do not. remind me of the passage of time.
egg tooth is out but by god was the shell annoying to break. i vehemently oppose presenting a new work alongside autocriticism though, so i'm not gonna air my displeasures, especially because i do think it turned out good (and many agree... the response to the was lovely)! sure there are things i could have done better, but it's a jam game, you can't let perfectionism get in the way of finishing. as always, scroll down for my full commentary ^_^
i also finallyyy finished (to a given value of that...) the the birds yuri story... it's in portuguese though. may translate to english eventually. você precisa ler "os pássaros (1963) se fosse bom".
i'm taking a bit of a creative break now before working on the machine beach zine again. i made some music for my friend's upcoming game, an rpg with a working title perilously close to becoming permanent if you ask me. when you follow up your wip name with "name subject to change" it's joever. i'll post about it when it's out, he's aiming to finish around november.
also working on a track for bertha, kinda like a treat for this year's queer games bundle, but tbh i probably need to start over. i'm remixing a piano nocturne by john field (that was the premise because of the match in time period and theme), but the recording i'm sampling introduced a lot of noise that's pissing me off. so i'm just not sure.
a situational eroticism is what is needed now, in our literalist times. it's exhausting, how everything is so readily defined by types, acts, traumas, kinks, fetishes, pathology, and aesthetics.— i have been looking for a way to put this into words (as in, into a tumblr post) for a while and now i don't really have to. i think there's a pervasive hogwarts-house-in-bio syndrome [1] to a lot of our discourses on sexuality that's so tiresome, but still kinda hard to avoid when you've been online so long [2]. there's other stuff here i feel deeply and have been trying to talk about and failing but won't go into [3], but it's just a top tier essay that i hard agree with.
at first this was part of the link section above but things go unwieldy: i have a lot to say. this isn't a complete or rigorous coverage of the topic, mostly just a collection of links and thoughts i had while things were happening. late july was rough.
if you're enough of a nerd to read a rando's personal website, you're probably well aware of this already. i don't think i have much to add to the conversation: usamerican (and the emphasis is important [2][3]) payment processors and advertisers have been twin boots on our global necks for as long as i remember, and emboldened by the rise in conservatism (and especially usamerican fascism) they've been pushing down harder. do not for one second think the fact they (from the looks of it) only removed daz3d incest sludge means "true art" is safe. i'm probably preaching to the choir here but don't get frog boiled. obscenity (and thus pornography) is politically defined. siding with the anti-pornography crowd is shooting your own foot.
and to be clear, pornography is worth defending on its own right.
oh hey, a couple days after writing most of that above, on july 23rd, itch.io shadowbanned all nsfw works on the site. tags like "nsfw" and "erotic" bring up results on single digits, and games (and books and so on) have been delisted — all stealthly, with not a single community update, or even an email if you have a game that's been affected (well, that's the definition of shadowbanning). the blog post was too little too late if you ask me (kinda literally too, it seems like this came out at 2am EST?). itchio has a small team, but it was completely careless of them to fuck people over first and limply apologize later. is anyone else fucking tired! a company that's built on the backs of creators and this is how you treat us. well, many such cases, that's how it always goes: keep sex around but only while it's profitable, and then pornographers and sex workers are disposable. it's a pattern that shouldn't surprise anyone at this point, but that only makes it sting more each time.
and i've been seeing some posts like "don't blame itch blame the payment processors and credit card companies and collective shout" and yeah itch had no option but to fold, but how do you expect people with delisted games to feel?? itch chose the course of action and it chose one that was confusing and hostile: a course of action that left affected creators unsure if they'd be getting payouts, that said "you're now a liability and we don't respect you enough to communicate with you". even if that's not what the people at itch responsible for the decision believe, that's the message sent when you deindex twenty thousand games (compare july 22 to july 24) and delist god-knows-how-many, at night (for most of your userbase), in complete silence. i don't think anyone is saying itch should have gone down rather than comply but idk to me the carelessness is particularly upsetting, and you don't really get to police people's anger at that. especially since a lot of these people are trans women. does not escape me. the pattern repeats forever.
good ending? we'll really have to see. high risk payment processors have higher transaction fees, and while itch is very generous with revenue sharing (you can set it all the way down to 0, and default is just 10%), that's still pretty rough. it might be the best we get for now, but it's hardly satisfactory.
yeah yeah sign petitions and call mastercard, sure. but well i personally don't live in the united states and believe that there are other ways to envision the present and future of art in the face of christofascism. if i may be so bold.
to me, there are two things making platforms like steam and itch useful for both creators and players / buyers: visibility, through tag searching and recommendation algorithms and seeing what people you follow interact with, and ease of sales, through having the platform handle hosting, serving, and the transaction.
dealing with the latter is its own can of worms (buying and selling queer content in interesting times might be useful), but we can at least do something about the former.
some time ago i made a decision: if i saw erotic art i liked, i'd share it. no "hm should i really?" or "will people think i look at too much porn?" (ooo do i have Thoughts on the rise of the term 'gooner') or "is it too early in the day?". if i like it, i reblog (or its platform-dependent equivalent), i give it 5 stars on itch, i link it here on my site. and i haven't proselytized about that (i don't think anyone has noticed tbh), but i am now. idk if we want a cultural shift we have to do our part. here, have a dark sun gwyndolin.
so this is the proposal: give porn visibility. if you feel shy about it, do it scared until it feels natural. in no time you'll have your friend turn to you in the subway and say "so there's this eroge we gotta play" (it's yu-no btw).
if you've never played a game with sex in it, go and do that. it won't hurt you, i promise they don't bite. see what all the fuss is about. you can play mine linked right below (teehee) or scroll down further for my toxic yuri vn jam reccs (though they're not all nsfw). here's 59 fucks the machine, one of the first i remember playing. outside the vn realm i don't really have much experience, and it looks like hardcoded no longer has a demo available (i've yet to play the full game, but the demo was really good!), but vns are good for you. idk just give them a shot.
if you play games with sex in them, share them. the games have been deindexed and several are being removed but they still exist. without the platform's own indexing, we'll have to do it ourselves. yes this is where i convince you to make a personal website, making a page to link to games and creators you know of. but just linking stuff on your social media is great too. writing more at length about these games is also a way to get them viewed more seriously by people who aren't in our bubble — here's porn games and writing about porn games.
if you make games with sex in them, then i really really encourage you to make a personal website to at least list them, alongisde something like a ko-fi link, and using that as the primary link to your stuff, rather than itch. if you make yuri visual novels specifically, submit them to the webring! something like the evil queerotica bundle that kills you is also pretty interesting. if you can, host your work on mediafire or proton drive or something so you can have alternate links (especially for anyone in the uk). i recommend not using google drive — too many rumors of sexually explicit content being removed, and while the official word is that they're triggering spam filters when sharing, and zip files shouldn't give you that sort of trouble, i still don't trust them.
and if i may soapbox juuuust a little bit: the matter of distribution is a really good reason to make games with smaller file sizes... the game size conversation has to happen at some point.
(while i'm focusing on eroge, i'm well aware that there's a lot of erotic literature on itch. so when i say games and gamedevs, it also applies to the authors self publishing over there.)
and well yeah speaking of the webring, here's a vision: what about chaining together individual perverts' indexes into a big meta ring? i don't think i have enough visibility to be a lead in this endeavour, but i do know that trying to compile Everything is too gargantuan a task, and decentralization is reliable. this is how the internet used to work before search engines after all. imo, the more specific the better (depth, not breadth), especially given shorter lists are easier to navigate without filters or tags (not that those can't be done, but it's an easier task if you don't have to worry about coding that).
also: the trans literature preservation project is linked in the transfeminine review post above but i'll highlight her post on building a microlibrary specifically. uhhh it's tricky for me to be the piracy advocate that i am right now: piracy and preservation go hand in hand but this is very crucially a case of people losing access to ways of being paid. idk, download the things you care about and index but let's use common sense together?
i think that's all i've got. as always, the best time to envision alternatives to our current centralized and us-centric internet infrastructure is yesterday, but the second best is now. quaint to say as i host my website through a usamerican service bound by oregon law. but yeah i have been on a speculative mood even before this, and i do believe we must think of what our small utopias look like and try to achieve them.
my entry for the toxic yuri vn jam — be sure to check out the other submissions too —, this is a short nonlinear eroge about a classically fucked mech pilot, her sentient (but definitely nonhuman) mech and an alien threat. mostly the pilot though. if you haven't played it yet, you might want to skip the commentary and come back for it later ^_^
for my last vn, a machine walks on the beach at night, the visuals were basically half the reason i was working on it in the first place. but for egg tooth, its visual style was determined by how little i wanted to draw (that's why it's nvl mode in the first place). and i really like the result! while the abstract backgrounds mean we don't get to see (if i may be crass) a mech getting tentacle fucked, it means i don't need to figure out how to draw a mech. writing and coding is hard work enough.
i think the style of these backgrounds might be familiar if you're aware of my work from 2020 and 2021. i initially tried some photomanipulation but i wasn't happy with the results; i wanted to keep things abstract and vibes based but not pure color yknow. so i went back to my dusty old artbreeder profile for inspiration: i really like the colors and textures from that generator. it's pretty fun imitating that era of synthetic images. there's just so much detail that doesn't really cohere. usually i really oppose zooming in and losing the forest for the trees, but that's the whole point in this case and the flow state is pretty lovely.
music for this guy got a lot more involved. for one, i downloaded an actual daw (lmms). but also, since i didn't know what i wanted it to look like i decided to make two tracks to better match the moods of each scene (there's an ambient i'd normally use for the whole thing, and a tenser track for actiony scenes). the music was a very important part of the game in my mind, and i think it really helps the atmosphere / making it feel finished. idk, i am really enjoying adding music to my games!
the lmms workflow is pretty interesting, it's obviously a lot more robust than plain audacity. the beat and baseline track is super useful though it took me a bit to really understand how to use it with samples (i used my breaths btw) — in fact, that's where lmms bothers me: using samples is pretty cumbersome and your options to manipulate them are basically nil. i wish it was easier to move between sample-based work and synthesis.
well to be perfectly honest this intro is just an excuse to talk about the differences in drones made through sampling and through synthesis. with audacity, i make drones by getting some sort of audio (either raw data from an exe or a recording) and paulstretching the shit out of it before adding reverbs and manipulating it kinda randomly. it makes for some really rich sounds, i love them.
but with synthesis it's closer to tibetan bowls yknow. and like. anything can be a drone, by definition it's just a sustained note, and i love the repetitive looping drones from finding some interesting wave, giving it some modulation and otherwise letting it be. but then it's a lot harder to get the more organic interplay between drone and melody. i've used both types of drone together for this ost, but i don't think i used the synth as well as i could have. really wanna learn how to better wield these.
dog the time i spent coding the random menus for this thing... see, i had some worldbuilding to do and i thought the best way to have that plus depression plus sex while keeping things pretty short would be to have an episodic structure. i was still thinking about the dictionary of the khazars (i'd love to eventually beef up that part of the metaporn short story).
how it works is pretty simple: every single scene (well, except the end) jumps to the same label, that handles all the game's logic. the scenes themselves are in a list, and if you haven't met the ending requirements this menu shuffles the list and picks two items to present as menu choices. it then removes the scene from the list and takes you there. (also if you haven't encountered the alien by your last choice, you're forced to pick between the two scenes). but there's a surprising amount of things that can go wrong, it turns out. i don't wanna bore you listing everything in detail, not sure i even remember all the bugs i had to fix, but damn python got hands. i still don't know the language btw. sure i can program with it but i'm not sure what it'll take for me to say that yeah i know a little python.
also, as a consequence of this randomization, the music crossfading needs some extra steps to check which song is currently playing and only crossfade if the upcoming song is a different one. it's unbelievable how much can go wrong when you're not manually controlling the flow of things — i don't think i'd use this structure for a longer vn, be warned if you do!
and on the note of music (heh) i'm not sure what about the setup (if the crossfade script that makes use of a nondefault audio channel or the place the music "gets declared") makes it so the music doesn't play on a load (and sometimes on rollback?). so i have a very stupid hardcoded after_load label that checks the current_song variable and plays it if it isn't already. another thing that'd become extremely unwieldy really fast. it does bother me but sometimes you gotta let it go, it's functional and no one's grading my code. still, not an elegant solution.
at least i did have an elegant single line coding moment: randomizing pilot's name. it was my friend's idea after he playtested it. since her name is an arbitrary serial, he said it'd be a neat touch to make it fully meaningless (and it was rei ayanami like). so while it always starts with E-00 (she's echo's first component i guess, and that's more readable), the rest is a randint(100000, 999999). does mean you can get unlucky and end up with ugly numbers though.
while i didn't set out to write any metaphors and a mech is mostly just a mech, everything is about transgenderism (except being transgender which is about being alive). i began to see the mech as a cis-sona. you know what it's like, don't you? piloting around a thing that isn't you. not to worldbuild in paratext, but: pilots are legally extensions of the mechs, not the other way around. they're not even really named, the mechs are. there's only one pilot other than echo's here, so i couldn't really get into it, but ligeia keeping her mech's initial letter says something about her relationship to leopard. e-00 would name herself something as different as possible. idk just a fun fact.
and speaking of ligeia, i think she's doing some heavy lifting here in her one scene. shoutout to narrative foils. like, the ~narrative purpose~ of her vaginoplasty is to contrast with e-00's inability to self-actualize. ligeia knows what she wants, enough to actually go after it.
well i think every inspo here is very obvious and very obviously part of my canon. it's a very comfort zone story. if you're interested:
i think it was rather neat how mostly aesthetic inspirations gave rise to themes. what is the firmament if not an egg shell yknow.
oh yeah baby separate subheader. here are all jam entries, look around for yourself too! there's also a webring (do join it if you participated!).
some of these games might have been delisted. i know rainjoke has, and linked accordingly, but i won't really be checking everything and the ground is still shifting under us. if a game has been taken down i urge you to check the dev's profile and see if there's an alternate source. i think it's more important than ever to seek things outside platforms we can't control and that don't have our best interests in mind.
btw one of these rickrolled me and i'm not gonna tell you which. ✴️ precede highlights.
these are not all the games in my queue but sometimes you need to take a break from text heavy games... i'll continue the list on august's artlog (possibly make a dedicated page). i have like 15-20 more that caught my eye. this jam was huge!! 200 entries!!
bye!