Making sports into drama (and games?)
An anime analysis from a game design perspective I admit: I am a great sports anime nerd (and I’ve previously written about the volleyball anime Haikyuu and its fandom) – something that also affects my thinking around game design. What makes sports anime so good – better than watching
Is the goal to make players feel good?
In this series of posts about relation games I’ve been discussing game and narrative design from a relational perspective. I’ve been meaning to explore the role of player agency in games centered around relationships. I also posed some specific questions: Should players get a wide variety o
Relationships and gameplay
If fictional relationships feel real, as I proposed in a previous post, then we need to be mindful of how we utilize characters and relationships in games. Why are the potential relationships there, and what do we want players to feel? Most often, we are not entirely free when we design a game ̵
Impressions from Devcom & Gamescom
Last week was a really intense one for us, as we attended both Devcom and Gamescom. At Devcom, we did the first IRL showcase of Truer than You, during the two conference days, as well as at Developer Night | Courage Cologne. Then we moved over to Gamescom for meetings, where we were part of [&hellip
Fictional relationships feel real
I’ve been writing a few posts now about the relationships in Knife Sisters and what we learned from making that game, as well as from the comments we received (here and here). This post is about one of the most important findings we’ve done when it comes to relation games. Players invest themsel
I’ll make it up to her!
Games that are about relationships and making tough choices in regards to other characters can evoke quite a lot of emotions. We have already talked a bit about how some players objected to being forced into a relationship with Dagger in Knife Sisters. Another very emotional message we got from a pl
Would you like being forced into a relationship?
When working on relation games, there are many things to take into consideration. I’ve already elaborated a little upon the fact that the choice of characters in relation games is very important, and will affect the players a lot. When working on those kinds of games I have asked myself question
Systems for Emotions – Knife Sisters
In this blog post, I’ll go into Knife Sisters as an example on how a game’s system is created to convey a story, and how the characters are chosen to play a part in that story. (Be aware, there will be spoilers!) When we started working on Knife Sisters, I mainly only knew that the […]
Systems for Emotions – Exploring Relation Games
The games we’re making are relation games: games centered around existential questions and ways to relate to others. We also have a large focus on LGBTQ+ issues and characters. In 2019, we released a game called Knife Sisters, and this blog post, as well as a few upcoming ones, will be centered ar
Making Relation Games
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the games we make, and what kind of games we want to make. When we started the new company this autumn, we also did a lot of business planning, working on the brand and so forth. Doing that kind of work is something I really enjoy, since it […]
From games to the world and back – 2022 in review
This was a year that began and ended with video games. That might not seem very strange when we’re a game studio, but nonetheless it has a special significance this year, which has been quite an eventful one, to say the least! Previous Next The year began with Hades I’m not an avid game player,
Variations on Amnesia
Adaptations are very common in the domains of manga and anime, the most typical being that an original work of manga is adapted into anime. But there is a third media form that sometimes get adaptations too, namely games, and more specifically, the adventure game genre visual novel. [This text was o
The fan art makes up for it!
In this text I will analyze fandom and fan creations connected to the shōnen (targeted towards boys) media franchise Haikyū!!. The text was originally written as a short assignment in the course Japanese Popular Culture Represented in Anime and Manga at Dalarna University. Haikyū!! is originally
Implicit Storytelling – The Excellence of Descending Stories
Descending Stories – Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju (~Showa and Genroku Era Lover’s Suicide through Rakugo) is a work of fiction by Kumota Haruko that is originally released as a 31 chapters long manga series (2010-2016) and then adapted into two seasons of anime (2016-2017). It’s a very comp
Processing the Process – On Game Creation, Burnout and the Existence
Long time no see, comrades! Last year, on April 24th, me and my team released Knife Sisters, a story-based game about love, manipulation, relationships and sex. We had been working on it for 2.5 years, but the creation process had been pretty straight forward – something that could not be said
Bridging the Gap – Steam and 18+ Content
This is a post in the series “When your Wholesome, Queer Game is Seen as Very Controversial” in which I’m circling around questions such as: How are we supposed to discuss topics like consent and sexuality with young people, if those topics are banned from almost every platform and hidden behi
When Your Wholesome, Queer Game is Seen as Very Controversial – a Blog Series
On the 24th of April we released our dark, emotional, and erotic visual novel Knife Sisters on Steam and Itch.io. In a series of posts, I will look into what happens when you approach the commercial markets with a game that explicitly aims to explore sex, power and consent. Knife Sisters is set in a
5 tips for doing a Kickstarter campaign
In november 2018 I did a Kickstarter campaign for the visual novel I’m working on, Knife Sisters. This was in part an impulse move, which I will get back to, and it was instigated by meeting a representative from Kickstarter at IndieCade in L.A. in October, who told me he thought the project c
Playing with Power – BDSM in Games
How are BDSM and power dynamics represented in games, and what can that teach us about love, life and games? In this blog post I’m exploring what BDSM and games have in common, and how BDSM and power dynamics are represented in indie games. It’s based on the talk “Explicit Power Dynamics &