sometimes life is very stressful, but there are currawongs outside, so it's okay

they need to bring back the wacko level design sensibility from KH1, it was way more interesting than anything later in the series and while I love how the combat developed it sucks the levels got stripped back to a series of linear boxes with almost no verticality

i once again owe my life to antique tech nerds who upload videos of old equipment in use. so many film history sites with pictures of antique cameras and none of them explaining the steps of using them, one million enthusiast guys on youtube who want you to know about every little mechanism.

sometimes as a VN designer you have to just think up a really nasty bad end. for your health.

i'm looking up fun activities people did at amusement parks in 1931 and one of them is 'clowns that hit you with cattle prods'

Submissions to the National Cultural Policy close next Sunday 24 May. We need as many studios, gamemakers and sector support organisations to put in submissions. Freeplay's helpful guide on making a submission can be found here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Went to the zoo, befriended a pigeon

not being able to taste things properly makes ingredient substitutions a real flip of the coin between 'it will make no perceivable difference' and 'the dish will feel vaguely Wrong in a way that's both indescribable and inescapable'

because of my accent (Kiwi) a lot of people mishear Drâculeşti as Dracula HD when I tell them about the game... imagine if Dracula was high definition

📢 CALLING ALL NONBINARY GAME DEVS! 📢 i'm helping run a steam sale event to showcase games made by nonbinary devs during the week of international nonbinary day! if you fit this description, fill out the form by may 18 👉 forms.gle/cx9AqFfPqzF9... please share & send to all your nb dev friends!!

branching narrative design decision struggle! 'a smaller number of stronger options is better' vs. 'the bonus options would be funny though'! fight!!

learning important things

Really good interview IMO. I nodded vigorously in agreement with Thomson here in particular, on the virtues of letting games go before we exhaust them of content completely: “I think that one of the things that games are great at is living large in our imaginations.”

I know it's gauche to quote tolkien but genuinely the most interesting thing in his letters to me is this one from 1963 wherein he laid out in very plain terms what I think is THE fundamental thing that makes so much art have a life in your head beyond what you see on a page or play in a game

the comiket doco is lovely, thoroughly recommend it the part where they talk around BL culture is pretty funny also. captain tsubasa fans appeared making comics 'about character relationships', you say? it brought new audiences to the event? i'm sure there's nothing to read into there.

I feel a narrative design blog post brewing in my head... hmmm...

setting my next game in the pacific solely so i don't have to double-check every piece of slang i use for whether it's universally understood or not

as always, you have time for one earnest answer 🌙 can someone else please play titanium court? i urgently need to discuss this game with people

From the creator of #ButterflySoup and #PomGetsWiFi, The Crane Rider's Tale is a mystery game inspired by Disco Elysium, Zero Escape, and Chinese folktales. 🪽On Kickstarter now! www.kickstarter.com/projects/psy...

the last few weeks I've been struggling to write anything I didn't immediately hate, and after cycling through all the usual coping strategies ('skip to the fun stuff', 'rework the scene structure', etc) the solution has been eating my vegetables and going back to a regular scene of people talking

cathartic/infuriating feeling of realising a scene you've been trying on-and-off to make work for two years just won't work ever because it's fundamentally flawed. i can move on to different concepts! why did i beat my head against this wall for so long!

I took German classes all last year and now I keep saying I'm gestresst

titanium court is extremely intriguing and moreish. somehow, i lost a round to a no smoking sign.

historical discovery of the day: so in late 1930, there was a popular novel called Imperial Palace, which was a meticulously researched upstairs-downstairs drama based on the Savoy Hotel in London with input from its staff

Dreams on a Pillow is the game that the establishment doesn't want you to play. A game made by Palestinians about Palestine. This game needs to exist, and we can make it happen. Please back, share, and talk about this game. We must amplify the voices that they're trying so hard to silence.

back in my final year of high school I had a phase where I read basically every urban fantasy detective novel in my local library. writing Van Helsing scenes for Drac now is like needing to build a fence and rediscovering a shed full of lost power tools. I know this genre. I can write this guy.

images not loading on here making the "i just released the demo to the game i've been quietly working on" a little difficult... ah well i'm in no rush. anyway DAWN CHORUS demo out now. long live the pre-apocalypse → haraiva.itch.io/dawn-chorus-...

face of a guy who's pulling a tree apart for no reason

find the part of you that needs it to exist; bring it into alignment with what you need to express. shift it from being "something to be read by others" and toward "something to be written for you"

Went to the new Sydney fish market and none of the fish restaurants had gf stuff 🥲 fishless

dropping a subtle hint that i'll be showing a demo of DAWN CHORUS interstate for the first time at ALT:GAMES in parramatta this weekend! made a sick looking start screen just for this. come look at it.

BL is a medium, yaoi is a mindset

apparently after fifteen years they've finally wrapped up all the major projects for rebuilding my hometown, otautahi/christchurch. wild to think it's back to (new) normal!

Doing revisions has been making me lean hard into what I've been calling an 'only opportunity' mode of branching narrative design; basically, for any combination of choices, I've been thinking about whether they produce the 'only opportunity' in the game to show a particular thing.

lately i keep thinking about how good elden ring was. hey, wasn't elden ring good?

thought I'd take up a relaxing new textile hobby and learn embroidery but I'm tripping at the first hurdle (thread the needle)

the magic of art is that sometimes you'll be reading a book from forty years ago and the narrator will complain about a highly specific type of person and you're that type of person (someone who has a lot of books on Huizinga and Gothic architecture)

my bus just idled at the stop for several minutes until another bus went by and now we're following it. is this romance.

romance games where you create a character of any gender, but your love interests are always taller/shorter than your player character in a way that makes it clear the relationships are still assumed to be straight every time a 'gender neutral' game has 'you look up at him' I'm like 🫵 i'm onto you

はーとふる彼氏は4月1日に15周年を迎えました。おかげさまでHappy Birthday! 🎂 The first Hatoful Boyfriend hatched on Apr 1 in 2011. Thank you for your support! 🍓 #Hatoful

hands you several dishes full of corellas

cool when you revise something and take it from 'this is bad and I'm kind of embarrassed about it' to 'this might be the best bit of the whole work'. wow! the magic of revisions!!

complaining to this guy about daylight savings and the arbitrary human systematisation of time. he doesn't get it.

This is the funniest reason for a character in a romance game to be non-romanceable

what fixing this sequence has done it's worth it it's worth it it's worth it

my beautiful wife dorohedoro has returned after six years... welcome back dorohedoro

there's a bit of drac that you'll play and think 'i bet mads did revisions on this that week they watched the thing'. and you'll be right.

happy tdov! i've been putting all my feelings in the video game i'm working on so please check back in (?) months for reflections on gender in an era of queer precarity (and dracula is there)

we watched the Castlevania musical! what an experience. Olrox was there, the Dark Priest Shaft caused the French Revolution, and there was a fairy dance number.

[sighing] it does matter whether the writing in a video game is good or bad