I won’t get into anything that could be considered a spoiler, but there was absolutely a lot of plot that we came up with in these brainstorming sessions that wound up on the cutting room floor. Fisher axed around 2/3 of our planned plot in order to get everything wrapped up in time for the jam, which was definitely the right call to make. I do think that we were able to tie up what we had in a satisfying way– many of the plot elements that we planned to elaborate ended up as juicy tidbits to chew on in the epilogue.
There’s been some talk amongst the team about revisiting the setting for a sequel, which might happen one day. One day I may also write my own short story(ies?) expanding on the origins and development of the mechs. I’m fully aware of the pitfalls of over-explaining the horror in a horror story, but in this case I believe that the number of fucked up implications multiply with a slightly more zoomed-out view of the big picture…
Minor aside behind the scenes of Bug Grinder
Learning to work with a new team can be an exercise in learning the differences in your creation styles just as much as it is an exercise in creation. One point where this difference in styles became incredibly apparent was when deciding what to name the project– almost all of my proposed names were far more scientific or technical than the others.
My proposed names list:
- Stochastic Reality
- Basal Contamination
- Tactical Stochasticity
- Mechaphasia
- Subsumption: Mechaphasia
- Manifest Subsumption
- Mechyme
- Divertechulopepsia
- Ancillary Laparopilot
- Laparopilot Record
- Laparopilot Appendix
- Cricket, Human, Mecha
I’m still really fond of the word “laparopilot”, I may find an excuse to use that later.
New site features
The release of Bug Grinder segways nicely into two new site features: locally hosted itch-alike game pages and a 18+ content warning module (both of which can be seen on the page for Bug Grinder). While I don’t think that Bug Grinder counts as explicit sexual material, it’s still mature and fetish-y ways that make me want to throw that warning label on it. There will definitely be new things in the future that more unambiguously deserve this label, so please stay tuned.
I also created a full game page for Offsuit Pair while I was at it. In the future I may throw some of my 18+ work into my gallery, but that will require some elbow grease to get the template to work with the Adult-Only filter. I think I’ll also need to swap hosts before I implement this.
Changes to upcoming dev plans
The tl;dr of this section is that I will not be participating in Yuri Jam. (I will still be working on the project I was planning to submit to that.)
I know that I’m just some dev and that backing out of plans isn’t something that needs a long explanation, but participating in this jam was something that I have mentioned offhand a few times over and I don’t like to quietly drop projects and leave people wondering. Plus, some readers might find the process of making these decisions insightful, idk.
I initially wanted to use Yuri Jam as a way to get a demo for my ongoing solodev project1 out the door and also potentially meet other people who make similarly interesting things/would be interested in my work. Plus, a semi-firm deadline would force me to lock in– I’ve been piddling with parts of this since January and, truthfully, have little to show for it. Being forced to work on this project as my #1 priority would absolutely make me make ground on it.
The thing to precipitate the idea of “do I really want to partake in this game jam now, with this project?” was listening to the Crying Rules Actually podcast coverage of the Toxic Yuri VN Jam. In these episodes, the hosts spend a lot of time talking about what actually constitutes toxic yuri and ultimately come to the conclusion that many entries to the jam don’t actually meet the stated theme (something in common with the judges of the event, evidently). While I maintain that Offsuit Pair does qualify as Toxic Yuri, I found myself asking whether my ongoing project even counts as yuri.
This ongoing project is a continuation of my Postmortal Figures story, and while I did originally label the Volume 0 short stories as yuri, they also take a fundamentally different approach to carving out a narrative than this visual novel (Volume 1) will. In Volume 0, I jump around the narrative timeline to stitch together moments depicting the relationship between two women with a sci-fi thriller as the backdrop. In comparison, Volume 1 is going to be a telling of a heist involving all the established women from Volume 0. Drama first, relationships second. While there will be a ton of homoerotic tension, it’s far less a “romance” and far more a work that you walk away from and imagine that the characters get together.2
I think that, to me, this yearning can count as a kind of Yuri. But your average Yuri Jam participant, who will be walking in with a specific set of genre conventions, is unlikely to agree.3
At the end of the day, an event like Yuri Jam is only as useful as its ability to put you in contact with like-minded people, and between the aforementioned “my VN doesn’t really count as yuri” and the fact that a lot of the edgy or toxic yuri creators appear to have participated in TYVNJ in lieu of Yuri Jam this year, I just don’t think it would be beneficial for me to participate in.
The other half of this equation, of course, is where my creative energies are. As much as I’d love to get back on this project (I haven’t touched it since before TYVNJ started), I’m also tired right now. I haven’t had much of a break from firm development-related deadlines since TYVNJ started– I went from Offsuit Pair to website dev (pressured by the itch situation) to Friction & Integration for Yuri Shipping Olympics to more website dev (with a deadline of being done before Noise Jam) to Bug Grinder. I just need some time without a deadline above my head to recharge.
Plus, getting a public demo out is going to be a lot of front-loaded work. I feel like the ideal VN demo would let players pick up where they left off when the full version releases, but, like Offsuit Pair, this visual novel is going to have plot-centric gameplay. Building the engine and fine-tuning it to make early encounters to work right is going to take a lot of work from both a programming and art perspective. It’s not like writing where scaling back to 1/3 of the novel means you can leave about 2/3 of the work for later.
Yeah, there’s also the option of working on something else entirely for the jam, but… I already got the drive to do that out of my system with the aforementioned small projects.
I’m gonna keep working on Postmortal Figures Volume 1, just on my own time. I think that instead of making a demo, I’m gonna aim to get enough interesting scenes/cgs/gameplay together to make a compelling trailer before the end of the year.
On the upcoming Deus Ex remaster
So, some old lore about me: most of my oldest current friendships come from my days in the Deus Ex fandom ca. 2010-2012, in the lead up to the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the time shortly thereafter. Honestly, it still blows my mind to think about how it’s been longer since Deus Ex: Human Revolution dropped than the time between Deus Ex 1 and Human Revolution.
Let’s just say that when the remaster news dropped, the old groupchat positively lit up.
To be clear: we were not overjoyed with this news. It was more of a “…but why, though?” This remaster isn’t bringing anything new to the table, unlike the recent System Shock 1 remaster, and the graphical decisions made are rather jarring, to say the least. The new models don’t feel accurate to the intent of the old ones4, and they still feel clunky and old to a modern audience.
Fast turnaround, little creative dev work, an established audience that enjoys the established IP… this is a game that makes that only makes sense on a profits spreadsheet. The fact that it exists speaks to the problems endemic to the modern gaming industry.
But still, this is a game that’s incredibly important to me. Hell, I have vague plans to build a shrine to it on this website! For now it’s just a set of links to some of the many, many things that people have written about it. I’m still finding new analyses of the game from time to time– the other day I found this fun blog entry on how the game handles password security, with some replies from the devs in the comments section!
Putting aside how DX is an absolute masterclass in game design, it is a game that is important to me because the story was exactly the thing I needed to hear when I played it in highschool. Deus Ex is a very political game, and it was eerily prescient of “The War on Terror” that Bush would start not even 2 years after the game’s release. Among many other things, the game points out that the label “terrorist” is a term of convenience for the current enemies to the established method of political rule.
Now, I’m certain that this idea isn’t radical to the readers of this blog, but at the time I found it to be a revolutionary thought. The war in Afghanistan was nothing more than background noise through my childhood, and I grew up in a conservative suburb in Texas where the overwhelming opinion was blind support for the president. I was vaguely aware that some other people opposed the war, but I didn’t put any thought into these things so removed from my daily life. I just accepted the definition of terrorists as “people who are choosing to do Evil” that was presented to me.
As I got older, military propaganda was everywhere in pop culture and further cemented this thought: the MCU was just starting to take off, where movies like Iron Man showed blatant disregard for the lives of those from middle eastern countries; You couldn’t go to a hangout where people were playing games without the latest Call of Duty on a screen somewhere, especially after the colossal success of Modern Warfare 2.
I’m not saying this to provide excuses, and I know that this is written from a position of extreme privilege. I’m also not going to claim that DX is some leftist masterpiece that disassembles everything wrong with modern society, either. But the questions that the game asks do a good job of making the player question their political beliefs, as well the nature of belief itself. This game was a critical step in unlearning the conservative-imperialist politics that I grew up in, eventually leading to the person that I am today.5
In the end, the old game hasn’t gone away. The remaster announcement got a lot of people talking about Deus Ex again, and I even got some of my friends to install it for the first time. Even though the remaster looks bad, the fact that it gets people talking about this ~25 year old game makes me happy.
Will I be playing the remaster on day one? Probably. I want front row seats to this disaster (I am fully aware that I may be a part of the problem here.) But I’d like to see a Deus Ex 5 one day, even if it is a shitshow…
In Conclusion
Hah, this blog post ended up being a lot longer than expected. I suppose as this website matures I’ll have a lot less to say about new feature rollouts and lot more musing on general goings-on. I’m definitely planning to write up some minor reviews to shoutout cool indie works (including continued TYVNJ coverage), so please look forward to that.
Footnotes
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To be announced soon™. Although if you’re in a gamedev discord server with me you’ve probably caught me yapping about it. 🐍🎲 ↩
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To elaborate to those who are already familiar with Postmortal Figures: the primary romantic relationship at the time of Volume 1 is between Gale and Tora, who are a duo that I struggle to paint a coherent romantic picture of due to their massive power difference and different walks of life. In Volume 0 the nonlinear narrative was driven by the fact that these two seldom interact, even though these interactions massively change the trajectory of Gale’s life. While Gale certainly thinks of Tora to keep herself going during Volume 1, the thrust of the plot occurs between two of these interactions. ↩
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I’m fully aware of the irony of this coming from the person who just said “get rid of what your preconceived notions of Yuri has to be, it can be anything” in her Yuri Shipping Olympics post-event interview. ↩
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What did they do to my boy JC’s hairline??? 😭 ↩
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I would be remiss to not at least mention that the intersection of transhumanism and capitalism is also a core theme in Deus Ex, and that it was this game (far more than any other cyberpunk work) that first interested me in this interaction. But that is a lot to unpack and would benefit greatly from my reading more theory on the topic, so for now I’ll just leave this comment here in the footnotes. ↩