I don’t know who I’m sending this to. But I think about you all the time. In the back of my mind. I know a lot about you. Does that mean you know about me, too? Or are you just glowing brightly in way that I don’t understand? Is anyone else seeing this? Do you get messages like this all the time? Are you aware of how much you loom in the heart of someone you haven’t met? What am I expecting; I don’t even know. This is really awkward. Sorry for doing this. It must really be hard. No, I can’t really know that. This is delusional of me. I’m going to make it stop, because if I don’t, I’m going to come to hate you, because I’m already so frustrated I’m nothing like you. I need to understand why I tear myself apart thinking of you. I’m not going to send this. I don’t know how to send this, and I hope you never read it.
Let’s all give a cheer to Lindsay Small-Butera. The TeeVee Academy is now announcing she’s won a juried animation and motion design Emmy award for her character animation in the Adventure Time episode “Ketchup.” She and her partner-in-crime, Alex, animated and directed three separate segments in the cartoon. The awards are presented here in LA not this weekend but the next.
Congratulations, Lindsay!
Alex & Lindsay’s self-caricature lifted off the dynamite ChrisOatley.com.
Heaven Will Be Mine is a queer science fiction visual novel from the creators of queer cult horror visual novel We Know The Devil, about joyriding mecha, kissing your enemies, and fighting for a new future. A send-up of 1980s giant robot anime and 70s queer science fiction, Heaven Will Be Mine puts players in the cockpits of three women fighting on opposite sides of an interstellar war to decide who they’ll get to furiously make out with the very fate of humanity in space! A game about messy twentysomething lesbian dating and dying science fiction dreams that players will explore from three unique perspectives in missions across the solar system, leading to three different endings.
Features:
•Multiple Playable Protagonists: Watch the narrative unfold from the perspective of one of the three main characters.
•A Battle For The Fate Of Space: Your choices determine which of three factions will emerge victorious and determine the fate of space, as well as the messy arguments, makeouts, and love stories of three lesbian mecha pilots.
•A Rich World To Explore: Look through chat logs and emails to understand the rise and fall of an alternate universe’s 1980s space program, and the end of its dream for humanity’s future.
The visual novel developed by Date Nighto with words by Aevee Bee and art by Mia Schwartz, 80s horror synth soundtrack by Alec Lambert is on Greenlight, and we need your help! Anyone with an account can vote, so vote and tell all your friends if you wanna see us on Steam, and let them know small queer visual novels belong there too!
Not familiar with We Know The Devil?
WE KNOW THE DEVIL is a short horror visual novel about relationship dynamics, growing pains, queer isolation, summer camp, and The Devil.
It’s something like an OTP simulator: instead of playing as one character, you pick which two you want to see pair off for different tasks and watch them bond while they try to get through their last week of bullshit delinquent kid summer camp. Maybe you want to see what happens when popular tomboy Jupiter deals with shy Venus’s bullies, or which one plays truth or dare with meangirl Neptune. But this also comes at the cost of the third person, unless there’s somehow a way to keep everyone safe?
There are no routes to lock yourself out of, only endings determined by the sum of your choices.
This game does not have jump scares or gore. It does feature themes of isolation and alienation of queer youth in a religious rural setting, abstract psychological horror, some body horror, and possibly alarming music. As in: it uses horror themes and is Not Unscary, but scaring or shocking the player is not the primary goal.
We’ve been overwhelmed with the incredible support and beautiful fanart for this game already! thank you so much <3
HEY THIS GAME IS ON SALE FOR 1.99 ON STEAM RIGHT NOW AND IT’S PRETTY GOOD AND WE’RE COMING OUT WITH A NEW GAME VERY SOON SO IT’D BE RAD IF YOU COULD SUPPORT US, IT’S MEANT SO MUCH TO US OVER THE YEARS ! FOLLOW US OVER AT http://WORstgirlsgames.tumblr.com FOR MORE INFO ON OUR UPCOMING PROJECT!
Today our developer Conrad of Pillowfight Games goes into the process behind Heaven Will Be Mine’s character-specific UI:
Building Three UIs for One Game
Heaven Will be Mine features three characters who represent three different factions: Saturn representing Celestial Mechanics, Pluto representing Cradles Graces, and Luna-Terra representing Memorial Foundation. One of the challenges we discovered early on was presenting the mood of both the character and their faction through the UI of the game.
A very early concept for unified UI.
Early comps had the UI looking the same for all characters, which we identified as underwhelming: each character had a unique personality, and we quickly realized we needed to more reinforce the character’s personality as you played through the cockpit sections.
Per-character UI, with extra flair per character. Much better!
Once we came to this realization, our UI designer Christopher Simon put together some beautiful comps, but this left me, our humble engineer, at a bit of an impasse: how do I reuse what is generally the same layout, with different colors and extra styling?
I decided to create a series of scripts that could conditionally control the display of objects on screen depending on which character was selected. These came down to three different kinds of scripts: PerCharacterColor, PerCharacterImage, and OnlyEnabledForCharacter.
PerCharacterColor will change the color of an item depending on the character, or optionally disable it entirely if the object isn’t meant to be displayed for that character. PerCharacterImage works similarly, but taking a reference to a Sprite instead of a Color. If I just wanted to turn something on or off depending on if a character was selected, OnlyEnabledForCharacter was able to do the simple comparison.
An example of the PerCharacterColor script. If a checkbox is unchecked, the object will simply not be displayed for that character.
Once I had these selection behaviours in place, I was able to put together a small tool to quickly allow me to signal to an entire menu that it was time to pretend you were in, say, Saturn’s colors.
An example of the control that allows me to quickly reassign UI presentation of an entire submenu.
Once I was able to efficiently do this reassignment, the UI came together extremely quickly. We’re currently in the process of adding animation to the UI to make it more dynamic, and I’m excited to show you all the results of our work!
Zora is one of the two main characters in our second game, In the Valley of Gods. Quite a few people remarked on Zora’s character design, in particular her hair, when they saw our announcement trailer. Indeed, creating Zora’s hair is a challenging problem for intertwined technical and cultural reasons. I would like to talk about our explorations and aspirations so far, and why it’s important to us we get it right by the time we ship.
In 2015, Evan Narcisse wrote an important essay on natural hair and blackness in video games. You should read it. It was the first time I’ve really thought critically about hair and representation in video games, and the yearning in the piece struck me.
Hair is very personal. As an immigrant woman of Chinese descent with atypically frizzy wavy hair, my hair is, to an extent, an outward expression of my struggle with who I am and where I belong (or don’t). I want to love my hair the way it naturally is, but it’s never quite simple as that.
So when I first saw the character design for Zora, I had an understanding of what task lays before us as a team. None of us has Type 4 hair, characterized by tight coils and common among black women. In fact, none of us have even made video game hair before, but we are committed to giving Zora the hair she loves, the way she chooses to wear it, with all the care and effort we can.
Building Zora’s hair will be a continual effort that lasts the whole project. Our first milestone for the hair was getting it in shape for our announcement trailer, when Zora was first introduced to the public.
As a small team without a dedicated character modeler, we hired a couple of specialists to do Zora’s character sculpt. Their task included sculpting a static version of her asymmetric bob so we could evaluate the scale and silhouette of her whole body. We knew the static sculpt would serve only as a placeholder and reference while we figured out a longer term hair solution.
Hair is a complicated combination of geometry, shader work, and texturing, and it requires a very tight and frequent iteration loop to get right. It made sense for us to do it in house even if we haven’t created hair before. The task of modeling “good enough, first pass” real-time hair for the trailer fell to me; the shading and rendering work to our graphics programmer Pete; and the copious texture and oversight work to our art director Claire. We started by investigating what other developers have done.
Real-time hair geometry, as far as I can tell, falls into two broad categories: “hair helmets” and “hair cards.” A hair helmet is what I call completely opaque geometry, as one would see on a plastic action figure or Lego figurine—think Princess Zelda’s hair in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Hair cards, on the other hand, use many sheets of hair strands to portray more free-flowing hair —think many characters in Uncharted 4. That approach is well suited to hair types that can be abstracted into sheets, which works well for any length of straight hair. There are also hybrid approaches, such as this wonderful tutorial of a game-ready afro by Baj Singh.
Claire designed Zora’s Type 4 coily hair to have a lot of texture and volume, but it also has a “big-chunky-tubes” structure allowing fluid “floppy” movement. Neither of the two previous approaches is ideal for Zora’s hair.
The closest in-game hair reference I found is Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4, but on closer inspection Nadine has Type 3 hair with very defined curls, quite different from Zora’s tighter Type 4.
Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is… just by making something, even if it sucks in the beginning. So I started off with a variant of the hair cards approach by making “big tubes” of three cross-cards to follow the shape and flow of Zora’s hair helmet sculpted by Ted Lockwood. It was important to have some geometry that remotely resembles what we will ultimately create, to test the shader Pete has been writing.
I would work on the hair for a few days at a time whenever I wanted a break from creating the trailer’s environments. After two months of wrangling various placements of polygon tubes, flat cards, and cross-cards, as well as bending all their normals as if her hair were a shrub, we had the following result as of October 2017.
Part of the challenge of all this is that not only are we making Type 4 hair, we are making stylized Type 4 hair that evokes Claire’s distinct style. It became clear very early that the way Zora’s hair interacts with light would be a key part of the shader work.
I’m not able to go into the technical details of the shader in this post, but we ended up adding individual controls for each type of lighting we wanted the hair to respond to, based on Claire’s specific concept art: for instance, light striking from the back, from the side, ambiently, and so on. This got finicky, but taught us a lot and provided enough variation to create the trailer. It will take much more experimentation and iteration for the hair to behave according to the style guide under all necessary lighting conditions, but making the trailer gave us a lot of direction for our next steps.
Right now, we have an intensely stylized back-scatter effect in the hair when backlit, but we still lack the ability to do high-quality rim lighting without relying heavily on post-processing.
We are currently only using alpha-cutouts for the hair cards (alpha sorting is a whole different topic outside the scope of this post) and I’ve been advised by character artists that some number of alpha blend cards for flyaway hairs usually works well.
For the trailer, James rigged Zora’s hair and hand animated the movement, but we plan on applying physics simulation to the hair rig for the shipping game.
There is a long way to go before we’re truly happy with Zora’s hair, but this is a good first step. As the rest of the game’s visuals become more solidified, it will become more clear what we need to tackle next.
some of our early work on Zora’s hair! That painting at the top is still one of my faves that I’ve done/
Aevee here—we’ve been pretty quiet recently on account of having to make a video game, but we’re entering the final phases of development and so we wanted to talk a little bit about both the setting, characters, and mechanics of Heaven Will Be Mine, and how we are making the game!
If not for spoiling everything, it would be kind of fun to a devblog about the game’s script, but those changes are too subtle to document:
*Came up with a mecha nomenclature based on planetary geography
*Made some adjustments to Saturn’s brattiness/likability ratios
*Added some language to clarify the metaphorical implications of a certain worldbuilding device
I wrote this up as a joke but these were really things, and this is actually great, and maybe I will publicly write something someday. Well, anyways, I’m not going to do this, so I am going to talk about the other kind of writing I am doing for this game, which is working in the markup languageInk. It’s not coding, but it’s hard, so I consider it to be coding, emotionally.
For We Know The Devil, I just sort of told Pillow Fight what I wanted to happen, and we figured it out together. It was a pretty simple mechanic, but this game is bigger and more complicated, and I wanted to be able to have a grip on how it worked as I was writing it. In the same way that you can have a wonderful idea that doesn’t sound any good on the page, the game’s logic feels kind of like a jumble until I can see it actually work. It also frees up the rest of the team to do more important things, and allows me to play more freely with the logic as I go.
Honestly, it’s kind of a nice break sometimes, because unlike writing, which has vague standards of quality, this stuff either does what I tell it or it doesn’t, so I either feel like a complete genius or an utter idiot, which has a kind of relaxing definitiveness to it. Inkle, the editor for Ink, also lets you see an html version of the script and choices, which lets me see what the logic actually does. This is frequently what I actually want it to do, and then I can decide if it was a good idea or not from there.
Heaven Will Be Mine is not that much more complicated, but it turns out: not much more complicated is still a lot complicated. It’s a really different experience to have control over the logic while I’m working on it—this is not news to probably most designers but as I am still pretty new to development, it’s exciting to me!
We’re devblogging!
A behind the scenes look at the development of Pillow Fight’s next game: Heaven Will be Mine!
i talked about this a bit on twitter, but i wanted to post some thoughts here anyway! it’s hard to believe it’s been 4 years since i posted the first chapter on here!!! back then, i almost didn’t post it, because i was scared no one would read/care about a story about epilepsy, but i posted it anyway – and i’m very glad i did! making a comic about my illness helped me become functional + brought me in contact with great & understanding people. i’m not exaggerating when i say that mis(h)adra has been a miraculous journey; making this comic saved my life and guided me to a healthy place. i’m happy that i get to continue this journey with this new release of the work and am always very open to hear others’ experiences with reading it. my askbox is always open for questions about epilepsy, coping with illness, and general thoughts.
thank you. 💜 💖 💛
MIS(H)ADRA by Iasmin Omar Ata - a wonderful new graphic novel that I highly recommend. In stores now!
Welcome everyone! This the development blog for Worst Girls, the creative team behind 2015’s queer cult horror Visual Novel We Know The Devil, and the upcoming Heaven Will Be Mine, a Visual Novel about joyriding mecha, kissing your enemies, and fighting gravity’s pull. We’re making this the official channel for updates and new info about both of our games, and regular posts on behind-the-scenes stuff, upcoming events and announcements, and information on the characters, story, and world of Heaven Will Be Mine.
Here’s our first look at Heaven Will Be Mine, with more to follow very soon:
Heaven Will Be Mine follows three women piloting giant robots in the last days of an alternate 1980s space program fighting for humanity’s future—or ditching their jobs to make out with each other instead. Experience the story from the perspective of three pilots bound by fate and gravity: veteran ace Luna-Terra, overwhelming super psychic Pluto, and hacker-hijacker Saturn as they fight for or against three different factions in an eight day war for humanity’s fate in space. Your choices decide if they become clandestine lovers or passionate rivals, and which faction’s ultimate plan for space and beyond will be realized. Win for your ideals or lose for love, and grasp heaven in your hands.
We will be debuting the demo for HWBM at the upcoming PAX West through the Indie Megabooth and we can’t wait for you to see it!
Aevee and I started a development blog for our game work, follow for updates 🙏 I can’t wait for you all to see this game!
Miami, 1986: On average, one person is murdered every day in Dade County. Between the drug cartels, the AIDS epidemic, and a flood of undocumented immigrants, hundreds more will vanish, never to be seen again. Chelo Martínez finds the people who slip through the cracks.
Help Chelo explore the beaches and back alleys of Miami at its most dangerous, investigating her very first cases as a private investigator. You make the decisions: do you bait the shady drug dealer, or beat the answers out of him? When that handsome stranger shows up at Chelo’s door, will he help your case–or distract you from it? And will you be able to find Chelo’s missing father, who disappeared without a word almost ten years ago?
Available on Steam, itch.io and Humble now in English, Spanish and Traditional Chinese.