Knife Sisters turns five
On this magical date – 2024.04.24 – Knife Sisters turns five years old. To celebrate, the game is free for 24 hours. Get it on itch-io! It both feels much longer and much shorter since this game was released. We started conceptualizing it in late 2015, originally it was intented as a web
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 ̵
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
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,
Knife Sisters got the Long Feature Award!
Tonight at the A MAZE. Awards we won the Long Feature Award for Knife Sisters! We are honored and humbled! 😀 THE LONG FEATUREThis is the award for complex games and developing virtual reality worlds. Those are the ones, who challenge your life by offering immersive storytelling and much more than
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
The reception of Knife Sisters
Knife Sisters has been out for a little more than one month. The reception has been very positive, and we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from the ones we aimed to reach. Here are some impressions: *inhales* If you want to explore queer relationships, empathic BDSM scenarios and wonderfully writte
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