Truth be told, as a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to making VNs, writing is the sub-craft that I feel least confident in. (While I have talked about this here before, when I skeeted about this on bluesky it was a surprise to my followers, evidently.) I suppose that, compared to my background in both visual arts and programming, where I largely learned through reverse-engineering and self-directed learning, writing is the craft that I do have formal, fundamental training in– But this technical background doesn’t offset how it feels to publish original writing online, where, unlike my experience with visual works, it’s very difficult to get engagement with a piece, much less any kind of feedback.

And yet, here I am, penning this meandering blog post tying together loose VN recommendations, postmortem-adjacent thoughts on my most recent games, and my thoughts on writing genre fiction.

So, genuinely, thank you to anyone who takes the time to leave comments and recommend indie works. The least I can do is try to pay this forwards.

Pervert Jam Highlights

Pervert Jam is a call to make a game in a week with a target audience of one: yourself. As it turns out, it is kind of hard to make a complete entry in one week.

Although I made an earnest attempt to play every game submitted, there were quite a few that I could not get to run or otherwise suffered from game-breaking errors. Many of the gameplay-centric games kind of left me with the feeling of watching someone else play with toys– like the supremely libidinal FLESH OUT or the body horror-ridden (VR-only) Forsaken Flesh Body Art Gallery, both of which I had to ‘experience’ through the screenshots on their respective store pages.

So, my highlights from this jam are going to be visual novel entries. I find that a one-week timeline can help the development of a short story more than it hurts it– work smarter by focusing on your thesis, not harder by inflating scope.

tracing morality through soap bubbles by bruisedmarble

The soap-bubbles are popping,

and I was wrong.

A story about what it means to have sexual power.

Deals with narratives around victimhood. Reader discretion is advised.

This game feels a bit more in-line with what I’d expect from the Toxic Yuri VN Jam or some of its subsequent gamejams than most things that come to mind when describing ‘pervert jam’, but it very much fits the theme as something “unmarketable”. A grounded and uncomfortable read that touches on the struggles of local community, navigating victimhood, and what it means to consent.

Free by tippler

Don’t try this at home! Warning for dead animal pictures!

Like many of Tippler’s other works, Free manages to be witty and humorous in its small runtime. I’d say that this semi-autobiographical (?) game is a really fun (?) example of perversion in the non-sexual sense– being obsessed with something outside of the norm.

Trans girl to moth plushie file converter free online by gnat

Feeling alienated? Isolated? Rejected for your obsession over the inexplicable?

Come to the Faewoods!

Throw it all away, and embrace the transformative power of becoming your true self.

(no refunds)

This is absolutely a game where the fetishes on display are not my personal cup of tea, but I can still admire the thought about the underlying desires that went into this– an exploration of the relief from finally letting go of all your pesky human obligations and cognitive functions in exchange for being soft and unconditionally loved.

The niche of Pervert Jam

Works that explore the author’s personal realms of perversion have always been interesting to me– even if it’s not in the constellation of kinks that I enjoy. In a time where so much media sexlessly worships the conventionally attractive figure², the honest pervert eskews both of these axes, indulging in their non-conventional interests without a hint of reservation, allowing their messy devotion to flow onto the page. In comparison, descriptions like “He was tall, dark, and handsome” or “She breasted boobily” only convey a signifier of something that is meant be seen as attractive.

And, honestly, this has always been my personal experience. I never see what gets my own jollies going in mainstream media. While it can be easy to ridicule the pop-culture milieu of sexless and shallow media, even niche erotic works lauded by my peers for how sensual and tender they are just leave me bored, despite the obvious craft skill that went into them. For the most part, I don’t see reflections of my taste outside of scenes meant to be horrific.

The process of figuring out my own sexual desires has been an arduous journey of pinning thoughts and feelings down to the canvas before carefully dissecting them, picking apart what bits and pieces do and don’t work for me.

Works devoted to pervert interests are a delight for this reason. You, like me, have spent time discovering and learning about your own interests– they were not something rolled out on a platter and understood by greater society. Show me the results of your research! Show me what parts of this you enjoy! I’m here to sit down and listen.

Further reading: How Does Touch Lead to Pain or Pleasure, Janna Levin and Steven Strogatz

Worldbuilding WITH TEETH

The core concept behind WITH TEETH was inspired by how Monoco learns spells in Expedition 33 by collecting their dismembered feet³. Feet are very much not my scene, but I appreciate just how brazenly this plays into the kink angle… But what if this did cater to me?

That could be enough to set out and write a story, but when I sit down and write something I like there to be some kind of deeper meaning or themeing to it. If there isn’t something deeper to chew on, I just get bored and don’t care to finish executing the idea (yes, even in the context of self-indulgent smut). So, what deeper meaning could there be here?

Subliminal Horrors

While dental horror is not a primal fear, it is still something deeply embedded in modern society– teeth may serve a functional purpose for mastication, yes, but teeth are also a social organ. They are front-and-center when engaging in face to face communication, and, even during moments of smiling and joy, are held to strict beauty standards. It is no coincidence that teeth falling out are a common motif in nightmares.

Absent teeth in particular carry strong connotations. At different stages of life, it is normal to go without teeth– the infant whose teeth haven’t grown in yet, the youth in the transitory period before becoming an adult, and eventually, the elder, whose lost teeth are an indicator of their senility and declining health. There is a common thread between all these stages of life, namely, that they are periods of life where an (otherwise able-bodied and of sound mind) individual is stripped of agency. To be toothless is to be seen as an incomplete human by greater society.⁴

This is where this all starts to tie back to WITH TEETH, a magical setting where the associations of senility and disability with toothlessness are directly tied to stripping magical potency. The rules of the world itself substantiate the subliminal social fear.

Some analyses would go one step further and state that the act of pulling teeth is one of emasculation. I’m not a fan of tying agency to masculinity like this, but I cannot deny that the act of removing a tooth carves a new hole in the victim.

Isn’t all sex just probing cavities, anyways?

It was for this reason that I decided to keep both figures in this story wholly ungendered. I did my best to altogether avoid pronoun use as well, instead referring to both characters as a collective of body parts that appear to act and react under their own agency. It took some tinkering to get this to parse cleanly, but I think it made for far more lurid descriptions than I would have written otherwise.

When it comes to erotic violence, the genders of the participants does not matter to me⁵, but the action in WITH TEETH is, arguably, gendered. In the absence of any social indicators outside their role in violence, what gender does the reader see?

The Pelican and Timeliness

If this wasn’t a purely text-based novel, I definitely would have included some closeups of this device.
Source: Smithsonian

There’s one last tidbit I’d like to get into while discussing this game, and that is the exact exact means of tooth extraction. I did a bit of historical research on tooth removal protocols, and it turns out that a lot of the tools used for this have not changed for centuries– I ultimately settled on using the humble dental pelican, a tool that was ultimately phased out for the older tooth key because, by sheering out the tooth sideways, it was disproportionately likely to cause damage to the surrounding jaw and gums.

But like the torturer in WITH TEETH, I fundamentally wanted this to hurt.

This characterization for the torturer interplays a bit with the piece’s time period ambiguity. If the magic in a tooth can ‘die’ and it must be extracted in whole to be ‘stolen’, then for a dental pelican to be considered best practice the story would have to take place somewhere around the 16th-18th centuries; This is directly at odds with the language used– orthodontics in a recognizably modern form did not exist until the industrial revolution, and the word ‘orthodontics’ itself dates to the early 20th century. We do not know when “our age of magic” really is, just that our torturer’s actions are anachronistic.

At the start of the story, the victim assumes that the torturer is doing this for their own gain (something conveyed succinctly with the uncreative moniker “magic thief”), but as the curtain is pulled back and more about both the world and the characters are revealed, it becomes clear that this is not the case. The game climaxes at the realization that this is purely an act of sadistic hedonism, and closes on the note that the torturer has both done this before and proudly wears the marks of doing this.

Further reading: Dental Imaginaries in 19th Century Literature and Culture, Eleanor Chantelle Faulkner

WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT

It is probably unsurprising for me to say that WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT is also a game that started with a core conceit for how the world would work.

In my opinion, “worldbuilding” is a concept with very different connotations to different people. To many, it conjures notions of bullet point lists about topics like holiday traditions and jargon– things that can make for interesting decoration in a narrative, certainly, but are not the conceptual framework needed to deliver the intended themes and plot of a story. Personally, I agree with what Ada Palmer has to say: that the worldbuilder’s craft is the same as the historian’s, an art of drawing throughlines between disparate events in order to make statements about the sociopolitical and economic forces that steer the world.

And many of the throughlines from the world of WHGW to our modern day should be obvious. I am far from the first person to draw parallels between the current state of generative AI and prior tech bubbles⁶, and I doubt that I will be the last. By writing a game about generative AI that only minimally includes computers (and their output), we are free to focus on the other effects of the technology: decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio of an increasingly corporatized internet, the environmental impact of new datacenters on the surrounding (often lower-income) communities, the erosion of skilled labor and how this causes growing class disparity, the way an outside agent that mirrors one’s beliefs can further entrench them, etc. etc.

That said, there is one component of the setting that I feel is more about stylizing and underscoring the way it feels to live through such a time than is about a historical argument about the impacts of the technology: if we stop feeding our demons data, the world will not end tomorrow. But given how the average person is helpless to do anything about this industry-backed juggernaut that feels as though it is consuming the world around them, we can relate to the people in the world of WHGW have no choice but to watch as the economy warps around this existential threat.

I’ll spare this essay some of the specific decisions that were made when putting together the setting for this game. Just know that both Fisher and Laplace Atelier were involved in the early back-and-forth that pinned a lot of the specifics down, after I provided the initial pitch. This world would be very different without their contributions.

Reject Nostalgia, Turn to the Future

Setting WHGW shortly after the peak of the dot-com bubble in an alt-history where that bubble never popped both worked to cement some of our thematic parallels and gave us a delicious set of aesthetics and cultural influence to draw from.

Y2K throwbacks are in vogue, for everything from fashion to the growing popularity of oldweb-inspired services like Neocities and webrings⁷. But, even when looking back at these times with fondness, I think it is important to avoid the sweet poison of nostalgia, the fascist impulse to revisit an older time as though it was a physical space.

The experimental digital artist Nathalie Lawhead wrote an optimistic piece about the nostalgia in indie/weird-games for Web 1.0, often found in those who never lived through the time themselves. The crux of her argument is:

If I was to point at any one instance in internet history to say “this is where it all changed for the worst”, I would point to when business started to “take the internet seriously”.

I argue that such a time never existed.

The moment the internet shifted from an internal research project by the department of defense to something available to the public, companies have been trying to extract value from it. The internet is not, in the economic sense of the term, free. It takes human effort to extract copper and rare earth metals from the ground to make wire and other hardware, to bury cables and keep up with maintaining them, to generate the electricity to run servers and replace failing hardware; The people who perform this labor deserve to be fairly compensated. While there are arguments to be made about who should be responsible for footing the bill, under our present economic system one cannot deny that companies providing access to this grand series of tubes have incentive to seek increasing payment for it.

By the time of the examples cited in the article, the movie Hackers (1995) and the essays “A Declaration for the Independence of Cyberspace” and “Cyberselfish” (1996), the hooks had already been set for many of the modern conflicts that we face on the internet today.

Services like Prodigy that simplified the process of getting online had to be supported by advertiser funding in order to stay in the black. By 1991, Prodigy had already pioneered the banner ad and began to censor anyone who spoke ill of advertisers on their forums or messaging services. Companies revoking user content because they are beholden to the advertisers that maintain their bottom line– stop me if this sounds familiar.

1995 saw the birth of advertising behemoth DoubleClick, who would lay the groundwork for advertising agencies providing software-as-a-service as well as leveraging unique user fingerprints and a real-time bidding system in order to optimize the number of ad click-throughs. If this kind of combined rent-seeking-behavior combined with selling users as a product sounds familiar, that’s probably because it’s the same basic revenue model as Google Ad Services, who would eventually acquire the company. There would later be a class-action lawsuit brought against the company for violating user privacy by compiling information on their online habits without their knowledge or consent– stop me if this sounds familiar.

As much as we regard Geocities as a bastion for easily-accessible individual expression during the Web 1.0 era, we shouldn’t forget that in 1997, after the invention of javascript, the service invented what would later become known as the “pop up ad” (and this was before the controversial acquisition by Yodel Yahoo that would drive the platform to become even more profit-oriented). Browser developers would work on tools to stop the obtrusive ads, creating a game of cat-and-mouse between those who profited from user eyeballs and users who wanted a better web-surfing experience– stop me if this sounds familiar.

The power of looking to the past in order to feel hope for the future should not come from nostalgia for an era that never existed, where the original sin that would cast us from the Garden of Eden had not yet been committed; It is that knowing that people in the past had to contend with many of the same issues that we do today, and that they fought back and survived.

The Belief is Out There

One thing I wish we could have done a more concrete job solidifying was the importance of belief and how it interplays with all of the economic and supernatural forces that drive the game. A tech bubble cannot exist without a critical mass of investors to believe in it; Organized religion cannot exist without a critical mass of patrons to believe in it; AI psychosis cannot exist without a critical mass of amplified thoughts repeated back to the person who believes in them.

Belief is the glue that fills in the cracks when other explanations for the way the world works fail. While we kind of touch on this with the timing (and implied cause) of The Great Crash as well as the nature of how demons appear to people, there was a lot that we left on the table.

The direct conflict between religious and scientific ontologies for the world has always been fascinating to me.

Rachel’s status as a practicing Roman Catholic scientist was something that I decided on relatively early on, and is a topic somewhat close to my heart– I am a scientist who was raised in the Catholic church, although I stopped genuinely believing in religion in my teens when I parsed that many stories in the bible were meant to be taken as metaphors to guide social behaviors.⁸

I was also not very old when I learned to code switch when questioned in my beliefs. The answers that I gave at Sunday School were different to the answers that I gave to my mother (a catholic scientist)⁹ were different to the answers that I riddled out for myself inside my own head. While I don’t think that the scientist’s view of empirically understanding the world through study is something that has to be innately incompatible with belief in a higher power, but as I understand things now, I do think that you have to take a few liberties from the Catholic Church’s teachings in order to reconcile these belief systems.

I really wish that we could have gone into greater depth about how Rachel holds these (superficially conflicting) belief systems in balance, but by the time that I realized we were wholly overlooking this the script was already growing past our ability to easily sustain it in the limited time of the jam. Maybe on the next one.

Further reading: God is a Fiery Accelerant, Erik Davis

Robert Silverberg’s Science Fiction 101

Around the start of the year, I picked up this book on a whim when visiting an out-of-town used bookstore. Short stories I hadn’t read by Philip K. Dick and Alfred Bester? Yes, please!

I greatly enjoy the form of the SFF short story, and this book is a delightful collection of them. Aside from being an anthology, there is commentary between each work by the curator of the collection, Robert Silverberg, often going into the cultural context of the work’s original publication and analyzing the work itself, highlighting themes and dissecting effective narrative devices– It’s like having a mini-bookclub baked-in to the book itself. That said, there are definitely points where I disagree with what Silverberg has to say about a story.

The stories in the book run the gamut from the crunchy and detail-oriented to the lyrical and emotional, but the overwhelming feeling across the selected works is a sense of wonder. The last story in the collection, Day Million by Fredrerik Pohl, is a story that paints mundane life in the distant future as something wondrously different to our own, which works well as a capstone to a collection. (It’s a particularly short short story, you could probably go read it now without losing the cadence of this post too much.)

This is the gist of what Silverberg has to say about it:

Long before the term “future shock” became a cliché, Pohl realized that the world is in a state of rapid metamorphosis in which change has been coming at an almost unimaginable rate: and in which that rate will continue to accelerate. Reality makes science fiction look timid; what most writers imagine as the world of 2583 will be old stuff before the year 2050, and if we could see the true world of 2583 it would be virtually unrecognizable to us. […] “Day Million” is framed in the form of a challenge to our complacency.

But… is this unimaginable shift really all that the story is saying? I want to highlight this particular snippet, emphasis added.

About this business of her being a boy. It didn’t matter to her audiences that genetically she was male. It wouldn’t matter to you, if you were among them, because you wouldn’t know it—not unless you took a biopsy cutting of her flesh and put it under an electron-microscope to find the XY chromosome—and it didn’t matter to them because they didn’t care. Through techniques which are not only complex but haven’t yet been discovered, these people were able to determine a great deal about the aptitudes and easements of babies quite a long time before they were born—at about the second horizon of cell-division, to be exact, when the segmenting egg is becoming a free blastocyst—and then they naturally helped those aptitudes along. Wouldn’t we? If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one. As sex had long been dissociated from reproduction this was relatively easy to do and caused no trouble and no, or at least very little, comment.

How much is “very little”? Oh, about as much as would be caused by our own tampering with Divine Will by filling a tooth. Less than would be caused by wearing a hearing aid. Does it still sound awful? Then look closely at the next busty babe you meet and reflect that she may be a Dora, for adults who are genetically male but somatically female are far from unknown even in our own time. […] The difference is that […] the people of Day Million did it often, on purpose, because they wanted to.

Well, that’s enough to tell you about Dora. It would only confuse you to add that she was seven feet tall and smelled of peanut butter. Let us begin our story.

While I would agree that this excerpt is meant as a challenge to the reader’s complacency, it is not spinning a yarn set in a distant future that is wholly detached from the author’s own time¹⁰– part of the challenge to the reader’s complacency comes from pointing out that some of elements of this story exist in our current time, and in ways that many people may not notice. I don’t think Robert Silverberg did.

To borrow the (perhaps cliché) words of another SF author,

The future is already here– it’s just not evenly distributed

– William Gibson

And this, to me, gets at the heart of what Science Fiction is about. We tell stories about hypothetical what-ifs and the future in order to talk about today; Abstracted metaphors that highlight the underlying emotional truth of a situation, built with the knowledge that the future is built from historical throughlines that started in our past.

To quote the prescient Ocavia Butler in her short essay, A Few Rules For Predicting The Future, written in 2000,

“SO DO YOU REALLY believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.’

If reality makes science fiction look timid, it’s only because it is being taken too literally. Writing science fiction is the art of using what-ifs to deeply explore our present reality.

Further reading: The Importance of Reading (and Teaching) Cyberpunk in the Age of AI, Joanna Nelius-Free

In closing

Woof, this has been my longest blog post to date. When I first set out to write this meandering post I didn’t really think that it was going to be this long, but I suppose that it should not be a surprise to myself that I have a lot of words to say on topics that I feel passionate about. Thanks for sticking through with this ‘till the end.

Site updates

Been a minute since I had one of these headings, eh? I’ve been on a kick of tinkering bits and pieces of this site, partially brought upon by seeing more pages by fellow TYVNJ participants.

• Added toybox
• Added shrine page
• Added improved last.fm now playing widget on landing page
• Minor restyling
  • Middle column of layout is now centered when all 3 columns are visible
  • Tweaked welcomments section
• External links now have icon to indicate opening in a new tab (you probably noticed this already)
• Implemented littlefoot.js footnotes (another thing obvious in the contents of this page)¹¹

I admit that I kind of want to rip out and replace parts of the backend now that I have a stronger grasp of jekyll, as well as rework large chunks of html/css now that I know about standards that were written after 2006… but we keep moving forwards. 🏃‍♀️‍➡️

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