load of developers had come to meet the creator of Cave Story too. All over the place there were people with so many different connections to games and the gaming industry. The frog in the photo above is of ‘Amagaeru (Ayama Daisuke + Geroblaster), as imagined by Mr. Deko. (@de_ko_)
He also made some funny name tags for Mr. Naramura. Poor Naramura always ends up at the receiving end of every joke. I was gutted I didn’t get a photo of it, but afterwards Deko sent me the pictures. What a hero!
Pixel’s programming master, nao_u, brought along his HMD, which allows you to play games in stereoscopic 3D. Boumankan, one of the biggest playtest contributors to La-Mulana, was able to experience the game in 3D. I think people who know or love the game will understand how amazing an experience this really was.
Actually, this event was the first time ever the whole La-Mulana staff have been in the same room: Boukanman (all the way from Sendai!), Funshi (all the way from Fukushima!), the NIGORO boss (all the way from Kyushu!) and also their programmer Duplex. The whole thing felt a bit like a NIGORO event. The 2011 Earthquake directly affected Boukanman and Funshi, so I asked them if everything was okay. They said they were playtesting La-Mulana throughout the whole thing. Now that’s dedication!
Duplex lives in Kyushu and thus doesn’t really get many chances to come visit the other NIGORO guys. The other three had only met all together once before. It was my first time to meet Duplex too, and of course I had a bunch of questions for him. We talked for a long time. I always want to make small, one-screen games. Like that adaptation of The Goonies. But then the other two always make each project bigger and bigger…” He’s a quiet guy, with a kind of refined air about him. He told me he had to be quiet because the other two were so noisy. Balance is important in any sort of relationship. I think I understood what he was saying.
What shocked me was finding out that while he is the primary programmer at NIGORO, it’s actually not his main occupation. He’s just been programming as a sort of hobby since the GR3 Project began. It’s amazing to think he could learn to program and then produce something as incredible as La-Mulana in such a short space of time. Obviously Mr. Naramura & Samieru are both very talented, but I think Duplex is a real genius. It really was a pleasure meeting him. I found myself drawn to the ‘MSX’ (La-Mulana’s console inspiration), too.
Everywhere I went, the topic was the same: gaming. Literally everyone was discussing them. Producers, indie devs, university students, everyone. There was no elitism or separation; it was a free exchange of ideas. PLAYISM really has built an amazing thing. They’ve been slowly growing for two years now. Every so often I’d ask how things were going, so I got to see a bit of the world behind PLAYISM. But tonight it was BAM, right in our faces. I’ve no doubt that as it continues to grow, and as more interesting and talented people get involved, it will improve in leaps and bounds. I know I say it a lot, but the PLAYISM project really is amazing.
I met a lot of people today. Firstly, someone I met at BitSummit – king (@king_75), who made Rokko Chan. He came to Osaka by overnight bus from Tokyo specially for the party. Rokko Chan was well known by a lot of the people at the party, so he was a pretty popular guy throughout the event. We both wanted to try someice-cream, so we went all the way to a 100 yen store to buy some, but it was sold out. Never mind. Next time!
Next, Mr. Maruchu (@Maruchu), who made the puzzle game Colorful Mines. He was also at BitSummit but as I only recently found out about Colorful Mines, I didn’t get the chance to meet him. Upon meeting him (for I think the first time?) I was taken aback by what a gentleman he is. A lot of indie game devs tend to be a bit… weird, so I was kind of expecting that of Maruchu as well, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He’s a very sociable and outgoing guy, and a pleasure to talk to.
Before I was dragged away by PANDA to take photos for him, I was listening to the Kyoto Indie Game Idea Development seminar, which had featured one of my diaries in it. It was being explained by game designer Kawanaka and Hanada Kei of graphic novel maker Novectace. Kawanaka was moaning about how usually at indie game events there’s a real lack of women, but there was a good number at the party so I think, for once, she was satisfied. She was so happy when we asked for a photo too, but then she got really mad when PANDA photo bombed her. Those two are always fighting with each other. Beside them was Yumeneko, who made the shooting game “BLACK ART”, who calmed the situation down. After that, we took some lovely photos.
Another hot topic of the night was the free RPG development software “WOLF RPG Editor”, “One Way Heroics”, a game made using the WOLF suite, as well as the author of Heroics, SmokingWOLF. (@WO_LF) He was a real Osakan. He also wrote a book on developing games. He’s a real pro. He was very popular at the event, and even throughout the after party had a lot of interesting things to say.
Shuhei Miyazawa@room_909 An OUYA! pic.twitter.com/wckPvIYvjc
Recently Unity has been gaining a lot of momentum, and today its users were out in force. Nanimosa (from FullPowerSideAttack) was one such user, and at the event introduced his tablet game ‘TorqueL’. I enjoyed a closely fought battle with PANDA on it. Also, Mr. Kurukuru (@mkd214), a university student who has adopted UNITY, enthralled a whole group of people with his fantastic “One Night Werewolf” title. So many creative, inventive people were at this event! Next, I had wanted to meet Takaaki Ichijo of CRI Middleware, but the OUYA unboxing ceremony pulled me away. Sorry, Mr. Ichijo, but the OUYA has been interesting me for ages.
I only spotted it after I’d finished my photographing, but Mr. Shigoto from Petit Depotto, of Unholy Heights fame, was also at the party. Although, I’m really sorry! When I saw “Shigoto” (which is Japanese for ‘job’) on your name plate, I didn’t understand who you were! The game looks fantastic, though. I can’t wait to play it.
Yusuke Hirano brought an iPhone case from the NIGORO store with him. PANDA told me “We made it to look cool”, which may be so, but I had to admit to him that this was the first time I’d ever seen the case outside of the NIGORO offices. Fortunately, he laughed at that. I’m glad he doesn’t take it too seriously. By the way, you can buy NIGORO t-shirts from their store as well. You can get a super cool La-Mulana watch, too.
Shuhei Miyazawa@room_909 A visual novel made by an Egyptian group! https://twitter.com/room_909/status/333482843260981249/photo/1
Also, I wasn’t able to meet them but there was a visual novel made by an Egyptian guy being displayed. I really really wanted to check it out. It’s called “Ibn al-Nafis Visual Story”, please do check it out. It was great to meet Mr. Gokubuto of Game*Spark again. Our last meeting was broadcast over Nico Nico.
Of everything that stuck with me, this is the most memorable. A guy called Coppelia cleared Cave Story on the projection screen using only his feet. You can watch his amazing performance here. He fought the last boss using his feet. It was…weird. Everyone in the room was cheering him on. Even though he was using his feet, Coppelia’s play was smooth and skilled. The NIGORO staff were loving it, but when Naramura tried to play his own title La-Mulana using his feet, he played like an elementary school kid would.
Actually, Coppelia had brought a cookie designed to look like Naramura as a gift, and gave it to him even after he’d made light of the art of foot gaming. I guess he really respects Naramura. After that, Naramura signed things for fans. Coppelia got a big round of applause for his amazing feat/feet, too. By the way, when Coppelia cleared La-Mulana, DJ Justin played ‘Knightmare II: Maze of Galious’…I wonder if that was just a coincidence? Did he know? The track played twice that night, and both times it gave me goosebumps.
He played so much music that conjures up such strong memories for me – Gradius Gaiden Stage 3 (Famicom), TMNT Stage 1 (Famicom), X-MEN Stage 1 (Arcade), and some classic Konami tracks too. I, along with Samiel, were so overwhelmed by how awesome it was we sort of crowded the DJ booth and got a bit carried away. I had no idea there were such passionate classic game fans in the west too! So after four hours of fun, the party slowly drew to a close. But then it was time for the after-party, which was held at the same place!
Some of the game displays were empty, so I thought maybe they’d put out the stereoscopic La-Mulana thing again, but then it turned out Amaya had to go… back to his office! Everyone was really surprised! He didn’t even say a proper farewell to everyone. I mean I personally don’t need one, but at least be polite to other game developers, Amayaaaaa! Also I heard he saying that one time he asked his daughter what she thought of the title “Geroblaster”, and she told him not to talk about Gero (gero means puke in Japan) over dinner! Apparently he was really mad at getting yelled at by his own kid!
After that Mr. Suiheilibe (@Antouchable) who had come from Tokyo to participate showed some stuff off. I remembered him from the ‘Behind Cave Story’ event. He’s travelled so many miles to be part of the community! Suddenly the atmosphere changed to a serious one. A very serious open table discussion about games and their future started, with a few HAL graduates getting involved. Developers, publishers, students, fans… it was a meeting that covered every part of the game industry. There was a lot of off-the-record talk that I can’t really write about here, but I will give a list of the general topics covered. We heard some really earth-shattering, exciting news too. I can’t tell you about it, though!
How a game’s tutorial defines its success.
The boom of the indie game industry.
The relationship of indie dev and consumer.
Localization
“There are many different types of adult out there!”
What will the game scene be like in 5 years?
Josh (of Playism) had some great comments. “I’m totally addicted to Five Star!” “Gundam was first broadcast in 1979 right?!” and so on. PANDA simply said “Man, you’re basically Japanese at this point” in return. At 10pm, the after party finished.
At this point I’d been chatting and taking photos for nearly 8 hours in total. I’d pretty much lost my voice. Some people were still hanging around, but I had a train to catch. On the way back, I had a chat with Mr. Hashimoto (@HashimotoRST) who went to both ‘Behind Cave Story’ and ‘The Eric Chahi Panel‘. Apparently after the Cave Story meeting, he got this big burst of motivation, leading to him helping out with La-Mulana and developing his own title.
He said he was so glad he was able to chat with the NIGORO guys. Seeing people like Pixel and NIGORO who are on the front line of indie game development really inspired a lot of people to get involved. I think Hashimoto’s spurring moment was during the Cave Story event. I kind of felt like I wanted to get involved too. I… I’m also gonna make a game!
I got home just after midnight. Apparently Samieru and the others were drinking until after 1am. I want to thank everyone for all the great conversations I enjoyed. Being able to be absorbed in game related discussion really educated and entertained me. I also want to thank everyone at PLAYISM for running the event and facilitating this amazing experience.
I imagine it must be a lot of work, but I really hope you do something like this again in the future. To finish, I’d like to show you two images – the first one was a scene that lead to a huge round of applause, the second is a sleeping giant.
For weeks now, we’ve been talking about our upcoming games on Facebook, Twitter and even on Playism.TV, but without a trailer. We’ve showed Japanese trailers in the past, but today we finally have English trailers for two of our upcoming games: Unholy Heights, and One Way Heroics.
Fans might know Unholy Heights better by its original Japanese name, Maison de Maou, the game that mixes apartment management sim and tower defense. One Way Heroics, meanwhile, fans might know better by its Japanese name, Katamichi Brave (片道勇者), the new RPG by Wolf RPG Editor creator Smoking Wolf. While we may not have release dates just yet for these two upcoming titles, we do have brand new English trailers for both!
NOTE: Some of the footage used is outdated, and doesn’t reflect the current state of the game’s localization.
It’s not often that we use Playism.TV to comment on Japanese Playism news, but this is a special case. We recently hooked up with the developers of Novectacle, a Japanese visual novel developer, to bring their stunning VN, The House in Fata Morgana, to Playism JP.
The first time I checked out Fata Morgana, I was blown away, both by the soundtrack, and by the stellar art. Evoking a gothic style reminiscent of Ayami Kojima’s art, Fata Morgana’s art fits its dark subject matter with ease.
The House in Fata Morgana tells the story of a cursed mansion, and stars a mysterious maid that guides the player through the history of the abode. Fata Morgana works on an episodic basis, breaking up the entire story into eight (8) episodes, totaling 25 hours. You can check out more about the game (and download a Japanese language demo) on the official site.
So why are we talking about Fata Morgana hitting Playism JP? Surely there must be some reason we’re bringing the game to the attention of our English-speaking fans! Simply put, we want to bring it to Playism EN. There’s only one problem. We’re not sure you’d want it. That’s where you come in.
Are you a fan of visual novels? Interested in Fata Morgana itself? Just want to tell us we need more games on Playism EN? You need to tell us! Post on our Facebook page, send us a tweet, or even e-mail us! Nothing would convince us more to localize Fata Morgana for all of you than knowing that you all want it.
We’re passionate about the possibility of bringing visual novels to Playism EN, and we hope you feel the same way. We won’t know, though, unless you tell us! Convince us that we should localize The House of Fata Morgana!
SPIDER BAIT is a transcript of a back-and-forth email role-play between me and my luna that we wrote / played between the last time she visited me in february (around my birthday) and may (her birthday). i play two spider-queens and she plays a very unlucky girl. it’s of course totally explicit, and is mostly about tickling and fucking and spider-queens salivating over captive girl-meat. nasty & gross stuff from a couple of real perverts.
because of the back-and-forth format that we wrote it in – there’s a lot of prompting and riffing off of each other – i made a twine version that reveals the transcript one email at a time, a la merritt’s first date game (which i in fact peeked inside to figure out how to make it work). leon wrote the <<replace>> macro that i use to reveal the new text. i played around with the formatting of the dialogue a little – i made the spider-queens’ words a little bigger, and their captive’s words a little smaller.
d. vincent baker’s apocalypse world is a role-playing game of the sit in a circle with your friends with some paper and pencils kind. it is in fact one of the games of that type that has most resonated with me.
i’ve played in two campaigns, both emceed by porpentine (who was basically vat-bred for the role), both with different tones. the first was a violence-heavy campaign where i played a gunlugger named hellen killer (gunluggers are good at violence). the second centered a brothel and its attempt to avoid getting mixed up in the local drug trade (“surge” being the drug in question). in that campaign i played a battlebabe named murder slutfuck who was really good at getting herself and the business into trouble.
here are some reasons i like apocalypse world: first, obviously, is the setting. as a queer person, i feel more at home in the future than the past, making my campfire in the hollowed-out ruins of the institutions that oppress me in the here and now. but more important than the setting is how the game uses it: it’s pulp. in a conversation with my friend andrew recently, i explained one of the reasons i so often reach for pulp settings for my games & writing: because exposition is unnecessary, a hole in the plot can be filled with a hasty invention, snags can be smoothed over with tone and style. you can tell a story without getting hung up on the numbers. a lot of role-playing games get hung up on numbers. why do we have to go after the jackabacka cult? what’s on the other side of the pleasure labyrinth? just make it up.
in fact, as andrew wrote in his own post on apocalypse world, every action, successful or not, moves the story forward. mattie brice’s character, “always” (a psychic sex cult leader) was trying to reach into the psychic maelstrom and touch one person, the surge kingpin, and plant an impulse in her mind. opening yourself to the psychic maelstrom requires a die roll against your “weird” rating – mattie failed (the number on the die was higher than her weird rating). instead of touching this one person, she accidentally planted an impulse in all of her cult members: the impulse to immediately storm the kingpin’s brothel-fortress in a mob.
apocalypse world is always asking questions – the emcee (the master of ceremonies, the overseer, the dream operator) as much as anyone else. what does the psychic maelstrom look like to you? what have you heard about that part of town? what’s the shop owner’s name? the players are as involved in world-building as the emcee is. that kind of rapport wouldn’t be possible in a game where every new character has to come with a stack of numbers a mile high, but in apocalypse world’s pulp setting a few words is all it needs. it all sticks, adds to the mess on the wall, fits into the frankenstein patchwork that is the post-apocalypse.
Really good article about gender-focused NES rom hacking, and how the recent coverage of it is pretty myopic:
The discourse centering on Mike Mika’s Donkey Kong hack aims to present men as positive forces for gender equality in gaming while distancing them from feminism. These strategies help to relieve anxieties that might implicate men in the shaming and rejection of girls from gaming cultures. Additionally, the suggestion that this kind of ROM hacking is new and limited to loving fathers obscures a long and rich history of ROM hacking that includes women hacking games for their own ends.
luna announced that she was planning a dating sim jam this weekend. SMART GIRL THAT SHE IS, she never defined what “dating sim” means, leaving it deliberately ambiguous. what she made was a game about her first date ever.
i played it and decided i wanted to make a game about my first date with my slut, my life partner, my favorite person in the world, daphny drucilla delight david. but like queer relationships do, ours doesn’t really fit the established narrative. we were long-distance for a long time, seeing each other every couple months and talking on the phone every night. what counts as our first date? the first time we cruised each other, over some xbox game? the first time we had phone sex? the first time we saw each other in person? i was forced to make a game about all of these.
so that’s gold, which leaves silver. AS THE RHYME GOES. i wanted to make a game about a series of messages i sent merritt one night, when i was missing her fiercely, about what our life would be like after the apocalypse. she saved the messages: they characterize our dynamic perfectly. i wanted to make that game, too.
both of my games play around with the idea of “dating” in an obnoxiously literal way. both of them are particularly interested in what the future is going to be like. it reminds me of something i said to my friend andrew when he was asking me about the pulp sensibility of my writing the other week. i told him that more than any other time, the future belongs to queer people.
(We will add names before printing as last-minute folks clamber aboard)
mastermind barm doing his thing
come to this dang event
You can pick up your own copy of redcrossbook here, which features my Rei collage.
Also if I can find a ride, I may be show up and buy things. You will probably not know who I am though. If I had more time I would have gotten a table and stuff, but things happened and I never have time, and eh.
I just got back from a trip to Mexico City, and while there my wife and I visited the studios of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
Frida's first:
Note Kahlo's actual wheelchair (from late in life) in front of the easel.
The wall-plaque said:
In this part of the house–designed by Juan O'Gorman in 1944–the artistic essence of Frida Kahlo is distilled: her brushes, her easel (a gift from Nelson Rockefeller), the mirror she used for her self-portraits, and her books...There are also perfume flasks and varnish jars which the artist used to hold her paint. All of the materials remain exactly as she left them. One striking feature of the studio is the painting which depicts the evolution of the human fetus, a reminder of Frida's obsession with the maternity she was never able to achieve.
Yeah, so here's that fetus poster they mentioned:
I was also captivated by whatever this was:
Besides awesome.
Next, Diego's set-up:
Didn't even understand what these were. Pigment manufacturer's samples?
And there are boxes of powdered pigment, I guess? I'd love to read opinions in the comments.
Suddenly the atmosphere changed to a serious one. A very serious open table discussion about games and their future started, with a few HAL graduates getting involved. Developers, publishers, students, fans… it was a meeting that covered every part of the game industry. There was a lot of off-the-record talk that I can’t really write about here, but I will give a list of the general topics covered. We heard some really earth-shattering, exciting news too. I can’t tell you about it, though!
