But, looking at the date… how we feeling, gamedev fam?

hahahahahah yeah

Soooo, unfortunately, BDSiM chapter 2 is not going to happen before TYVNJ2 starts. I have definitely made bits and spurts of progress– I penned a few scenes that I can’t wait to see y’alls reactions to, but alas. It’s going to get shelved for the time being.

But! I am super pumped for what’s coming up next– Fisher and I got an all-star team of people together to work on our TYVNJ2 team for WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT. This is the original pitch that we used when asking around for interested parties.

In the year 2000, after Y2K was averted and during the peak of the dot-Com bubble, an unexpected technological disaster upends the world: the manifestation of information-consuming demons in Zones surrounding internet datacenters.

Study and manipulation of these thermodynamics-defying demons has the potential for massive leaps in scientific development, but is easier said than done: navigating Zones of demonic activity is a dangerous affair, because electronic signals– including the firing of neural synapses– have the potential to attract an interloper. For this reason, scientists often work together with local guides in order to conduct research.

This story will follow a guide and a scientist and how their understanding of the world, personal beliefs, and social positions clash.

I’ve been doing a ton of reading for background knowledge and inspiration. It’s a bit imposing to coordinate and direct for a team like this, but given the conversations we’ve been having in the team discord server and talent we have working together here I am so so so excited to get this off the ground.

After convincing Congress to plow $30,000 into his project, Morse strung up a [telegraph] wire between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The first official message careened along that Baltimore—D.C. line in 1844, and it was a strangely oracular pronouncement: “What hath God wrought!” This bit of scripture was suggested by the daughter of the U.S. commissioner of patents, though Morse himself surely concurred with the sentiment; besides being the son of a staunch evangelist, he would later transfer a good portion of his considerable fortune to churches, seminaries, and missionary societies. Still, the first telegraphed message reads as much like an anxious question as a cry of glee, and today we know the answer: What God wrought, or rather, what men wrought in their God-aping mode, was the information age.

–From TechGnosis by Erik Davis

This game is going to share a bit of its creative DNA with BDSiM; I came across the concepts that would eventually turn into this game while doing background reading for that one. I suppose this is the nature of the creative.

At least I got this scene, which has a lot of thematic overlap with WHGW, down on the page before the jam starts.

At least I got this scene, which has a lot of thematic overlap with WHGW, down on the page before the jam starts.

Anyways, I gotta go work on the meatspace nonsense I need to wrap up this weekend before the jam starts. Onwards! 🏃‍♀️‍➡️

Now, I got a lotta small things done and continue to have a lotta increasingly big things to do, so let’s keep this post brisk.

• I have a new game out! The Voyeur: A BDSiM Side Story, a short kinetic novel from the perspective of The Manager, made for Videotome Jam 3.
  • The game is also hosted directly on this website, because Videotome is an awesome engine for in-browser games.
• There is now a page on this site for Postmortal Figures, which links to all the major works in the setting. It’s only gonna get more sprawling from here, so this is going to be useful to keep tabs on everything, moving forward.
• I also added an RSS feed exclusively for my visual art, and a small feature of my most recent art on the homepage to this site.

I must confess, Tomodachi Life has also been taking up an unexpectedly large amount of my time as of late.

I must confess, Tomodachi Life has also been taking up an unexpectedly large amount of my time as of late.

What else, what else… I’m also doing visual dev for a Daydrinking Jam game, which is going to be an excuse to play around with some renpy toys I haven’t gotten to play with yet, so that’s going to be fun. Even if it’s going to be the vast majority of my free time for the next week and a half, ahaha.

Videotome Jam 3 Recs

There’s a lot of variety cram-packed into a lot of small games, so I do recommend clicking around a bit if you’re interested in the medium of VNs. Here’s some personal highlights from what I’ve played so far:

• Me / 我 / Saya / நான் is about dissociation, diaspora, daily life, and forgetting your mother tongue.
• Scrimmage Ball 5050 is about a possible future of (american) football.
• Running at Night is about balancing work and hobbies, and the act of choosing to run when you can.
• This Desolate Night is a beautiful adaptation of an urdu poem about a chukar partridge who yearns for the moon.

The way sinister undertones work their way into this game makes me giggle just as much as she would…

The way sinister undertones work their way into this game makes me giggle just as much as she would…

Anyways, that’s all for now, see y’all again soon. 🏃‍♀️‍➡️

Needless to say, the preface to this blog post of recommendations is about how I highly recommend that you check out the game I worked on, but I may be a bit biased there :p

Over the past month or so I played all entries to the Ryona Yuri VN Jam and had a lot of fun with it. After thinking about it for a bit I decided to write up this blog post, in the same vein as the one I did for the Toxic Yuri VN Jam.

This is in no way meant to be a critical review space, but more a place to shine a light on some art I think is Neat. Parts of this will be flavored by my personal opinions and are not intended as objective commentary.

Disclaimer

First and foremost, many of these games contain heavy subject matter and/or adult material. Heed the warnings on each game’s itch page, eat only that which you can digest.

I should also note that there are three games¹ excluded from this process, because they wouldn’t run on the linux laptop where I play VNs. These games are: XxU, My Dear Mutt, and The Witch, and What Remains. I may come back and play these eventually, but do know that they are excluded from the following post.

Exclusions of games from this list does not necessarily mean that I think they are bad, but could be that I really did not jive with them or think that they’re too incomplete to earnestly recommend to others. The demos included in this list are ones that I feel have enough meat to them to be satisfying reads at the time of writing.

Now, the Recommendations.

Don’t feel obliged to go through and read everything from this list (unless you’re someone as hungry for ryona as I am), use this as a tasting menu to go through and find the works you think you might like.

Of Personal Appeal

While these are works that I found particularly engaging because they appealed to my interests, and are probably going to be some of the games I think about from this jam the most (alongside the games in the last heading).

• TEMPTING FATE: CHASING HIGHS is about two girlthings who meet and bond over their shared morbid interests, leading to a fateful night where they play Russian roulette.

My partiality to deathgames aside, I felt like this game did a really good job exploring the mindsets of both characters, with a really satisfying follow-through on both endings.

• The final entry in the Banality series, Banality 4 follows Maddie as she tries to (humorously) rationalize her way through her current living arrangement, where she is confined to the house of the witch who made her an eldritch approximation of a werewolf, and the existential dread of knowing the planet will be destroyed in ten years.

Like many in the toxic yuri jam-extant circles, I’ve been following this series since the first release, and this entry is a very worthy finale.

• Post Annihilation Playback is a lighthearted girlshonen following a professional assassin and the aftermath of a job that doesn’t pay out as well as she expects it to. When the sister of her last mark comes knocking, she is pulled into indulging in her own sadistic fantasies for cash.

I had fun with every moment of this game’s short runtime, and I’m always a sucker for works that show us what the sadist is getting out of it and works with sexually repressed weirdos (affectionate).

Grounded Explorations Of Bad Kink Practices

While a lot of toxic yuri can be over-the-top and melodramatic, these works choose to focus on realistic dynamics and depth of psychology of their characters.

• Hot Cocoa, Spoilt With Blood is about a loving relationship slowly falling apart as the main character tries to play the dominating role that her girlfriend wants and how this is at odds with what her own interests are and the kind of support her partner needs to have.

I feel like it’s fairly common to have Bad Kink Stories where the dom pushes the sub too far; it’s a very natural progression of power dynamics and lends itself well to conflict. Hot Cocoa is a very compelling study about a relationship where the boundary-pushing comes from the sub.

• Leave. is a short and visceral story about figuring out what you actually want.

This is easily the story from this jam that made me wince the most.

• While more fantastical than the other two games in this heading, MBD2 (ACT ONE DEMO) leverages a setting where fiction can manifest into reality, leading to the rise of tokusatsu-style heroes and villains, to tell a story about a friendgroup crashing out and how the warped reality of social relationships can lead to material harms, especially to marginalized groups.

The Denpa Corner

Mundane settings with themes of disconnect from society and isolation that cause psychological instability are a ripe playground for ryona scenarios.

• うららで五月 Urara in Satsuki asks philosophical questions about god and worship as the two leads further complicate each other’s lives. Neither woman is as their outward appearances would lead one to believe, and the gradual reveal of what the titular Urara is like makes the situation all the more strange.
• the slow process of pulling out my guts follows a shut-in woman who struggles with taking care of herself and her mental manifestation of a parasite, who tries to get her life back on track. Now, as to whether the parasite’s idea of helping is actually beneficial or not…
• Moon Illusion is about an office woman’s totally normal infatuation with a high school student. She’s waiting for her at home every night, so memorizing every small detail of her when she encounters her on the train is normal, right?

Exploratory Indies

Some small, experimental games of a type that you don’t really find outside gamejam environments like this one.

• Bleeds Real Blood tells a story about yearning and jealousy, as a doll waits for her owner every night, hoping that she will take it out of the closet and drink her blood. This leads to friction when her owner fucks other girls in her bed instead of playing with her.

This entry is on the shorter side, and makes great use of minimal visual assets and conveying mood with an original soundtrack.

• Lead Coffin is a noisy, short poem about two women desperate for something good. Fully voice acted and very raw.

For the Right Audience

These are games that didn’t really resonate with me on a personal level, but I can appreciate the artistry that went into them and think that there are people out there who would be very passionate about them.

• PeriPetEia is a story about revenge and resurrection– or rather– molding the rebirth of someone else. A woman abducts a woman and a man, and the abducted duo gradually learn their relationship to their kidnapper. Definitely one for non-con forcefem enthusiasts.
• The Feeble Unicorn is about a woman who encounters an enchanting unicorn in the woods, and, desperate for her companionship, agrees to both let her stay the night and partake in an ancient ritual to help restore the unicorn’s powers. Give this one a read if you enjoy second-person accounts of being the sub in terato eroguro.
• Request Behind Classroom Doors (demo) is about how a high school student who struggles to make friends has her life turned upside down when the girl she likes confesses to her. They start dating, under one condition: that she indulges in the girl’s masochistic fantasies, something that teach her about both the girl and herself. Fans of superficially “normal” high school romance with a dark undertone and nostalgic visuals will love this one.

The Big Hitters

If you’ve heard much about this jam, it was probably centered around these games. These are high “production-value” games made by experienced VN devs with an established fanbase and/or large teams with the additional man-hours needed to make polished works.

• senescence follows an android suffering from system errors and how things go very wrong when she hires a sketchy scientist to handle her repairs. After a rather mechabre ‘medical procedure’ sadistically breaks her into pieces (and her subsequent re-construction), she finds herself at the center of the scientist’s research into the three laws of robotics.

Ugggghhh yes 😩 This is exactly the kind of thing I was excited for when this jam was announced. Even outside my interest in robots/cyborgs, this VN is absolutely sadistic & delicious.

• erm,,.,,. honeydewcomplex: SLF is about a college student and how being told to kill the invasive lanternfly ends up changing the trajectory of her social life. She could never hurt an innocent bug, but if she imagines it as a girl…

More than any other entry in the jam, this game feels like a celebration of collaboration. This is absolutely a work that is more than the immediate sum of its parts because of its combination of very different styles (and mediums).

• Codename: TYPHOON, tonally, is like if Disco Elysium was a take on James Bond flicks instead of a take on buddy cop movies. In an alt-history setting where psychic powers are real and the Korean war diverged from our own, the egocentric Agent Typhoon is sent on a mission to set of a nuclear bomb in the heart of Moscow and do irreparable damage to the USSR, where her former mentor (and US defector) will do anything to try and get her to change her ways.

On the ryona front, I really liked how the portrayal of psychic interrogation plays with perception of pain in a way similar to how a dom setting up a scene might roleplay such a scenario.

• Glow of Honeydew follows a tech-savy shut-in and her roommate. While the protagonist enjoys being the voyeur in their thin-walled apartment, her concerns quickly change when she does a deep dive on her roommate’s social media accounts and the company that’s been sponsoring her.
• Last, but certainly not least, Excision of Cancer is the entry made by the judging team– a group with a strong grasp on what ryona is. In what’s effectively a game-spanning torture session, a toku villain (and her chorus of underlings) peel back the layers of her captured hero, and show her just how beautiful she actually is.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoy some of these games! 🙇 I have a small list of other VNs I’m planning to read in the Near Future:tm:², but other than that my plans for the immediate future are to get back to working on BDSiM for Major Update Jam: Queer Edition, and I’m also being tagged in for a Daydrinking Jam game where I’ll be doing character designs + sprites, so please stay tuned.

Footnotes

Also, happy year of the horse!

It’s been an incredible joy to build something that’s such a self-indulgent combination of my niche interests, both in terms of game contents and the methods used to develop it. I want to talk about it soooo much, but some things will have to wait until it’s farther along in development…

Alongside that, please enjoy this art I commissioned from the wonderful Dorkfruit, who also made the logo for the game.

Rotating these characters at a speed faster than even my long-term OCs. I’ve got some more money to throw at people who are good at drawing Creepy Women, if anyone has any recs to send my way… (maybe I should make a page for commissions and gift art at this point?)

Rotating these characters at a speed faster than even my long-term OCs. I’ve got some more money to throw at people who are good at drawing Creepy Women, if anyone has any recs to send my way… (maybe I should make a page for commissions and gift art at this point?)

Ahh, what to say next… The completion of a big project is often just as much a relief as it is another stressor: while you finally get to see the completed fruits of your labor, you’re in limbo for a bit while you wait to see how it’s perceived. The release of this demo has been a bit… odd, in comparison to my other games. Like, yeah, it’s out there and people can engage with it now, but it’s also not done.

Because the game is effectively in “early access” a part of me wants to welcome feedback so that I can improve future versions of the game, but another part of me is just expecting to go “yeah lol I know about issue x. I’m planning to get to it.”

I generally don’t like to speak ill of my creations, even when I find them imperfect, but in this case it’s a bit different because, yeah, there will be improvements made in future releases. For example, despite all the emphasis on Ember being a cyborg, there’s just about fuckall visual representation of this. There are a few CGs I wanted to include (I did draft up what her body looks like in my pre-dev work) and they got cut for time in the v0.4 release. I’m planning to add them in the upcoming Noise Jam 2 patch.

Although I have a strong idea of just how fast I can work, the sheer volume of how much needs to be done on a solo project was a little overwhelming. I guess that’s the theme of any “peri-mortem” thoughts I have at this point: I’m ambitious in my creative endeavors, and this time I was forced to scale back scope for this release a lot. If you’ve played the demo to completion, you probably noticed that there was clear exposition for stat-raising mechanics in the second chapter– I actually have these programmed already, but ran out of time to write the corresponding story for it.

A screenie from my obisdian vault for this project. The big red box represents ‘things to the right of this can’t happen until after the first duel’, which ended up being where the demo cut off.

A screenie from my obisdian vault for this project. The big red box represents ‘things to the right of this can’t happen until after the first duel’, which ended up being where the demo cut off.

That said. Oooooooh I can’t wait to get back to writing. You guys have some good stuff coming up next, and I can’t wait to make it.

Now listening

I love these three terrible people so much already. I can’t wait for you all to meet them.

I had an absolutely amazing time creating and participating in VN gamejams since the Toxic Yuri VN Jam, and it really feels great to see the amazing works come to life over the course of the jam and have your own work be well received. And while I am incredibly proud of both Offsuit Pair and Bug Grinder, there’s just been something nagging me about them. I don’t want to say that I feel insecure in my work– that doesn’t quite feel like the right descriptor for this situation– but I guess it’s just that, now that the initial glow of publishing a work is gone, there’s a bit of a disconnect between both of these VNs and what I want to get out of creating a piece of art.

Part of why I create is because I want to connect with people. I want them to experience my work and feel what I’ve felt. While I’ve definitely made people feel with my VNs, they aren’t really works that I feel represent my own struggles.²

This will not be the case with Bloodsport Duel SiMulator.

I know that BDSiM will not be a game for everyone, and that is because it is a game for me. Not only is it self-indulgent, pulling from a lot of my niche areas of interest, but it is deeply personal. It’s equal parts private frustration and wish fulfillment. It’s fine if parts of this won’t land for people– Hell, I’ve already been turned down by potential collaborators because the core conceit of the game made them uncomfortable. I’m not going to compromise on this because I just need to be understood.

Forgive me for speaking in vaguities, because at the end of the day I would like for the game itself to do most of the talking here. These are just thoughts about the development so far that I needed to get out of my brain– I suppose you could consider it a pre-mortem of sorts. Check back in in a few months and see how well I pull this off.

Anyways, now that I’ve bared my soul for a moment there, let’s just skate on from that and hide it under a layer of humor.

This is what BDSiM is about.

This is what BDSiM is about.

This is what BDSiM is about.

This is what BDSiM is about.

This is what BDSiM is about.

This is what BDSiM is about.

Footnotes

This is probably for the best– I maintain that having a varied media diet (and a variety of life experiences) is important for creating compelling art, and I find that avoiding getting lost in one thing for too long helps prevent creative stagnation.

So instead of posting about what I’ve been creating, I’ll use this space to talk a bit about what I’ve been reading, doing, and thinking about, as well as how this is all going to fit together into Bloodsport Duel SiMulator (BDSiM), my upcoming stat-raising game for the Yuri Ryona VN Jam. (Or, if this doesn’t sound interesting, you can skip ahead to the beginning of the link roundup.)

It’s been 3000 years…

There’s one elephant in the room preoccupying most of my time, even if I haven’t been talking about it much: the latest Pokémon game, Legends AZ. Knowing that this game would soak up my time this fall was honestly up there on the list of reasons why I decided to drop Yuri Jam, even if I didn’t include it in my blog post on the topic.

The core gameplay loop of this game hooked me for a few solid weeks– it really tickles my brain to wander around the streets of Luminose city with my favorite Pokémon and check tasks off my to-do list. The story and characters are also rather charming, and the Rust Syndicate are my faves by a mile.

The core gameplay loop of this game hooked me for a few solid weeks– it really tickles my brain to wander around the streets of Luminose city with my favorite Pokémon and check tasks off my to-do list. The story and characters are also rather charming, and the Rust Syndicate are my faves by a mile.

In no way is Legends AZ a perfect game (I don’t even think it’s my favorite Pokémon game in the past few years) nor do I care to defend the shortcomings of Game Freak as a game development studio with an insanely large budget, but I do find it fascinating to track how Game Freak has learned through iteration over the past decade. Much like the Ryu Ga Gotoku series, each successive Pokémon game is an awkward stumbling step forward that tries to bite off new mechanics and concepts that prior games haven’t tried, and only after a given idea has been given a few rounds in the rockgrinder of implementation does it really come together.

In particular, Legends AZ feels like the culmination of open world mechanics that the series has been flirting with since the Wild Areas of Sword & Shield. Both Legends Arceus and Scarlet & Violet took stabs at integrating how the player triggers a menu-based turn-based combat section with active targeting in the overworld, but only in Legends AZ does this lead to an “immersive” battle that retains the same modes of interaction as overworld navigation.¹

Granted, Gamefreak has some awkward moments where they seem to move backwards between generations (see: character customization), but Legends AZ is the first game to really feel thematically cohesive and nail an anime-as-hell cinematic feel for its climax.

Life in plastic (It’s fantastic)

If you’ve been reading my status updates, you probably saw hints of my descent into plamo². I didn’t realize this was a hobby that would grip me so thoroughly, but it’s been a nice excuse to stay offline. Working with my hands, away from a screen, while doing detail-oriented sanding and assembly work and listening to an audiobook is such a great way to spend a few hours unwinding.

While I have access to a nice lightbox setup, I still need to go through and take photographs of most of my builds. I might set up another gallery page on this website for my girls, we’ll see soon enough…

While I have access to a nice lightbox setup, I still need to go through and take photographs of most of my builds. I might set up another gallery page on this website for my girls, we’ll see soon enough…

In particular I’ve been greatly enjoying Bandai’s “30 Minutes” series, which includes the mecha-centric “30 Minute Missions”, anime girl-centric “30 Minute Sisters”, and dark souls npc-alike-centric “30 Minute Fantasy” lines. Each kit is affordably priced and parts are cross-compatible across different kits and series. This level of flexibility and modularity has earned the series the moniker “lego for gunpla”, which is both incredibly apt and also explains the itch that they’re scratching.

I do intend to keep up with the hobby and continue to tinker with customizing models, but I think I’ve finally worked through the demon that was possessing me to do this with all my free time for a month.

Building these kits has also given me another level of appreciation for mecha design– if I took another crack at designing Epsilon (Bug Grinder), some of the joint details and panel decoration would come out a lot differently.

Print and Other Crafts

While I primarily engage with digital media these days, be it through indie visual novels or through audiobooks, I still frequently put in orders at my local bookstore for print books. When I picked up both of these books in October, I got a “Is this really the book you special ordered?” from the clerk. 😅

Ichi the Killer, Vol. 2 by Hideo Yamamoto and Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin

Both of these books ended up being core parts of my vision and development process for BDSiM, although this was rather unintentional for one of them.

I know that my weakspot in creating a visual novel is prose– I’m reasonably confident in my visual art abilities, have a strong sense of how to tie the big picture vision of a story to its intended themes, and know that I’m hot shit when it comes to programming, but writing? Dear reader, even though I am trying my best to inform and amuse in this personal correspondence, it is a belabored affair. Turning ideas and concepts and scenes into sequential letters and stringing them together on the page has always been a struggle for me, even now as I write this blog post.

I look up to the great Ursula K. Le Guin and her absolute mastery over prose, something that she exerts so effortlessly that it makes me appreciate the use of language as an artform in and of itself. Reading her book on creative writing and hearing what she has to say on the nuts and bolts of language has been an absolutely illuminating experience. Between witty examples and insightful commentary on interpersonal communication, her explanations on how certain written conventions work have made many aspects of the act of writing click in my mind.

Steering the Craft is an easy read, and I have been reading through the book (and performing the writing exercises paired with every chapter) at a steady clip. I expect to be finished before development starts on BDSiM, and I also expect to be a much stronger writer for going through this process.

(The part where I actually start talking about sadism)

Now, for the other book… Ohhhhh Koroshiya Ichi, where do I begin…

Well, I guess I can start with the fact that this book is very close to me, in part because first reading it many years ago was what made my sexuality finally make sense. While I had certainly heard of the concept of sadomasochism before reading this manga, in my mind it was always something that had to be paired with conventional intercourse. It never occurred to me that this could be desirable to people in a sexual way, but without any bumping genitals involved.

I feel like I have to mention that this is a manga that comes with a hearty list of (well-deserved) content warnings, and the way its characters discuss BDSM is far more indicative of their own warped ideas about desire than it is remotely safe, sane, or consensual. Maybe that’s part of why this manga is so precious to me– it fully embraces the messiness and confusion of human sexual desire.

I’ll spare writing out a proper review for Ichi the Killer, since that’s not really what I wanted to do with this post. I’ll just say that:

1. It’s nothing short of a small miracle that this finally got an English physical release, and that they did a good job with both the translation and printing, and
2. If you enjoy sadomasochistic, psychological crime fiction you really owe it to yourself to check this one out.

Now, given what I’ve said about the manga so far, I imagine that it could be a bit surprising that this manga was unintentionally a core influence in BDSiM. I’ve been kicking around the core concept for BDSiM since the Toxic Yuri VN Jam ended, and over time it has gathered depth and themes as I molded the idea in my mind (and on my Obsidian canvas). But it’s true– despite being such a cornerstone of my favorite relationship dynamics and relation to sadomasochistic desires, Ichi the Killer is something that exists in my mind as an amorphous vibe. Actually revisiting the original text for the first time in a few years helped to clarify some core characterization that I was struggling with.

Do forgive some of my vague wording here, reader. I hope that this connection will speak for itself once the game is out– I don’t want to completely show my hand.

Ohhh it’s all coming together…

Oh, the ero/horror (Indie VN Roundup)

As I pick my way through the submissions to the Erohorror VN Jam, there are a few standout entries that really grokked my brain chemistry. I’ll be honest: I’m really picky when it comes to NSFW material, and wide swaths of it just do nothing for me on an erotic level. I wasn’t confident that I would feel the ero- side of the erohorror in this jam, but these games pleasantly surprised me.

Digital Boymeat

This is a porn game that knows what it’s about and does not fuck around.

Goregeous art with a pervert’s attention to detail (depending on the branches you take, the injuries from prior choices are still visible) and delicious descriptions of pain. The energy between the two leads adds a fun dynamic to the piece, because if the player avoids escalation, Egon will take the torture into his own hands. The various endings also provide satisfying emotional payoff, detailing how (consensually) torturing a guy for a porn film could go very, very wrong.

Butterfly Æffect: Papillons à Quatre Mains

Butterfly Aeffect is a game that boldly asks: just how many times can a Nice Guy make everyone in the room physically recoil at his antics before the targets of his affection decide to escalate the situation violently?

I was completely glued to my computer playing this game, with moments that made me laugh and cringe in equal measure. As a game, it has much to say about mid-aughts anime fandom, questionably homoerotic friendships, the dance of soliciting relationships expected from this genre of visual novel, and the painful awkwardness caused by interjections from a well-meaning but clueless and unintentionally sexist oaf whose understanding of relationships comes primarily from ecchi.

Interactions in the game run the gamut from incredibly relatable to highly stylized.

Interactions in the game run the gamut from incredibly relatable to highly stylized.

And the payoff when the erohorror side of the game kicks in and we see not only what the women were thinking the entire time, but how their own preferences and aesthetics inform how they go about torturing our dear main character? Absolutely scrumptious. Vi is truly a woman after my heart♥.

Cuscuta: A Prayer for Endless Winter

Okay: this isn’t an erohorror jam game. It also isn’t horror and is only lightly ero, but I feel like it belongs in this blog post for reasons that will soon become clear.³

One of the things that Cuscuta pulls off marvelously is the how the initial setup achieves dramatic tension by playing with how the two main characters enter the plot with different levels of understanding about the other’s secrets. The thing that I would like to discuss is beneath multiple layers of obfuscation, and rather than risk spoiling the experience of peeling back these narrative layers, I will blur the following discussion. You can unblur it by hovering/tapping on each paragraph.

Cuscuta is a game about seeing and being seen. There are multiple layers to this for both characters, between Goldthread’s rather deliberately coy “homewrecker” persona and Alfalfa’s superficial adherence to comphet and overall restraint around Goldthread, and the way that all of this gets peeled away as the women grow closer and start to appreciate that they are being appreciated for who they actually are.

The aspect of this that really struck home for me is Alfalfa’s sadism, something innate to her affection, and the way that this has ruined prior relationships and causes her to maintain distance in subsequent relationships to prevent this from happening again.

I cried while playing this game. Many times.

I cried while playing this game. Many times.

It’s hard for me to articulate exactly why this resonates with me so deeply (aside from the fact that it is a beautiful piece of art), but I can safely say that a part of this is because this game about being seen for who you really are made me feel seen.

Bi-Monthly Article Roundup

I’ve been meaning to do something like this for a while. I do a nontrivial amount of nonfiction reading on a daily basis, and there are things that I think are neat and worth sharing or commenting on. I guess I could just post this kinda thing to my bluesky account, but I feel like I’ve curated a more fandom-y space there: this is where you go if you wanna see me nerd out.

Bad End: The Seduction of “Game Over”

This article talks at length about one of my favorite topics in game design, how the experiences that the player is put through are just as much a part of the narrative as any writing is.⁴

“…the way a game frames your failures acts as an invitation, an opportunity to convince you to stay immersed, to remind you that you’re having fun, or at least something like it. It’s bargaining, it’s persuasion, at times it is even seduction, and it’s this form which I am most intrigued by.”

This is definitely an article where I’m seated and taking notes rather than providing my own commentary. While I’m not the flavor of masochist described by the author, I enjoy embracing this kind of “play” between dev and player in the same way one might have “play” between a dom and sub, and I definitely find the same metaphors of tension and release to be useful to describe driving a narrative.

The push and pull between tedium and “reward” for losing is definitely something I plan to keep at the forefront of my mind when tuning difficulty and UX in BDSiM. Between the natural knowledge-based learning curve of a stat-raising game and my early experiences learning to play Uma Musume, I definitely have some ideas about where to take this.

SimCities and SimCrises

I’ve long since been familiar with how SimCity is not an “accurate” simulation of running a city, and that this dissonance is in part due to the (libertarian) political beliefs of the man who created it,⁵ but this is the first time I’ve seen the specifics of this dissected thoroughly.

“Games dealing with social issues always make some kind of argument, even if the designers don’t intend to persuade.”

This article also opens a discussion on something that I’ve been idly mulling over for a while, which is that to gamify a simulation, it is necessary to have player-adjustable knobs which alter the simulation in expected ways. Some design decisions may be informed more by a desire to give the player the expected response to their input than by any intended political message or overarching theme.

This is partially the nature of devising cybernetic equivalents for real-world systems. In reality, system dynamics can be incredibly complex and interact in unexpected ways; Any simulation of a real behavior is an attempt to simplify complexity into a form that is able to predict outcomes under useful circumstances.

A good design is just as much about defining what those “useful circumstances” are as it is about using math to describe system behavior.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

——statistics adage

I can definitely think back to the simulation games I’ve played over the years and point fingers at some of the places where my input didn’t lead to understandable behavior– and in all of these cases, this is because the specific “A causes B” that I was imagining was not a direct part of the design specification for the system, but instead separated by several layers of abstraction.

I was putting my foot on the gas pedal with the expectation that it would make the car go faster, but I didn’t know that there were lemmmings in the car engine that needed to be fed fruit in order to convert gasoline into motion.

The Game Theory of How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices

So, on the topic of simple interactions leading to complex downstream behaviors,

“Many different choices led to high prices when pitted against a no-swap-regret algorithm. It’s an outcome you’d expect from collusion, but without any collusive behavior in sight.”

Game Theory is always a fun lil field, if you ask me. A “game” in the game theory sense can be viewed as a type of simulation, and many of the same caveats about defining circumstances for the game/simulation apply. Sometimes the math can easily explain the ideal strategy a player should take, and sometimes, like in this article, the math has to catch up to the human intuition for how to play a given game.

At the intersection of sports and gambling

How cheaters rigged high-stakes poker games with the mob and sports pros, according to authorities

When this story hit the headlines I was tracking down as much about it as I could– it’s the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a movie. I particularly enjoy the wide range of techniques employed, from social engineering to hacking cameras in card shufflers to good ol’ fashioned card marking.

How Hacked Card Shufflers Allegedly Enabled a Mob-Fueled Poker Scam That Rocked the NBA

Quite amusing that there was already a story-in-progress on the riggable card sorting machines when the mob story broke.

Gaming industry could face repercussions from NBA-Mafia gambling case

The legalization of widespread online sports betting in the ‘states leading to players colluding to score big? Who could have seen it coming?

Men Are Betting on WNBA Player’s Menstrual Cycles

I don’t have much to add to this one other than an exhausted sigh. Like, of course this shit is happening.

FOSS: Hope for the future?

Python plan to boost software security foiled by Trump admin’s anti-DEI rules

The effects of current US administration policies on domestic funding of the sciences has been chilling, to say the least. I have to admit that seeing The Python Foundation unanimously withdraw their application (rather than submit to stripping DEI initiatives) and keep on keeping on makes me feel hopeful.

Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement

Even if the math goes over your head, I feel like a level of appreciation is needed for the people who engineered this and released it for free. The threat of quantum computing undermining public key encryption has been a looming threat for some years, and with this algorithm it’ll be possible to mitigate that without excess computational cost.

Renpy Dating Sim Engine Development

As a part of my pre-development phase for BDSiM, I’m planning to make some engine tweaks to the RenPy Dating Sim engine and release it publicly for other people to use. While the core engine is plenty functional, but are a handful of missing features that would be incredibly useful for a game whose design philosophy is heavily informed by a roguelite game like Uma Musume.

I have a fork of the engine on my new GitHub account, and the summary of the changes I intend to make are copied below:

• Update core renpy files to modern versions (completed)
• “Relationship status” screen that shows selected stats
• Optional “Hardcore” mode, which disables saves and stores all user data in persistent variables
• Optional “Quick” mode, which skips already-seen events faster than renpy text skip
• Allow specified random events to be rolled before player makes schedule selection, and display “hints” for the respective activities
• Event viewer menu, which allows the player to revisit any scene that they have already seen
• Stretch goal: refactor some objects into _ren.py files and write a framework to simulate playthroughs and predict player stat gain under different play strategies.

If this project is something that you would be interested in, either as an engine dev or a game dev, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me in the comments or through any of my listed contact info.

In Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read this snapshot of my mind. May your next creative adventure be fruitful and self-indulgent.

Footnotes