John: How does suddenly getting recognition on this project now feel?

Metin: I almost can’t express how joyful it is to witness all the emerging love for Moon Child and our other games. It’s a wonderful, surreal, wild ride, and it pretty much makes up for the repeated bad luck we experienced during our game development years. We’re much enjoying it while it lasts.

John: What previous media inspired the gameplay of Moon Child? Games for the gameplay, of course, but the look as well?

Metin: We all came from a Commodore 64 and 8-bit game console background and played lots of games before starting to develop our own games, but in the case of Moon Child, our goal was improving upon what we did before, when we created our preceding Amiga platform game called Hoi, which was published in 1992 after a delay, and was surrounded by bad luck with publishers.

For Moon Child‘s look I was inspired by the magical nightly atmosphere of a 1991 Capcom arcade game called Midnight Wanderers, which was part of an arcade cabinet featuring three games, collectively called Three Wonders. Next to this, another Capcom game is among my all-time favorites: the Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins and Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts series, also featuring a nightly, spooky atmosphere in a cartoonish style.

John: How was the development process back then compared to today? Do you think it’s better or worse now?

Metin: Well, we have been ripped off by publishers three times during our game development years. Those early years of the digital revolution were like the Wild West of game development. I guess the most painful experience surrounded the development and release of Moon Child‘s predecessor Hoi…

Hoi would first be published by the US-based publisher Innerprise Software, formerly known as Discovery Software International, famous for the classic Amiga games Hybris, Battle Squadron and Sword of Sodan.

In 1991, when Hoi was about 60 percent finished, Innerprise Software asked us to send them the latest version of the game, for internal evaluation and testing purposes. About three weeks later the Hoi version we sent to Innerprise turned out to have been leaked to the Amiga hacker Fairlight, and was rapidly being copied by Amiga users around the world.

We cancelled our agreement with Innerprise and found a new publisher, also in the US: Hollyware Entertainment, formerly known as MicroIllusions, publisher of The Faery Tale Adventure and Music-X.

But following the release of Hoi, Hollyware never paid us any royalties apart from an initial $200 cheque “for the release celebration party”. As we were three young chaps in a different part of the world, we did not have the resources to legally fight the lack of proceeds from our hard work. It was a deception that would occur again after the release of our puzzle game Clockwiser by the UK publisher Rasputin Software.

Both Hoi and Clockwiser were received warmly by the international game press, which made the events with the publishers even more sour.

Subsequently, we were determined to create a new, better platform game, featuring an elf-like character, and the Hoi character as an automated sidekick. But by the time we had completed the Amiga demo version, Commodore went bankrupt, and the Amiga’s future became uncertain. As we still hadn’t earned money with our games, we got the opportunity to start a semi-independent game development division at a local multimedia company. There, we reinitiated Moon Child for Windows, finally getting paid for our work, and we took advantage of certain PC hardware capacities to double the game’s resolution. We decided to leave away the Hoi character, and focus on Moon Child.

When Moon Child had just been released in the Netherlands, bad luck struck again though, because the company had invested heavily in Philips CD-i authoring hardware and software, which turned out to become a flop. By the time Moon Child would be published internationally, the publishing department was discontinued. So Moon Child remained stuck in a Netherlands-only release.

Later, we found out that the game had been living a life of its own in the worldwide piracy circuit, and through the years I’ve been receiving e-mails every now and then from people expressing the childhood joy Moon Child delivered, which is really heart-warming.

Reading the very sympathetic response of the current game dev community to Moon Child (and Hoi), I sense a connection between what we experienced with game publishers and the current state of the game publishing world, which is increasingly enshittifying, for example with the adoption of generative “AI”.

John: Were there any specific influences for the theme song? Why did the composer take the direction they took with it?

Metin: Ramon Braumuller, our composer, started playing drums at age six and joined bands by the age of twelve. In the early 1990s, he and his brother Ruud produced House music in their small studio. They were named ‘The R.’ Ramon thinks the blend of those House music influences and the Amiga demo-scene tracker music formed the foundation for the Moon Child track. He also sang the vocals in the Moon Child Amiga demo title track, using old school gear to realize the chorus: ADAT multitrack-recording onto VHS tape, then sampled the mix into the Amiga.

John: How’d it feel working on a traditional platformer in the wake of the shift to 3D, whether you knew it was coming?

Metin: I clearly remember that formed a growing dilemma for us back in the 1990s, when Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake were accelerating the attention of gamers to 3D gaming. I started practicing 3D creation in 3D Studio MAX (as 3ds Max was still called in the 1990s), but our coder, Reinier van Vliet, was hesitant to make the switch from 2D to 3D coding, and I don’t blame him. It’s literally an extra dimension you need to handle. Back in the 1990s there were no prefabricated 3D engines you could adopt.

In the course of the 1990s, after the Moon Child release had [been] stranded in the Netherlands, we decided to shift towards multimedia development: CD-ROM games and applications for companies and brands.

John: Which of the memes has been your favorite, and did having something you made find an audience in such a different way 30 years later take you off guard?

Metin: I love just about every piece of Moon Child themed expression I see on Bluesky, but I think I like the whimsical animated parodies made by Bluesky user LVL?KEN / @ricesnot.bsky.social the most.

(Note from John: Ricesnot/Icesnort is a great YTP creator/vidsmith and I’d recommend all of his work. He’s also part of a dev team called Gravy Crew Games that recently released a game called Rules and Rodents.)

Witnessing our games getting so much love and warm responses is a genuine emotional experience after we spent around ten years creating games without a real breakthrough that would have allowed us to keep creating games. After reading the positive reviews of our games in the game magazines of the early 1990s, our frustration grew when we turned out to deal with yet another unreliable publisher.

John: Was Moon Child going to evolve beyond the game if it took off? Do you have ideas for the character, or was it a design first? How has the fan response changed him as a character for you, if at all?

Metin: We always liked to fantasize about people wearing suits of our characters at games conventions, haha. And of course we would have liked to get rich with merchandise and big commercial deals, such as “Moon Child: The Movie” haha. But in the end, the sheer fun we had creating games together, inspiring each other and reading positive reviews in our favorite game magazines at the time was priceless and lasts a lifetime.

And the fan response is just wonderful. Moon Child has suddenly become the iconic character I wished he would become back in the 1990s. I created the first version of Moon Child back in 1991, when we had just experienced the setback from the first publisher, Innerprise. Later I streamlined his appearance to match the speed of Moon Child‘s scrolling. Never would I have thought that he would be elevated to fame more than 30 years later. Life can be full of surprises.

John: If Moon Child was voiced, who would you like to play him?

Metin: Oof, tough question… Sylvester Stallone, haha? Maybe Jim Carrey? In the days we made games, game characters didn’t talk yet, haha.

John: You released the source code and a level editor. Why was that your response to this sudden popularity? What do you want to see done with this now public?

Metin: When the second Hoi game publisher turned out to be unreliable, we decided to release Hoi to the Amiga users for free in 1993, released as a remix version with some minor improvements. It felt good to do that. Money isn’t everything, and we loved the idea that many Amiga users would get to know the game we had been developing for more than a year.

When Moon Child went viral on Bluesky, we wanted to do something similar: to return the appreciation of the gaming community by releasing the source files and assets, so anyone can have fun with the game, make ports, mods, etcetera. We can’t wait to see what people will create with Moon Child.

John: What is Moon Child’s perfect Sunday?

Metin: Chilling in his natural environment, sitting next to his pal Hoi, while chuckling at the funny Moon Child memes on the internet.

John: What is the team doing these days? Anything you want to share?

Metin: Around 2000, I returned to freelancing and became a magazine illustrator, newspaper cartoonist and toy modeler. I’ve also worked as a Technical Artist for the Blender Foundation for a while, which is based in Amsterdam, not very far from my hometown.

Reinier returned to game development for a number of years in the early 2000s, shifting to mobile games. We made one more game together for a company he worked at in the early 2000s, a China-themed game called Yin Hung for the Nokia N-Gage. After that, Reinier moved on to creating apps for banks, and these days he’s guiding other coders in the same field.

Ramon plays the drums in a popular Dutch party band, and creates soundtracks for high-profile Minecraft content creators on YouTube.

The three of us are still friends, frequently messaging each other, and going out for dinner every once in a while.

If you wish to play Moon Child for yourself, the game is available to be played in-browser here, or downloaded from Archive.org.

The post The Second Life of Moon Child – A Conversation with Metin Seven appeared first on Gamesline.

Parker: Entropy is our most recent announced title by the developer of Dread Delusion, Lovely Hellplace. 

Entropy is a tactical turn-based RPG inspired by classic PS1 Final Fantasy and Vagrant Story. It’s a dark fantasy similar to Dread Delusion, where the world is abandoned by its gods – which are cosmic beings that are unclear if they’re good or evil – in a post- post- post- post- post-apocalyptic world. The land is beginning to turn sour, people are beginning to get sick, settlements are all dying out, and there are demons running rampant around the land. 

You start as a member of a theater troupe, one of the players, and during a demon attack all of your troupe is destroyed, the town is destroyed, and you’re sort of thrust into this situation where in order to survive you have to band together with any survivors and mercenaries to figure out how to re-establish contact with the gods who abandoned you. 

Franny: I like that there’s still theater in a post- post- post-apocalyptic world. No matter what we’re always going to find a way to get on stage and embarrass ourselves a little bit.  

Parker: Absolutely, and you know, I think if we were, in real life, living a post- post- post-apocalyptic world where we didn’t have the comforts and technologies to rely on right now, and like generations from now not knowing what any of this did, it would kind of seem like magic to them. So, I would say if anything, we would probably regress as a society back to medieval times or something like that, back to feudalism. 

Franny: It reminds me a little of 17776 by Jon Bois. It’s about what football looks like after humanity has become immortal, so the world hasn’t exactly ended but it’s changed fundamentally, and people are going to still play football, just crazier. Why not go to space? Why not go a hundred miles per hour? Or whatever. 

Parker: Okay, space football sounds cool, but I do want to ask: is it American football or other football? 

Franny: Good ol-fashioned. 

Parker: Throwing stuff at people. 

Franny: Absolutely. 

Okay, back to Entropy, and actually, a question for you: What does your role look like in relation to Entropy? 

Parker: Yeah! So, on the publishing side with DreadXP I’m the project manager. We’re a pretty small team, we just expanded to around nine people, but we have multiple projects ongoing. The core production team is four of us, so I’m one of those four. Henry, our head of operations and production leads the four of us to make sure that everything is going smoothly on the games, that we’re providing the developers with the resources that they need to continue working. 

We provide feedback on the builds and we all have prior development experience as well. So, we all like to think and practically know what goes into making these games, and can provide that experience a little bit as insight for new developers, or for smaller teams that are kind of wanting to fill the gaps. 

Franny: The catalog of games that DreadXP publishes seems really specifically curated. At least personally, I look at the games you have here and they seem like exactly my type, there’s a real aesthetic consistency. 

Parker: That’s what I like to hear! And Hunter Bond, our studio director, and Henry Hoare, our head of operations and production, have recently really expanded the catalog of DreadXP games to incorporate multiple different genres. 

When the company got started a few years ago with the Dread X Collection, that was kind of a way to have little bite-sized tastes of all different kinds of games. Instead of just doing, you know, traditional outright horror, we’ve expanded to like Resident Evil/Silent Hill homages, some that are comedic, some that are their own takes on things, to First-Person Shooters. And now to tactical combat sandboxes and turn-based RPGs and roguelikes like White Knuckle, PIGFACE, The Secret of Weepstone, and Entropy, which we just announced, and The Lacerator. It’s really fun to be able to see people of all different tastes get to try things in our catalog. 

Franny: About Entropy, can you speak to some of the inspirations behind it? 

Parker: I would say personally, and after talking with James of Lovely Hellplace, even just looking at the key art, classic RPGs and JRPGs, especially from the 90s and the early 2000s are the main inspirations for gameplay. But the development team that James is working with all have really in-depth knowledge of their world’s lore, similar to Dread Delusion, where the narrative is so focused. 

Franny: It does seem dense, richly written. 

Parker: Very dense, and they’re excited to unveil like all of the cosmology that’s going on around this, and I think James has a taste for that kind of large-scale incorporation with small-scale personal issues, to show how the two are correlated. 

Franny: I played a bit of Dread Delusion, and it kind of had that way of not necessarily holding your hand through the world. It was just like, this is the world, here are the people in it who’ll tell you what they know, and you kind of have to piece it together yourself. 

Parker: Dread Delusion being so inspired by Morrowind was the same deal. Where like, here’s the world, here are the directions you can go with this beautiful establishing shot, have fun! You’re prompted with some main quest stuff, but you can just go do whatever. Entropy is actually very different from Dread Delusion in that sense. 

It’s channeling the stories from traditional JRPGs from the 90s, it has a more concrete story that it wants to tell and to unfold in a certain order, while also having side quests and rich characters that you can engage with. One of my favorite mechanics that are shown in the demo – which will be available to the public later – is these little choose-your-own-adventure vignettes. So, in the overworld map, there are locations you can visit. Some of them, you walk up to- and it kind of reminds me of Zork in a way, where it’s text that unfolds with these beautiful images and sprite work, and you’re like walking through this trail and suddenly teeth are raining from the sky, like what do you do? I think that’s a creative way to allow the player to engage in bite-sized side content to flesh out the lore and the atmosphere and the rules of the world. 

That’s something that I really appreciate about it. It has a lot of different flavors for people. 

Franny: I think I did run into one of those where it was like a guy in a tent, and he asks me for help killing some big monster, and I’m thinking I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet, and he just leaves mad. 

Parker: He’s like “fuck you, alright, I’ll go do it.” 

Franny: “Well, I didn’t need you anyway!” 

Parker: And seeing the consequences of that later as something that’s gonna be shown off in the full game. The demo here only covers part of the intro area, so there’s a lot more to discover. 

Franny: What did Lovely Hellplace take from Dread Delusion over to Entropy, if anything? Or are they jumping into a whole new thing? 

Parker: Yeah, after talking with James about what he enjoyed from Dread Delusion, what James really does well is tell engaging, lore-rich stories that unfold to whatever degree the player wants to learn from it. And mechanically, James really wants to create a combat system that’s engaging, and a progression system and a quest system that not only harken back but also iterate on the inspirations it’s taken from. 

Dread Delusion being so narratively focused and so exploration focused, now he wants to kind of hone in all of the skills that he took from that, and say, here are all the story bits that I want to tell, and here’s a more in-depth combat system, and here’s a more streamlined way to experience the story, while also providing more player agency. 

Franny: Has anything changed about the visual design between the 2 games? They look very similar. 

Parker: Yeah, that PS1 low-poly aesthetic. I would say the lighting and the texture work, at least from working with James on Dread Delusion and Entropy both, those are things that I’ve taken away from their visual style. And Dread Delusion was so large-scale, but a benefit of doing something like a JRPG is that with an overworld and specific explorable locations, that also lets them play with level design and to actually curate things. So, not only are areas more dense because it’s not trying to render an entire big world at all times, it’s more pretty to look at and they can play with the lighting a little bit more. 

Franny: In the demo, I noticed all the finer details seemed tighter and sharper without losing any of that chunky PS1 aesthetic, or the colors, or whatever. Like, I can read everything a little better, make out details on a face a little better.

Parker: I think that James, both in Dread Delusion and in Entropy, harkens back to the PS1 in terms of how many textures and polys that it does, but one of the things that you can leverage now with current day technology is you can just make it more dense. In a lot of old games, they couldn’t render as many objects on screen at once. Like, I love Final Fantasy 9, and I’m thinking back to the original version where it’s just some grass texture or whatever. 

Franny: It’s the same grass stamp over and over again into a horizon, the rest of imagination. 

Parker: Whereas now, it’s like let’s build an interesting backdrop. Let’s fill it with mushrooms that are explained in the lore as like, how did the soil let these mushrooms grow? It looks more lush. 

Franny: One of my favorite things that I’ve seen so far from Entropy, and especially from Dread Delusion, is the narrative. How expansive it is, but also how developed it is. Can you speak to the team’s process in developing that narrative at all? 

Parker: From working with James earlier in the process for Entropy, the narrative informs the design a lot of the time. So, they have these key world building narrative events laid out and outlined already, and they want to curate the heavy-hitting gameplay moments around those. 

Franny: Is there anything else you wanted to say about Entropy or DreadXP, or just some final thoughts? 

Parker: You know, I really love working at DreadXP. I feel like getting to work so closely with the developers gives me inspiration to continue to work on my own stuff too. I learn a lot from them and I hope that I can impart and help contribute just in some small way to the games being successful and them, you know, hopefully still having really good mental health and work-life balance with scope and everything. 

Franny: That’s the important thing. Some of these bigger games sometimes kind of sacrifice the people making them in ways. 

Parker: One thing I love is like, we’re just normal people. We all want to help each other. I think that I’ve grown a lot since working here, with my skill set, with the breadth of games and development experience of the teams that we’re working with. 

I have been given a lot of perspective, and I know that it’s a common thing to say “I’m so grateful to work at this job, this job is my life.” It’s important to me and so is my team, but they also really value lives outside of that. To be like games isn’t all there is, and we can take inspiration to make games from elsewhere, and I really appreciate the team for reminding me of that and offering that perspective. 

I think for Entropy, James’ love of classic fantasy and world building lore-rich things help him flesh out the game mechanics and the visuals, and I’m really excited to see it all come together.  

The post Conversation with Parker Hamilton of DreadXP appeared first on Gamesline.

On November 13th, just one week after release, No Players Online was delisted from Steam until December 3rd, when it was reinstated and a statement was released by studio Beeswax Games, clarifying that its takedown was due to a DMCA claim made by a former friend. It’s hard to overstate how much of an effect something like this can have on a small company. Obviously financially, but also in terms of reputation, momentum, and loss of goodwill from any lack of transparency. It’s a weird situation, something that doesn’t happen often, so I sat down with Adam Pype of Beeswax Games to talk about both the incident with Steam and No Players Online itself, a conversation I was excited to have, especially after buying and playing No Players Online myself. 

No Players Online doesn’t give away too much on its face. Its description is simple: “you find an abandoned fps game on an old computer. you decide to play it.” And play you certainly do, but beyond the empty, eerie capture-the-flag style map that the player uses to traverse some of the game’s larger themes and threads, there’s a stylish desktop with secrets to uncover. Little mini games that have souls of their own, digital occultism that runs through everything, and a lot of little touches here and there that relay an attention to detail and personal experience. No Players Online is comfortable in and unironic about its own genre. Some of the humor is nostalgic, the horror creeping and suffocating, complementing the sometimes morbid nature of obsessive grief. Everything gets space to breathe and build, resulting in an experience that I had a lot of thoughts about.

Adam: I’m one-third of Beeswax Games, it’s me and Tibau Van Den Broeck who’s a generalist – I’m also a generalist – so we both do a bit of the art, a bit of the code. We work together with Viktor Kraus who does all the audio, so it’s a small little game studio, I suppose. 

We made a game called No Players Online that was released recently, but before that, we made a game called SPOOKWARE which was kind of like WarioWare meets Paper Mario but spooky. So, both No Players Online and SPOOKWARE are based on games that I made on my own before we started the company. I was doing game-a-month at the time, in which I make a game every month and kept that up for 32 months- 

Franny: Oh wow! That’s impressive. 

Adam: Thank you! So, we got a lot of different concepts from that and then SPOOKWARE was the first thing that we were approached for to expand that into a bigger thing, so we did that, and then after we did that, we took No Players Online which was a small game jam thing that I did with Viktor back in 2019. We decided that because it was always kind of the most popular thing that we put out that we should really make it bigger, and so we spent two and a half years expanding it, kind of rebuilding it from scratch, like a spiritual successor, same title but bigger game, much bigger game. The original was about ten minutes long, and the new release is about three hours long.    

Franny: And I know you already made a couple statements about it, but if you’d like to reiterate what happened with it being pulled off of Steam? 

Adam: It really sucks because this was a former friend, so it was someone who I really trusted who basically went kind of rogue and he filed a DMCA claim to Steam like a week after we released the game, and Steam is kind of required to take it down a game when a DMCA is filed, even when it’s not real or in the right. And then we file a counter-claim and then it needs to be down for like ten more business days or something like that, so in effect the game was down for like three weeks just after release. Which, of course, is not great. 

Franny: I briefly tried to read up on like, US and UK copyright laws and it seems like copyright laws in the US are more reactive and standardized where a single claim can be very effective, especially when the allegedly infringed product is virtual and access to it can be easily revoked, whereas it seems a little more localised in the UK and I think that would give someone more of a grace period to allow for like a quicker and clearer resolution. In this case, having No Players Online pulled from the platform over an unsubstantiated claim, puts your team into a kind of guilty until proven innocent situation. So, what were the immediate consequences of this from the perspective of you and your team and how have you been recovering? 

Adam: Definitely it came to a big shock. It didn’t come completely out of nowhere, like there were some warning signs before it happened, already having complications with this person, but we really didn’t think they would go that far. But they did, and then we were kind of just shocked that it happened. I was personally very emotionally hit by it because I really used to trust this person.

But then I called my publisher like “what’s the next step” and there’s nothing you can do, the only thing was we got the lawyer and filed a counter-claim, we did all the steps correctly right away, but the reality is still the game is down for three weeks just a week after release. With Steam it’s so important that you keep that momentum of launch, because during the launch is when you make the most sales, normally, so it’s super critical. I mean obviously the loss was inevitable, but we were mostly worried about what the long term was going to look like for this game. Like, if all the momentum is killed, with the way the Steam algorithm works, it’ll get pushed down way more, effectively it’s like your game gets no downloads for like three weeks. And, you know, our game was in New & Trending before it got taken down, so obviously it’s not there now that it’s gone back up. 

A lot of visibility is just taken away. So, the only thing we could do was make a statement because not only did people not know why it was taken down, people thought it was part of the ARG – which would have been kind of crazy, no matter how much it could do for the ARG it would not make up for the loss in revenue. People even thought “oh maybe they got a DMCA from Microsoft because they used Minesweeper.” (laughs) There were a lot of theories going about, but we were obviously going to be careful, because also just legally we wanted to make all of the right moves and stuff. Not that we were, in any case, in the wrong or anything, like you said, basically treated as if we were guilty. And we obviously also have to say publicly that we didn’t steal anything, all of it is our own work. Some people even thought it was like “oh, did they use a ton of AI” or something. (laughs)

Franny: And those are things that you want to set the record straight on right away. 

Adam: Yeah, exactly, but the thing is we couldn’t even set the record straight right away because if we did that right away, then all of the publicity from that statement would have gone to nothing because the game is still not available. So, we waited until the game got back up, so that at least, you know, people could sympathize with the situation and then hopefully convert that back into sales a little bit, so that it can recover, which is what we eventually did. 

It was a really annoying three weeks. The only thing we could do was in the background prepare a statement, and then just wait and in the meantime look at the fact that the game was not available. It was so annoying because even like I think Pyrocynical was about to stream the game, looked it up on Steam and it wasn’t there, so he didn’t play it. So many potential people who could have played it. I would be like at events or something and people would ask me “what’s your game” and it’s like “oh yeah, it’s called No Players Online but it’s not up right now.” (laughs)

At least, itch kept the game up even though they also got a DMCA claim, but I think, this is just my guess, I think it’s because the people at itch know me a little better. 

Franny: And you’re not like an unknown person, you had the first iteration of No Players Online featured on let’s plays from big creators, articles written about it, there was momentum. And now Steam removed your access to a global market around a really critical time. What was the communication like between the studio and Valve during this process? 

Adam: The game gets taken down, the whole DMCA thing goes through the legal department in Valve, so it’s not the same department that does store management and stuff, so they were just like, “this is the DMCA you got, you have these next steps” very generally, but after the game got back up, we didn’t actually message Steam. Our thinking as well was: it’s also not good for Steam that like this game – that was doing well – gets such a big hit. So, we asked if we could get another round of visibility, or maybe like a daily deal or something, but they couldn’t do a daily deal so soon after release so “ask again later.” 

It’s just weird, I don’t understand why Steam wouldn’t want to help the game, like it’s obviously a very unique situation, but also I obviously understand why they took the game down, I completely understand why they want to do the right move and go through that legal process, but it’s definitely kind of baffling to us. At least, the statement and stuff, the community and people reacting to it and we had a lot of people help out and press reach out. It really, really helped a lot. 

The game has somewhat recovered in sales, it hasn’t recovered like the period it lost, but it seems to have gotten some of its momentum back. So, we’re feeling at least a little bit more optimistic for the future, like the long tail of the game. But still, the damage is there, and I don’t know how things work behind the scenes with Steam, I don’t know how it looks in the algorithm, and it’s annoying that it’s all so opaque. 

Franny: I would imagine it would be nice to have more transparency. Personal details aside, but in terms of what occurs with the person who made the false DMCA claim, what kind of consequence they face when they don’t share the same stake in Steam as you. 

Adam: When you file a DMCA, it does say “if you do this and it’s not true, you are committing perjury and you will be liable for damages.” Obviously if you do a DMCA, it’s very serious. The law should ultimately be on our side. And we’ve already spent a ton of money just on legal costs and stuff, just getting the game reinstated. It’s just a really annoying situation. 

Also, what was kind of morbidly funny was that after the game got reinstated we had a bunch of bundles like with Inscryption and Hypnospace Outlaw, all of those bundles were gone when the game got reinstated, so we tried to get them back up but when we tried, it would just give an error message and we contacted Steam support and Steam found a new bug. I guess it never happened before that a game would get DMCA’d with a bunch of bundles and then get reinstated. 

Franny: What’s been a bright spot for you and your team? 

Adam: Definitely the reaction of people, how many people reached out that were showing their support and stuff, I think a lot of people wanted us to succeed, especially in the Belgium games industry, because it is such a small industry, so everyone is always really supportive of each other. I mean, I think everyone found the whole situation quite baffling, and I was happy that we could make that statement and finally kind of talk about it publicly so that people were aware. I was really happy how many people just helped out, and at least it does seem like maybe long-term the game will be okay. But it shows, you know, that a lot of people care about the game and care about us doing well. It would just have been nice if Steam cared a bit more. 

Franny: I gotta wonder if there’s going to be any sort of internal dialogue within Valve about their reaction to this, especially because it’s a games platform, I would imagine they’d want to support the games that are on it in the ways they can. 

Adam: And normally they are very supportive. I guess their hand was just a bit forced in this situation, and it’s such a unique situation that doesn’t happen a lot. I don’t know who in Steam has the authority to make an exception, it’s such a big company as well. I think also, the nice thing about itch not taking the game down, at least the game was still available somewhere while it was down, and I think what’s so nice about a site like itch is that it’s much smaller and they can kind of just call the shot be like, “okay, we kind of trust this developer, we’ll keep the game up.” I think it’s great that even itch kind of took that risk as well, you know, for us, which is just like crazy. (laughs) I mean, I love itch, it has obviously made my career I think, and dealing with Steam as such a big corporate thing is just different, I guess. It needs to draw the right kind of attention before they do something. 

Franny: They’re definitely different ecosystems. 

Adam: It should be noted that Steam is just so, so much more important than itch, like when our game was released on Steam, the amount of units that sold on the first day was quite a lot, but on itch it was barely a hundred. As much as I love itch, unfortunately Steam is still the monopoly. It’s just incomparable, there’s not a real alternative, it’s just not the same volume.

Franny: We saw your statement going around, so I bought No Players Online and played it and I really, really enjoyed it. I really liked how it utilized that nostalgic feeling of early operating systems. I feel like we’re seeing more and more of these digital forensic/desktop exploration type games and it’s always stunning to see how different developers interpret their own vision, almost always inspired by personal memories. 

You even capture a few specific things that stood out to me like the pirated visual novel with the personalized gotcha moment of your love interest calling you a thief undeserving of love. That one popped me, and the accompanying key gen, I had one that I used when I was a kid that was all swirly and blue and it had this ethereal, oceanic music that played every time you opened it. I’ve spent this whole time thinking that was so unique, so we either encountered the same type of key gen or that was its own aesthetic back then and I didn’t really notice. 

Adam: I definitely did my fair share of piracy as a kid for sure, and I feel this is 100% a trope of the key gen with the Sega-ass-chiptune music that’s always such a banger and super loud for no reason.

Franny: This obviously just isn’t a desktop exploration kind of game, there’s a lot more to it, but are you pulling from a lot of your own personal experience and memories, with the design and feeling of it?  

Adam: Definitely, I mean in terms of the desktop itself, I try to go for something that feels somewhere between Windows 95 and XP, and I specifically wanted to do that because I feel like a lot of the retro desktop games go more for 95, but I’m too young to have really used Windows 95, so most of my memories are like XP. For me, it was like even though we set the game in the 90s, I wanted it to have an XP flavor because that was what I knew as a kid. 

Franny: I can see it in the soft edges and the shading, the kind of metallic sheen on everything.

Adam: Exactly, it’s much more bubbly, I suppose. I’m really happy with how it turned out, it’s actually funny because when we started working on the game, well usually when we make games we don’t do that much planning beforehand, we kind of just take it more organically, and in my mind it was like: okay, the desktop is going to be like a little bit of work and then most of it is gonna be the game. But, the desktop ended up taking most of the work because apparently it’s really hard to make a desktop interface. 

It’s just a lot of really tiny things that you don’t think about, and we also really wanted it to be fully featured, like you can drag files around and make files. We really wanted it to feel like an actual desktop and have that feeling of- I don’t know, Windows XP used to be really so cozy, like your little desktop where you can make your little files. Maybe that’s just nostalgia, but that’s definitely something that I wanted to do and by making things a bit more squishy, we wanted it to be a little cute even though it’s still a horror game. But then, at a certain point we did have to cut some corners, we made it so that you can’t move folders around, because it would have made it too difficult. 

Especially because the desktop is not just there as a window dressing, like a fancy menu for the games, but it’s very much a live feature. A lot of people don’t know this, so I don’t even know why we added this because it’s kind of unnecessary, but the older games that you download in the game, all of their folders are live, so if you move the graphic assets or music around different folders of different games, the games update and have those assets, it all works. It’s a very unnecessary feature, but we do use some of it for especially the ARG stuff without spoiling so much. The point was very much: we’ll make a desktop that is actually real and then we’ll try and actually do things with it, and I’m pretty sure we kind of ended up doing that. Pretty happy. 

Franny: I would say also what stood out to me was the visuals are so striking – the low poly but with the vibrant colors and dramatic shadows. It reminds me a lot of Buckshot Roulette and other games like that, at least visually. Was there any kind of specific inspiration or aesthetic discipline that you tapped into for No Players Online? 

Adam: The biggest inspiration for No Players Online was the original one. (laughs)

Franny: Oh, absolutely. 

Adam: If you play the original one, we created a new map, it’s very similar but not quite. It was actually fun to kind of remake my own game because I didn’t research my own game, like when I started working on it, it was already many years since I made No Players Online from 2019. I kind of remade it just from memory, so like I remade the map just from how I remember it, you know? And I made the gun and all the visuals, so it’s like I wanted to basically do an updated nostalgic remake or something of my own game. 

But then also, for example like you said with those striking shadows, that was very deliberate because usually when people do this kind of VFX stuff, you get a shader from the internet or something, and then use it outright, but we kind of adapted shaders that were made by Modus Interactive, which is a really good programmer for this kind of PSX stuff. We adapted it to put in a lot of the normal Unity new material stuff. So, you would have real shadows but still have a lot of the PSX elements but just kind of pick and choose the ones that give it the texture without it actually being limiting, so it has a lot of new rendering features of a modern game. Personally, I really like doing lighting in games, that’s one of my maybe specialties. 

Franny: I know there have been a few reviews claiming it’s not scary enough, however, I honestly think you – especially with the visuals alongside the other elements – conveyed the sense of horror you were going for very well. Computers, especially in their early days, have always kind of been more of a math made manifest, so you’re expecting a predictable series of events when you use a computer, so there’s usually this unsettling quality to moments where things act up or you get a virus and in No Players Online that dread combined with the later on explicit occultism really makes those unsettling moments more affecting. Especially as you build up the context between the player and John and Sarah, it really does present this horrifying atmosphere that’s not immediately in your face but kind of slowly consuming the world around you. 

Adam: Well, thank you! I think, it’s interesting that you say that because one of the first sounds that we ever added to the game was the drone on the guest desktop, as as soon as we added that to what was at that point just a normal desktop, immediately it made it feel so fucking ominous. And that was very much a direction we wanted to go in for the horror of it. A lot of the time there’s really nothing explicitly scary on the screen but it’s just the atmosphere of it is scary even though there’s nothing going on.  

So, the original No Players Online in 2019, I made that game very specifically because I wanted to make something scary, that was like the only goal I had with that game. But for the new game, I wanted it to be about something actually. For me, I still wanted it to be scary, but I wanted to use more of a horror setting and have the scary be in what it means and the context of it, but not necessarily something that’s really classically horrifying. It would have been easy to take the original concept and you’re alone in a multiplayer game and we’ll extend that experience for a couple of hours and then there’s a monster or something with some scares.

I think calling it explicitly a horror game is more so the problem in terms of the audience. A lot of people, when they see horror game they really expect it to be a horror horror game, but it’s more like horror as a setting, in the way that The Shining is a horror film as opposed to Saw. For our development, the beginning of it was very directly re-done from the original, so it’s the same setup with the shooter prototype and whole first sequence, but then we wanted to take this very quick story that we made in the original game of this woman who dies and is stuck in the game by the developer. But we wanted to take what is a tropey dead-wife-stuck-in-the-game story and turn it on its head a little bit and give the wife more agency, making it more about her and her getting out of the game, rather than about the developer and John and his loss. I think that was the intention further into the game when it becomes more of like a love story and that story about grief and more about her escaping what is ultimately kind of abuse in a way. The game eventually becomes more of a drama near the end, and personally I like that it goes that way, like it’s not going where you think it’s going, it’s a lot of surprises.

I think a lot of people just want to get what they expect. They’re like “oh I’m alone in the horror multiplayer game, more of that please” and then they’re happy, but you can’t please everyone, I suppose. 

Franny: Everyone has their own metric for fear. I went through the CTF portion of No Players Online for the first time and this unknown player joins the game and it’s a shadowy figure in the distance, and I pause the game and go wash my dishes to recenter myself. That stuff scares me.  

Adam: (laughs) That’s excellent. 

I think a lot about the fact that you do put something of yourself in a game, always.

Franny: And you can do that so well with virtual spaces, especially when you grow up with things like Ben Drowned or these thousands of creepy Minecraft SMP series or whatever, or hacking, or empty lobbies of old games. Also, one of my favorite things, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like at least one of the throughlines of the narrative of No Players Online is about the immutable part of oneself that’s left behind when you create something, especially for something that sticks around in a virtual space, or the ways in which creators let go of those parts of themself or perhaps refuse to, or the inherent souls that creations have. At least one of those notions is stated directly by Sarah toward the end of the game, but what are your thoughts on this beyond what was put in No Players Online? 

Adam: It’s good that you got that, I think I wanted to take the setting, with the desktop and the game and the story, to use those as a vehicle to talk about a lot of the things that interest me personally. Like this culture of hobbyist game development and having these forums on the internet where people just make things for fun, the culture around that and the personalities, and that was what the whole forum was about. But hundred percent, I think for me, I used to make so many small games, the reason why No Players Online is about all these small games is the same reason that SPOOKWARE was about so many small games, it’s because the only thing I really like doing is making a lot of small games. 

I think a lot about the fact that you do put something of yourself in a game, always. The kind of setting that you choose, the kind of things that you do when you make art in general it’s always a reflection of the person who makes it, and that’s also why Sarah is an artist, and John as well in a way as a game developer. 

Personally, I come from more of an environment where a lot of people around me are artists. My dad works for museums and is very much in the art world, but me as someone who makes video games and is a smaller artistic side of him, it’s like a whole different ecosphere, it’s much more like an environment that came from something that was more commercial from the get go. It’s always been like, video games are too commercial to really be respected as an artform from established arts. As someone who comes from more of this environment of more classical art, that was always a thing that I struggled with and still struggle with. That is a big theme in the game for that reason, because Sarah is a very classical artist, and John is a game developer, and even though they’re both artists, their worlds are so different. And it affects their relationship to a certain degree as well, because they really don’t understand each other’s work. 

Franny: And they’re expressing that grief and all of those emotions so differently throughout the game. 

Adam: Exactly, exactly. And I really wanted the game to be about that stuff, making the game about the fact that you put parts of yourself in it, it’s also why I put so much of myself in there, and why there’s so many of these topics that come up in the game. It’s not just about my personal experiences with making games, but it’s also my experiences with more like the established art world and also my relationships that I’ve had. I put in a lot of elements that come from my life and my perspectives into the game. I think it makes it more interesting for sure, to write what you know and use this kind of setting as a vehicle for talking about that stuff. 

Franny: Absolutely, and I feel like memory plays a big part in this, especially now that computers are really accessible and commonplace, I think we definitely tend to offload a lot of the effort of memory and presence onto our computers and social media whether it’s stuff like photos or writing or just like conversation and connection and it kind of puts us in an awkward spot when hardware can degrade and software can become corrupted or deleted, and No Players Online really couples that kind of digital dependency and impermanence with a literal external corruption with like the data and blood sacrifices, and the necromancy, and the sections with the park, and it really drives home both John’s motivation and his expression through this tech that he’s familiar with and then also Sarah’s imprisonment, merging that into this both physical and virtual space that reflects a lot of the spaces that are abandoned today, like dead MMOs and old forums. I feel like there’s something here to be discussed, like the haunted quality of those places or how, as time goes on, many of these virtual spaces also start serving as tombs.

Adam: Even the map, the CTF gulch, it kind of vaguely looks like old tombstones, like all the elements in the map, it’s kind of like a grave. And for the game, it was really important that there was so much symbolism, because we kind of know what the story is and we know the important memories of the walk in the park and stuff, and the point was, like what is haunted? They call a house haunted because it’s full of these bad memories that still remain, and that’s what the quality of something haunted actually is. 

So, these games are literally haunted because they’re getting corrupted by these memories, and these memories are getting put in there because the technology that John uses, he has to give a part of his soul for it to work, so every time you combine something, every time you infuse something, even though you’re taking these games and the souls of these games, parts of both John and Sarah get stuck in there as well. That manifests itself with the given tools of whatever game that you infuse. Therefore, it’s kind of constantly this conflict and this main scene of her dying in the park, the fact that that part is repeated over and over in different ways really drives down the weight of that memory, it being the darkest thing that keeps permeating through it. That was very much the intention there, about memory. 

It’s always been like, video games are too commercial to really be respected as an artform from established arts. As someone who comes from more of this environment of more classical art, that was always a thing that I struggled with and still struggle with.

What’s really fun while making the game was that – the specific sequence of them walking in the park came from a game that we made in the ARG for the original game and when we made that part, we kind of made it without thinking, well we kind of had an idea of like this is how Sarah died, but then actually it was from a YouTube comment that someone came up with the theory that she must have been blind, or going blind, and that’s why she drowned, and we kind of ran with that. 

So, for the new game, a lot of the things that we do, we develop it more organically. Every time we would add elements to it, we made sure that there’s always some symbolism, either to drowning, or art, or to this park, or the dog, and these symbols are constantly repeating. That was really fun to me, because it’s like every time we’d add a new part, we could be like “this is a reference to this, and therefore this other thing becomes foreshadowing.” Like, the audio player is like a record player, there’s a record player in the game as well, but then later on Sarah is the record. It’s these objects that keep coming back, and the more times it comes back, the more important it becomes. 

Like, the password for John’s account – sorry if this is a spoiler – is “sentimental” and the reason why we chose that word is because that is the song from the original game, but also because sentimentality is so much of what this game is about. It’s like, John has put sentimental value in every single object and every single small thing that reminds him of Sarah and it’s him not being able to let that go. All of these objects, like this vinyl player, the flag and the map, and all of these things have become sentimental things and that is cursing John, the fact that he put so much sentimentality into all of these things and he can’t let things go, ultimately. 

Franny: You can kind of see these elements pop up like the part in the house where you have to line up the frames, to get snippets of a conversation between John and Sarah, or the part in the art gallery where you have to go into dev mode and start deleting everything, like start sacrificing those pieces to make space in the memory. I almost expected a much more hostile final confrontation with John but once you get to him, and you and Sarah and John all come together in the last few levels, he’s more worried about what you’re doing, he’s trying to hang onto these shreds of Sarah. He’s not even angry with the player, it reflects that theme of obsessive grief that turns this familiar technology into a metaphysical space where he just can’t let go, where otherwise it would just be a dream sequence or something. 

Adam: Exactly, and there are two points – first of all, it was really important for us that there are no out of context moments in the game, like everything exists on the computer and like you say, even the memory sequence, it’s kind of alluded to that by the end of those memory sequences they’re very realistic, and the reason why they are is because it’s like the soul, it has become directed at that point to be able to shape the game.

It was really important that it doesn’t become this tropey thing but it’s always like everything exists within the physicality of this game, this program that John made that just becomes more and more powerful and more able to shape from their memories. There was even a fan theory that John and Sarah and everything aren’t real, it’s all just like a demon that shapes the whole experience to trick you basically into going into the game. Which I kind of like, actually, a good plot twist. (laughs)

But yeah, I think the other point is: what the original game was about as well is that my personal experience with game development is that everyone is scared about finishing things, like I used to make a lot of small games but I always finished them, and I never really leave my work unfinished. Something that I really dislike about the games industry is this tendency to leave things unfinished or this tendency to be obsessed with a project for many, many years. It’s like John is kind of this archetypal character, he’s someone who is way too ambitious with the things that he wants to make and can never, ever get it done. Ultimately, Sarah being stuck in the game and somehow he’s gonna revive her through that, it’s like an impossible task. But yet, he just keeps at it. He just keeps tinkering on the game, he can’t let it go because at a certain point he becomes more comfortable in this state of things being unfinished then actually getting it done. In a way he would actually be scared of finishing the game, or actually saving her. He finds comfort in the hope that it eventually becomes a routine for him to work on the thing a little bit every now and then. I think when you come and start messing with things and ultimately start destroying a lot of the work, he isn’t really mad at you because in a way he’s kind of enticed, like “oh this is a new thing for me to work on, a new problem.” He’s just finding an excuse to keep at it and constantly doing busy work so he never has to face the fact that he just, you know, has to kind of accept that Sarah is dead and to move on with his life, but he doesn’t want to.  

Franny: I also wanted to ask about the little games inside of No Players Online, were there any that were brainstormed but never made the final cut? 

Adam: Not really, actually. We were very economical. It’s the way that I work, honestly, when I put things in I put them in with the intent that it’s going to be part of the game. There’s really not much on the cutting floor. 

Franny: There are so many projects in my life that are unfinished, I admire that mindset, I could take notes honestly.

Adam: The mindset that I’ve always kind of had is that if the thing is not finished it doesn’t exist. So, it’s like, to me there’s no point if it’s not finished. And it’s like, otherwise you get stuck to this idea of what it could be and it holds you back from actually finishing it and it’s so much easier to cut things that haven’t been made than to cut things that have been made. That’s always been a philosophy that I’ve used with my work. 

Franny: That is so true. 

Franny: A note about the music, I went back and listened to the full album. It’s a really beautiful blend of like creeping atmospheric ambiance and distorted classical melodies, with some of the pieces for the small games that are really uniquely spot-on. Sometimes diegetic, sometimes not. What did the collaboration between you and Viktor Kraus look like, did you have any specific notes or direction or was it more freeform? 

Adam: I’ve been working with Viktor for a long time. The first thing we actually worked on together was the original No Players Online in 2019 and ever since every single game that I’ve made, he’s always on the audio for it. I think he’s really good because he’s really able to do a lot of different types of sounds and music, since he’s actually – you wouldn’t know it – but what he loves doing the most is like metal and hyperpop stuff. 

Making this game, I felt like I was torturing him the whole time because I was making him do the opposite of what he likes to do the most in his free time. Like as little sound as possible, like droning, you know, and then there are moments where he can shine and have, for example, the music in the dating simulator, which is very much a cutesy thing. He’s also very good at doing more of a classical or even orchestral thing. I think ultimately it is the fact that he’s so good at doing so much diverse work which really complements well with my skillset and also wanting to do a lot of diverse work. And No Players Online is so many different types of games, and therefore the sound is such a nice blend of so many different things. 

But then we use these genres also as symbolism, because all of the classical music and classical pieces in the game alludes to Sarah, because Sarah was very much into classical music. And then parts that are more like jazz are more like John. But then you have all of the themes for the other games but when they get added into the other games, some of the leitmotifs get carried over from those games, get distorted and reused in vague ways. 

And I think what was really fun was just being able to be like, I would always give him this direction of like, “for the park sequence, you just take this classical piece that is related to Sarah, but kind of distort it so it becomes something different” and he was always able to do it.

Franny: The memory stone songs in particular were very beautiful. Very evocative of their particular tragedy that you’re slowly uncovering. 

Adam: Yeah, exactly, and it also becomes much more like – like you said in the beginning almost all of the sound and music is diegetic, like the application makes the sound, stuff like that. When the morphs and the ending sequence becomes more clear, suddenly the music becomes more like instrumentation, like it’s composed for what’s actually happening on the screen, and that’s also very deliberate. 

Franny: And what are you proudest of, with No Players Online? 

Adam: I think what I’m most proud of is the fact that we were able to do so many different things and make a really, not short but, tight game. I think it does a lot of really interesting things, and it’s constantly surprising you. Instead of drawing things out, me personally, I want games to be shorter, I want games to be 2-3 hours long like a movie is. I think we had a good budget and good timeline for this game, and we could have made the game so much bigger, if we wanted to, but instead we used that time to refine and make sure that the pacing is very tight, and that it does a lot in a shorter time. Instead of like – constantly the game has like a new mechanic or new idea, and it’s there for five minutes and then it’s gone. I think, me personally, I really liked just to work on that constantly doing new things and I think it makes for a really surprising kind of result. 

And especially what I’m really proud of is that we made the game, that we made it on time, and we did it with the time we set out to do, and we didn’t kill ourselves working on this game. We had a very good work life balance and we basically didn’t crunch at all to get the game out the door. I’m very proud of that, that it just got done. 

Franny: It is a very tight, cohesive game. There are a lot of elements that might seem chaotic but it all comes together in this really nicely evolving emotional story. Also, I think I saw a big shared Google doc full of people discussing ARG stuff following the release of the game, is there more to come? 

Adam: There is definitely more to come, for sure. I won’t say too much, but the original game had an ARG and so we wanted the new game to have an ARG that’s much larger than the original one. Essentially we’re kind of doing it in phases, so the first phase of it has been solved at this point, like people have gotten to the end, and it gives a hint of like there’s more to come. So, it’ll go out in parts. 

Franny: Any final thoughts? 

Adam: Not necessarily. I think it was interesting that you said that you found the game very scary. 

Franny: (laughs) I am a little bit of a coward. 

Adam: It’s really fine, I think it’s good because this is definitely the most popular thing I’ve released in a while. Also, because it is such a big game so there are a lot of things happening, it was really interesting to see just how different this experience is for so many people. When you have such a big audience you can really see the diversity of experiences that people have for just the one game. For some people, we see them play the game and they’re just not phased by anything, and they just speedrun through it and then the game is done and it’s like whatever, like they didn’t feel a thing. And then some people would cry at parts, would enter the multiplayer game and then be scared out of their minds. There was one streamer with a heartbeat monitor and their heartrate would go way up and they’d be hugging the walls scared. 

Franny: There’s just something so dreadful about an empty lobby and a mysterious figure and the openness of it. It almost feels like, not in a bad way, but like suffocating. Where you really get to sit in it and let it build, and I think that was the scariest part for me. 

Adam: Thank you, I’m really happy that the game does so many little things and it talks about so many different things and has all of these different moments, and because of that I think there’s different parts that resonate differently for people. I think that’s what makes it a good thing. If it were just doing one thing, it might have been really popular for a typical horror game player, but it wouldn’t have been any fun for anyone else. I think the thing that we made now, even though it might have disappointed people who really wanted a big gory scary thing, by doing that, I think we reached a different audience of people that are more interested in maybe a little more depth or something. Or maybe some other kinds of work, although I will say that I’m sometimes worried that this game might not have reached those people because it’s still labeled a horror game. A lot of people might not play something just because it says it’s a horror game even though it might be for them. If I look at most of the horror games coming out, I’m still shocked that most of them are just like: I’m in space and there’s an alien. So, it feels weird to be sharing that label with them. 

Franny: It’s definitely more atmospheric horror. I don’t remember the exact wording of this post, and certainly No Players Online has reached a larger audience than this, but someone made a post somewhere that was like “you should be making art that reaches twelve specific freaks maximum and then don’t worry about everybody else.” (laughs)

Adam: (laughs) Yeah, yeah. I’m proud that the game is doing what it wants to do and that I didn’t hold back and try to do something more commercial or more broadly appealing. I think it’s very much a game that’s kind of hard to define what it is, it’s kind of hard to market it very well. I’m drawing people in mostly with the hook of like “you’re alone in this multiplayer game and it’s scary” and then that’s enough of a hook for enough people to buy it. Then, of those people who buy it, there will be some who are disappointed to find that it’s more than that, and then there are other people who will be delighted to find that it’s more than that. It’s those people that I’m happy to reach. 

Franny: No matter what, you’re gonna disappoint someone somewhere, but surprising people feels so much better anyway. 

Adam: Hundred percent.     

The post On Hardships and Horror – A Chat with Adam Pype of No Players Online appeared first on Gamesline.

SLICE hosted a lot of panels and “microtalks” with speakers of various backgrounds, and I tried to cast a wide net and attend as many as I could while covering a spread of different topics. The first block was three smaller panels mostly about storytelling and player motivation.

Cheryl Platz hosted the talk “Modern Motivators of Play,” and discussed why people play games, and the psychological needs that players are seeking to fill. There was a focus here on contrasts, especially between extrinsic versus intrinsic values that players gain from play, and the practical concepts of fun versus mastery or competition, and the intersection of those values. Overall, she introduced the many frameworks that developers can use to examine their relationship to their players and their motivations in a way that was grounded and realistic. 

Sean Vesce hosted the talk “Listening as a Design Superpower,” about the vulnerability of making and sharing art, especially in early stages, which is a common occurrence in game development, especially in terms of getting player feedback. A few specific notes I got from this talk: thinking of receiving feedback as building a muscle, building a community outside your own development team, and listening without the reflex that you’re losing creative control. Much of this talk involved ameliorating the common reactionary feelings that taking criticism often invoke – again a useful tool for any artist really, but especially those who rely on feedback to build a project. He also referenced Never Alone, a game made in collaboration with the Iñupiat people of Alaska, and how that process required listening and sharing, and honoring the world around them. 

Leah Hoyer hosted the talk “Importance of Story to Your Founder’s Journey,” which was about the story not only within a game, but around it. She starts with a question that comes up in articles sometimes: why do games still have narrative? A question with a flawed premise and an obvious answer from my perspective, but not so obvious if it keeps coming up in think pieces. She throws out the fundamental answers: it’s ownable, it differentiates one game from another, it creates conversation, it’s inexpensive, it keeps people coming back, and it provides the why. A story isn’t just in the game, it’s about the game, it’s a story about the studio or developer, the development, and the game itself – why should players or publishers buy it? 

Especially in a volatile market and an industry that’s already hard on developers and studios who have to do their own marketing, accounting, etc., there’s a need to understand what players and investors care about, and how a game lines up with it. I’ve seen the rise in players and fans taking more of an interest in the process and behind the scenes of games and studios, voice actors and artists, so it probably wouldn’t hurt to consider the story around the game as part of a core strategy. She ends on a foretelling note about understanding one’s own motivation: are you starting a studio to make games or are you starting a studio to start a business? 

Here’s where it starts to get interesting: the next panel I chose to attend was about AI. Specifically, it was titled “AI in Game Development: How Are You Using It?” I know, I know. I thought, would I not be doing my due diligence if I heard them out? Let me give the AI guys here a chance to defend themselves. What unfortunately followed would become the throughline of my impression of the day, if not the gaming industry as a whole, at least here in 2025. 

This talk was hosted by Chris Nemcosky, Justin Bailey, Jesse Helton, and moderated by Ric Neil. They represented different companies using AI in different capacities for game development both generative and analytical. I actually won’t go too much into the details of the talk itself – also I left 15 minutes in – but I will tell you much of this defense of AI in game development was introduced as “how to make a AAA game with a team of less than 12 people” and “how to make a character for less than $10k.” Considering those previous panels I attended had, at multiple points, spoken both about the scarcity of the market and the necessity for creative originality and collaboration, this panel felt like it snuck its way into this expo. Again I am reminded: are you starting a game studio to make games, or are you starting a game studio to start a business? 

For each company, there was a function they introduced. One was using original art to generate geometry and other assets with AI. The next was just text generation, for things like manuals and other tasks that would typically fall into the lap of a copywriter. In response to both of these, I would say this does not quite reach the lowest circle of hell, but I still don’t think game development is the place to take artistic AI shortcuts. 

The final example was forecast generation. From what I could gather, this program uses AI to predict how well a game would sell based on similar games. They used PEAK as an example, which didn’t clearly take into account basically everything else about it, what kind of game it is, the marketing behind it, the mechanics within and how that appeals to people, streamers, and other factors that I don’t confidently believe can be regurgitated into tangible results for what is simply Another Game Like It. 

The thought I keep coming back to is the fact that in Seattle alone, we’ve seen massive layoffs at some of our biggest and most profitable tech and gaming companies, game studios closed unceremoniously, upcoming titles cancelled despite the work already put into them, and some of the reasoning behind all this is cost-cutting, restructuring, and the growing budgets for AI. And that’s just in 2025. I can empathize with the desire to be able to make games even if you don’t have a lot of money to invest in it or a lot of people on a team, but finding new and creative ways to deny your work of human touch and a skilled person out of a paycheck isn’t the way to a bright future for the industry, for any industry. 

One of the speakers mentioned in their company’s own independent study of the market, they found that it was best to take a “conservative approach to AI integration” because “Gen Z and Alpha value authenticity” but that only manufactures permission to find the shortest route to the smallest amount of authenticity before AI is permissible to the projected audience. It feels paradoxical to frame that approach to game development in such a way – just enough authenticity to satisfy – and certainly more work than just approaching it fully invested with human labor and legitimacy. Why is the question “are the assets going to be made by humans” still up for debate?  

After looking around and wondering how many of the many, many people in the room were there for the same reason I was, I left to go catch the back half of the other main panel for that block: “Building Passionate Player Communities” – thank goodness. 

Hanna Fogelberg, Anthony Tešija, Gavin Eisenbeisz, and Brandy Camel were speaking, with Leah Hoyer from one of the earlier panels moderating. This talk brought everything back down to Earth, with how to connect with a present and potential audience, different modes of marketing, and what kinds of approaches to take. There was a focus on authenticity, not thinking of marketing a game as some kind of strategy, but rather being comfortable in the tone with which you address your audience naturally. In terms of promotional material, Hanna said “fuck AI slop.” 

This talk was more candid than I expected, but better for it. In particular, when discussing how to recognize one’s audience, they didn’t hold back on the reality of toxic communities. Brandy spoke up on this specifically, having been the person who announced Diablo Immortal at BlizzCon back in 2018, and said that building up rapport with the community helps to mitigate negative backlash and “if there’s anything you can own up to, own up to it.” One of them put it rather succinctly (paraphrased): ‘Shitcans aren’t your audience, so you don’t have to care about them, but dedicated players, modders, etc. are the people who you want to keep.’ 

In this new rise of certain demographics of gamers having rather unhinged reactions to video games with female protagonists, among other non-issues of diversity, there should be a push to deny them the satisfaction of getting their way. I’m sure it’s daunting to new and/or independent developers, but with the support of seasoned game industry people saying hey, don’t even worry about those people, we might just get through this era with our darlings intact. 

I had one more panel to attend before checking out one of the roundtable sessions: “Unity’s Indie Survival in 2025” with Major Nelson moderating the conversation between Tyler Wright, Andrea Roberts, and Nick Kaman.

Nick started this one out with a contemporary bit of advice (paraphrased): ‘There are too many good games. You’re not just competing with those, you’re competing with Fortnite and Netflix and going outside. You’re in the tough position of trying to be chosen for game shows or articles or getting streamed. Get good at the tools available so you’re not at the mercy of the gatekeepers of the industry.’ I can empathize with the constant struggle to be noticed, not to mention the added strain of whatever internal politics dictate the flow of attention.

The subject of AI came up again, as a rapidly-growing key factor of our lives as we know it. There was a little bit of a groan. Tyler started by stating the importance of understanding all the implications of it. Using AI to solve good game design, which hardly works, and not using generative AI but rather maintaining creator authorship and avoiding deliberately taking away opportunities. In other words, ‘finding a way to use AI without putting out questionable practices and output.’

Andrea added onto this, that as indies it’s important to keep an eye on how AI develops, recognize the unknowns. 

Nick called AI “a plague upon this Earth.” He elaborated by describing how it comes with so many problems that the games industry now has to face, like generative AI making art and music, and it sucks. It’s not the experience studios should want players to have. Then he says something that succinctly encompasses the problem I myself have with AI: ‘Games are art and art is made by people and AI has no ability to make art. I play games partially because they’re fun but also because they’re made by humans and I want to see that experience, that’s why I listen to music and go to museums.’ 

In settling the topic of AI, Tyler goes on to say that if you’re going to use AI, to go deep and learn how to use it responsibly, don’t let it replace your craft and make you lazy. This distinction between responsible and irresponsible AI use becomes more deliberate the further that AI technology advances, and has been a prominent sticking point in most of these conversations I’ve been observing. 

The rest of this panel is mostly spent on funding and marketing, the constant struggle within indie development obviously. There’s plenty of advice floating around, but a lot of it has to do with flexibility, networking, luck, sacrifice, and being in the right place at the right time. I think it helps to hear these stories to get that perspective, grow your own perception of what’s possible and probable, and to know you’re not the only one struggling to get funding or support. Some people are willing to go into debt, some people are willing and able to network their ass off, and so on. I feel like it’s about the same kind of sentiment I would hear when I used to ask people how they got into game writing and they would be like, “I saved someone’s life outside of a Panera Bread and it turned out to be the Narrative Director for Naughty Dog” or whatever. 

Toward the end of the day, I went to one of the roundtable sessions and, out of persistent morbid curiosity, I chose the one about AI. Specifically, “The Personal Ethics and Impacts of AI.” The moderator led us in a structured talk about the landscape and present moment of AI in games, and the livelihoods dependent upon and threatened by the expansion of it. 

We started with a series of questions about how we agree on what is and isn’t AI and what is and isn’t permissible from individual perspectives. With the table full of extremely varied backgrounds, including one of the speakers from the earlier panel about AI, there was no notion that AI is a monolith, and the limits of personal taste diverged along many lines. Fundamentally, there’s a gap between generative AI and functional AI, the art-scraping hallucination machines versus things like algorithms, mapping, functionality, etc. Part of the issue presented is looking for the ways that generative AI can be ethical, like having an in-house engine trained on consensually provided art or assets, but the financial and energy burdens still remain. 

Then we went into AI in education. Someone made the point that education is not about getting the right answer, it’s about learning the tools and reasoning to get to the right answer. Students that use ChatGPT to write their essays for them off of basic prompts, for example, lose out on the valuable processes of research, drafting, editing, and developing their own voice. The table discussed that while AI chatbots can sometimes be helpful in expert contexts where informed discernment exists, it’s more widely used at rudimentary levels and harms those early processes. A few unequal arguments were thrown around, at least one about not using electric cars simply because the charging ports aren’t common enough yet, so like many conversations about generative AI it went nowhere productive. 

Overall, the roundtable didn’t really bring up anything surprising, and while a valiant effort at productive conversation was made, opposing viewpoints on the topic of AI will usually refuse to meet in the middle. Especially on the topic of generative AI, there will always be a fundamental difference in perspective and opinion on the efficacy and ethics of it. Personally, I do believe there’s a right and a wrong answer, but that dichotomy will exist for as long as AI does. 

The moderator, at least, did a good job at keeping the conversation on-topic and meaningful, diverting away from arguments that were too personal or combative, and correcting genuine misinformation. He left us with the question: what do we want the future to look like in terms of AI? And my answer to that is: a portal back to the year 2018, but I digress. 

After the panel, the moderator – a local technical designer at Big Company – and a DigiPen student and I sat down to continue the discussion, because we all felt a little unsettled by the roundtable. This conversation was one of the highlights of my day. It was so candid and we all found each other on equal ground despite our backgrounds being rather distinct from one another. I have no quotes or paraphrasing for this, but the topics ranged from AI, generative AI in particular, the culpability (or lack thereof) of AI especially in terms of chatbot psychosis and other formed delusions, and the specific example of therapy professionals using ChatGPT to help them with clients. We went from capitalism to venture capitalism, prisons and housing to mental health and art and socialism. We truly went all over the place, and yet in this conversation was the reality that everything is connected, from generative AI and the billions being poured into it, to your tap water and the price of your rent.  

Not to be outdone by this growing discontent, I made my last stop at the indie game corner and talked to a couple of the developers about the expo itself and the Seattle indie community at large.

First I spoke to Gideon Moes from Ellensburg, developer of Night Spasm, a story-based adventure game that you play through every character in the story, to learn who they are and influence their decisions. The initial impression I got was this interesting blend of deep philosophical topics and unique omniscient gameplay with charming pixel graphics.

So, how was the process of getting into SLICE? 

G: Oh, the process? It was pretty easy. At first there was a little bit of information that I wasn’t sure about, but that was later updated, but signing up for it, getting the tickets, and actually coming here and being able to do everything has been very easy to navigate exactly where I need to go for the events that I want to see, and overall 10/10 experience.  

This is very much about not just Seattle but, you know, this general area of the PNW. What do you think makes games and game developers in this area unique, if anything? 

G: This is kind of my first time interacting with a big group like this, and I’m noticing a lot of patterns. First of all, like most, they’re all very friendly, they’re all very passionate and whatnot. One thing, compared to a lot of the other developers that I’ve met is that they don’t seem too much in your face. Like I feel like so many developers just want to tell you exactly what they want and then they really let you go. But this has been a very flexible experience and I feel like that has to do with the kind of people around you since most of them are local to Seattle and I’d say that’s the unique trait I’ve noticed in this event from all the people gathering around. 

Any other thoughts about SLICE, the area, game dev, anything like that? 

G: Seattle is a much cooler place for this kind of stuff than I thought. I never really took it as kind of a tech or game place but once I heard that slogan of “it’s the Hollywood of game development” I was like ‘oh my gosh, they’re right.” 

I also spoke to the folks – also known as Blue Comet Games – behind Magical Showdown, a team-based brawler full of vibrant magical girls. 

So, tell me about your experience at SLICE!

C: So far it’s been honestly just very nice. This is the biggest showcase we ever have been part of. We are based out of Washington, but mostly have been showcasing this on the eastside at smaller events, but we’ve had a pretty good time here. I’m very happy with the turnout and the response to the game itself. 

C: I will say this: Positives are a lot of nice talks. A couple of negatives, I feel like a couple of them may overlap a little bit, and early on I had some trouble figuring out that there was an upper area and a lower area to go to, and it almost felt a little bit out of the way. But overall, I would say I’ve had a very good time here, 8/10, easily 8.5/10. 

Do any of the talks stand out to you in particular? 

C: A lot of the fundraising and financial talks in general. Very very needed for like indie companies and they realize that when they were planning it. So, I can understand why they loaded up on those. But in general, a lot of these talks are relevant to indies and were very useful. 

And you both are based in this general area?

C: Washington, yes, I’m out in Bellevue.

J: And I’m in Capitol Hill. 

I’ve been hearing a lot about what makes this area special or unique? What do you guys think? 

J: In my opinion, I just think it is both simultaneously big but also very tightly put together. Like in spite of its size, there are a lot of people that you can meet who are just like ‘hey I feel like I’ve known you for several years now.’ I’ve been doing a lot of these Seattle events for a little over 5 years now, and I think of a lot of these guys as my close friends. Doing something like SLICE makes me feel like I’m meeting a whole bunch of new friends. 

A very tight, consistent community. 

C: Yes, like it’s a blessing in that you constantly meet new people but you also meet people that you know. I’ve met at least a dozen people that I’ve known from other events and I’ve been able to come around and say ‘hey, what’s up’ to, it’s very nice. 

J: It’s also a group of people that is always building other people up. 

C: We support each other. 

J: Like game development in general is very communal in that sense, but doing things like this in the Seattle Indies as a whole does nothing but put everybody up, makes everyone better. 

That’s so good to hear, because especially in things like art can be so competitive. I’m in the pro wrestling scene here and it’s a lot of the same sentiment – you see a lot of the same people, build a lot of these deep connections, try to build each other up and have this robust community. It seems like the Seattle Indies group encourages that kind of community and SLICE is a reflection of that. 

J: I just hope that SLICE could be just as big if not bigger than something like GDC, because it is really cool to have something like this so close to home. 

C: This has already been fantastic. I’m hoping it gets bigger and better somehow, but so far SLICE has been great.  

Seattle Indies did a great job in bringing their resources and philosophy to a bigger production like SLICE, even for someone like me who is not at all in the process of making any kind of video game, but likes to write about them from time to time. The span of experience and expertise within these panels and roundtables is welcome in an industry that still has so many unknowns and exceptions to generally well-trodden rules. It was communal too, though Seattle Indies hosts many smaller events, and gave a lot of creators room to share ideas and support. 

Despite my animosity toward generative AI and its encroachment into artistic industries, it can be worthwhile to not hide exactly what we’re dealing with. Without the discussion of AI, especially from companies who are profiting from it, we’re missing a huge amount of context for these spaces. 2025 is clearly the year that this has become a forward topic, and over the course of my 6 or so hours taking in this event, even when I wasn’t seeking it out, AI and the inherently oppositional viewpoints organically came up over and over again. Although I don’t necessarily want the discussion thrown out completely at industry events like this, it’s important to adequately address the effects these technologies have on the very communities that they’re seeking to ingratiate themselves within. Remember the layoffs, remember the real, breathing artists and developers, and remember the reason anyone is doing any of this anyway.

While I was perusing the indie game corner, I overheard a woman talking to a colleague and something she said stuck out at me. “There are visionaries and there are executioners.” I would agree, even though we seem to still be debating about who is who.

The post Impressions of SLICE – the (inaugural!) Seattle Loves Indie Creators Expo appeared first on Gamesline.

Demuresoft is headquartered in Austin, Texas, where most of their staff lives. A few of the crew have moved, one to Japan and one to California, but a majority of the work is done in an apartment room, set up like an office in a Japanese doujin works studio. If you’ve seen something like the anime 16-Bit Sensation, you’ll be able to get a general picture of what this space looks like. A row of computers, some more modern than those in the living room, some just as old, all running a variety of programs dedicated to a single goal: making an eroge Breakout-like.

Jenn, the artist and overall head of Demuresoft, spoke with a sparkle in her eye the entire time I asked her anything about the game, Ultraprocessor Ribbon. “I make what I want to make. I thought about going into the mainstream game development space, but I knew I’d end up making things I didn’t care as much about. Here, I can be me, I can create characters I want to see, and I can show off my inspirations.” 

The biggest inspirations seen in Demuresoft’s art come from the catalogue of Leaf, such as Comic Party and To Heart, as well as Leaf’s contemporaries such as Clannad by Key and Tsukihime by Type-Moon. Jenn pulled out an artbook full of Mitsumi Misato’s illustrations from a nearby bag, gushing over the love and care she put into each artwork. From how Jenn spoke about her own work, I could tell she put that same level of love into her work.

Ultraprocessor Ribbon is a simple game, but its got a good gameplay loop. You play as Ribbon, an android created by her inventor, Stella, who crafted her out of a computer from 2002. Now in the year 2673, old tech is outlawed, and Ribbon fights for her right to exist against a world trying to stomp out the past. Ribbon does so by flying through Breakout-style arenas, smacking a floating CD around to bounce off the bricks and the occasional spawned enemy. After a few levels, you’ll run into a boss, who fires bullets at you while you attempt to take them out with your CD smack.  

If you’re a Touhou fan,  this will sound similar to the first game in the series, the PC-98 game Highly Responsive to Prayers. This was by design, as the entire dev team has knowledge of Touhou, with all but one of them declaring their fandom of the franchise proudly when asked. The only non-fan was, according to the rest of the group, going to play the series eventually, “whether she wants to or not”. Touhou’s aesthetics were a major inspiration, but so was its origins as a doujin project, with creator Zun originally releasing the games at Comiket and continuing to participate in the event many years later. 

Ultraprocessor Ribbon includes sexual content, as Stella and Ribbon have an overtly dom/sub relationship, acted upon in unlockable h-scenes. Ribbon also loses her clothing after taking enough damage. While the h-scenes were added to showcase a normal aspect of a relationship evolving, the clothes being stripped was just because Jenn liked it. “I was inspired by a lot of eroge,” Jenn said. “I was able to take something meaningful from these titles, and I don’t think the sex is there for no reason. But I also wanted to make a game like this, and because I could, I did!” Jenn was also inspired by the current wave of robot girl appreciation, which she said lines up with today’s proliferation of AI. “Robots are on people’s minds, but I don’t want to talk about AI in this game. I want to celebrate tech’s ability to make people creative, not a lack of creativity.”

Demuresoft’s creativity is fostered by their work environment. The room they work in has anti-crunch mottos written on notes hung up on the wall next to a collection of fanart they’ve received. The crew co-works as much as possible, meeting up in the office to chip away at a variety of tasks. The team agreed that co-work makes the work less bleak, and gives a sense of tangibility to the creative energy. Jenn explicitly has the final say in any creative choices, but she still incorporates the entire group’s ideas into the game, saying that allowing for an open floor leads to better work. “A good leader incorporates everyone’s general feelings into the vibe of the game, but they also have to meld that vibe into something coherent,” Jenn said. “Give your team a sandbox to play in, so they can build in their own space but not overrun others.”

A cloud hangs over Demuresoft’s output, however. Payment processors are clamping down on adult media, with stores such as Steam and itch.io delisting, removing, or otherwise obscuring NSFW games to comply with their requests. There is a massive push-back campaign attempting to reverse these efforts, but large companies such as Visa and PayPal often target titles similar to Ultraprocessor Ribbon due to their anime art style. Demuresoft has been tangentially affected by these issues, as their publishing partner JAST was removed from San Japan 2025 in the middle of the convention. While this was apparently not a legal decision, Demuresoft was nervous about being kicked out during the entire convention, as they too were selling a physical demo of Ribbon on USB at the con. Thankfully, nothing happened to them, and they were able to break even on their booth’s fees and sold out of their USBs.

Demuresoft pushes back against the censorship by pressing on. “The things I can do are what I focus on,” Jenn said. “Being afraid is what they want, and I’m not letting them win.” Demuresoft creates not to be transgressive, but genuine. “Cultural norms and lines are shifting daily, and trying to define anything too much can be harmful. We try to be mindful of others’ feelings, but there’s a joy at poking limits, and having reading comprehension is key!” Jenn continued. “We want to create for us, and if that happens to resonate with others, that’s great! Our work finds people through surface level, aesthetic connections, then sinks in deeper with the writing and characters.” Jenn and friends are artists for art’s sake, and they’ll keep meeting up in that office, working on niche projects as long as they can. 

The post Demure Doujin Works – Talking with a Local R18 Hobby Dev appeared first on Gamesline.

Following up on June’s interview with Shinri of Holostars, Maverick hops aboard the Starlight Car with Cover CEO Motaki Tanigo, AKA Yagoo, and Head of PR Ryota Aomi, also known for his work previously as the series producer for Dragon Quest. Maverick asks about the trajectory of Hololive EN in the last 5 years, how Holoearth and other game endeavors seek to bridge connections between talent to fans, and what it means to be a Vtuber corporation amidst the ever growing subculture.

The written version of this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Maverick: As of September, it is going to be five years of hololive English. Since that time, what have been the biggest successes you’ve noticed with this branch?

Tanigo: I cannot point to one specific moment in time as the biggest success of these past five years, but since we started this branch to produce content for the US and the English speaking world, we have had many big steps in the evolution of hololive English, such as the establishment of COVER USA. Now we are doing live shows in the US, and we even have brand collaborations with US branch EN talent. I think we have such very important big steps, big moments, but I cannot point to one specifically as the best.

Maverick: On that subject, with the concert in August in the Radio City Music Hall—you’ve also done work last year with the Kings Theatre—what has been the experience of booking live events here in the United States?

Tanigo: Since the US is so big, getting the fans together in one specific place was a big challenge. Also, the costs are much bigger than in Japan. So, doing these shows in a business-minded profitable way was another challenge. But, the sizes of the venues have grown, we’re now doing the concerts in bigger and bigger venues, and this is a big success of course.

Maverick: Related to that—and this is something I’ve seen in conversations around how to still continue contributions as a fan—what has been the approach to expanding hololive as a global product during the current financial climate here in the United States?

Tanigo: With the economic situation changing—and of course the tariffs are changing—we are really doing our best to provide services that are affordable, and also enjoyable still to the American audience.

Maverick: Last month, I had the opportunity to hold a conversation with Josuiji Shinri of HOLOSTARS. That was a really great experience, and I was very glad to hear his perspective on a lot of the creation that he and the other members of HOLOSTARS do. I was curious, with the focus of a more global expansion, how do you see HOLOSTARS playing a role with COVER’s future?

Tanigo: We have two big groups of talents under our brand: hololive and HOLOSTARS. In Asia, male idol groups that are targeting a female audience are very popular, and HOLOSTARS also hits that demographic. In the US as well I see a larger acceptance and popularity for such male talent groups, and I think that will grow in the future, and I think HOLOSTARS will be a part of that growth.

Maverick: Recently, we have seen expansion of hololive and HOLOSTARS. We have seen collaborations, not only in the form of official brand collaborations in Kura Sushi or in ROUND1. We’ve also seen the concerts come up more often. We’ve also seen various talent be able to make appearances in conventions and provide a more personal experience to fans that way. What do you feel makes an effective collaboration for VTubers?

Tanigo: The most meaningful kind of collaboration, we feel, is the kind that brings the community together and makes them socialize with each other. I think a big part of the recent boom in popularity of VTubers was that during the COVID-19 pandemic, people closed off in their homes wanted connections. People watching the same VTuber, for example, would connect over the YouTube and Twitch comments and the chat, so there was that kind of text-based socialization and community spirit.

We really want to bring that online sense of community into the offline world as well. With our collaborations with Kura Sushi, with ROUND1, and with other brands in the future, and our other endeavors in the future as well, we really want to provide more opportunities for fans to come together in an offline environment and socialize with each other to create a stronger sense of community.

Maverick: What do you feel is an ongoing challenge in bridging that gap between the initial online connection, especially around the period of lockdown, into the current offline expansion?

Tanigo: When it comes to business-to-business collaborations, face-to-face negotiations are very important. Sometimes you find that between COVER Japan and COVER USA, not every connection and negotiation carries over to the USA company. So, some negotiations have to be done from scratch on the USA side. So it’s very important to explain what a VTuber is, why VTubing is a good medium to collaborate with, and what kind of target audience we have. 

So, that sort of business dealing is a big challenge that we’re still addressing. With game companies you can have online collaborations, but with some other types of companies, you really need face-to-face meetings to build those connections from scratch on the USA side.

Maverick: What drove COVER to create Holoearth? And in terms of using Holoearth as an event space, what events are being planned or considered for the future?

Aomi: As we mentioned before, during the pandemic there was a need to watch VTubers on streams and on YouTube. Holoearth is the next step in that natural evolution, we believe. People that are following and supporting these VTubers have a desire to be in the same space, to go beyond the screen. Holoearth is something that will fulfill that dream, and people will be able to meet their favorite creators in the same space.

This is a very easy example: as you can see, one of the VTuber talent is standing here, and there is a line here to take a photo with the talent, just like how you would have a real-world meet-and-greet. Now we can do that, and it’s the actual talent, and it’s the fans coming together. This is a really new, revolutionary, deep and immersive experience that other platforms are not able to provide. 

We want to make it so that people are able to live in, and live off of, this virtual world, meaning that users will be able to create user-generated content that they can sell for real money. So people will be able to make real-world money inside of this platform. This is a virtual world that you can live off of. We’ve created an ecosystem where users are able to license talent IP, and they can create merchandise with that IP, and they can sell that for real money, but some of that as royalties will go to the talent that they’re licensing. So this is an ecosystem where creators will grow, and also the talent will grow. Everyone will be able to benefit from this ecosystem with real-world money.

This clip is from a FUWAMOCO stream from yesterday, where they created an item mid-stream, and they put it on sale mid-stream, and people bought it, and FUWAMOCO received royalties from those sales. It’s all happening in the stream, so already this ecosystem is up and running.

In the next step of this ecosystem, this cycle that is already happening to some extent, items created by talent are made into real products in the real world and sold on Amazon. This creates an even larger cycle where fans will be able to receive items made by their favorite creator in the real world, and they will be able to wear them.

The trend of Metaverses is really limited to the virtual world, but we’re focusing on experiences. So we’re connecting these experiences to the real world, and creating a much larger ecosystem that goes beyond the virtual world. It is our hypothesis that this last link of the chain that connects to the real world is what has been missing from other companies that are investing in the Metaverse area.

We believe that it is a universal dream for someone to wish that they were in an animated world where they could meet anime-like characters, and I think Holoearth will fulfill that desire to a great extent.

Maverick: Recently the hololive Trading Card Game just released in the United States. What was the process like to bring HoloTCG over to the West? Currently there is a big collecting component, is there any plan for a competitive scene?

Tanigo: We launched the TCG in Japan last September, and we already have competitions that I also myself join. These competitions are very important for fans to come together in the offline world, and to build a stronger community. We really want that aspect of the game in the US as well. So, we do intend to have competitions in the US for the official hololive TCG.

Maverick: Something that I hear come up a lot in this interview is the connection between online and offline experiences, and really trying to bridge that gap. A recent development that I think really speaks to that is the appearance of Usada Pekora in Death Stranding 2, not only as the VTuber model, but also playing a character in the game, taking that next step as a character in that narrative. What is the plan moving forward for talent to appear in non-internet media, such as television or other games?

Tanigo: Of course, I cannot speak to future plans of such appearances by our talent. But this year has been lucrative in the sense that not only do we have Usada Pekora showing up in Death Stranding 2, but we also have Hoshimachi Suisei singing the ending theme for Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX. So now we have VTubers showing up in other mediums. 

In Japan, we already had hololive talent appear on NHK TV shows, NHK being the national broadcasting channel in Japan. Of course we would love to have our talent appear on US television as well, that would be a great thing. The talent is expanding beyond the internet, and they are expanding to further mediums, to further worlds.

Maverick: Back in the mid-2010s, there was an appearance by Hatsune Miku on Late Show with David Letterman, and I don’t know if the attempt to bridge that gap fully landed for the audience back then. I do think that you find yourselves in a much better environment to have something similar occur in the future.

I just have one more question, and this I think is something that really ties a lot of these pieces together. HoloEN started back in 2020, amidst the lockdown, and was really focusing on this idea of bringing people together. Not only did the stateside experience with hololive and COVER begin there, but within the last five years we have also noticed this expansion of VTubers in general in the United States. There is a very healthy independent scene, especially when you notice any streams on Twitch or YouTube. There is a conversation around VTubing not just as one specific entity, but as an entire ecosystem.

How does it feel to see the growth of VTubers as a subculture alongside the growth of hololive itself?

Tanigo: This is a great, amazing, awesome thing. 

You just mentioned Hatsune Miku a minute ago. Hatsune Miku is Vocaloid software, but in Japan, artists that make use of Vocaloid software also become famous. There is the band Yoasobi, there is Yonezu Kenshi, there are these artists that started off using Vocaloid, and they became superb artists. So there was that ecosystem of Vocaloid in Japan, and it didn’t catch up to that extent in the US. The focus was always on Hatsune Miku as a character more than anything. There was no Vocaloid ecosystem in the US.

But VTubing is not like that. Now, there is an ecosystem of VTubers. Now there will be great artists that start off as VTubers, and they’ll become great talent, great stars in their own right in the future. There are some only in Japan maybe, but in the US and other countries, new names will pop up as part of the ecosystem, and we definitely will do our best to make sure that we are ready to support these amazing artists that will be coming more and more in the future.

Maverick: Thank you very much, I really appreciated having the chance to sit here and see what has been the growth these last five years. I really appreciate getting to see your insight.

∗ ∗ ∗ 

Maverick: And just like that, we have arrived at the station. Thank you again to COVER for this unbelievable opportunity. 

To support and find more of us, that’s right over at Patreon. $3 for all of our content a week early, like Unlimited Rail Works, our anime podcast. I was able to come back on the most recent one to cover spring and summer watches, and also wrap up our watch of Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet.

On Twitch, we have shifted over to live podcasts, so you can always catch the newest episode of The Gamesline Podcast every Sunday. It’ll be folks from the Gamesline crew, including new additions like Lilith, Crystal, Jackson, and Nikolas.

If you want to talk shop and hang out, you can also join our Discord.

The theme for Starlight Car is a super chill remix of “Aquamarine” by Magic Circuit, which is available off their self-titled album Magic Circuit over on Bandcamp. 

Thanks, and we’ll see you soon.

Edited transcription by Crystal. Translations for Tanigo-san and Aomi-san by Demirhan Demir.

The post Bridging Worlds with Motoaki “Yagoo” Tanigo and Ryota Aomi – Starlight Car Ep 13 appeared first on Gamesline.

• The game literally wouldn’t exist anymore without the player base and strong community bringing it back from the brink of death. 
  
• And the entire development team and company is under threat from losing their BIGGEST moneymaker if they do anything in bad faith regarding the player base – and will go under. This is why the new CEO (Jon Bellamy) is directing the company to branch out in other directions and create other types of games using the RuneScape IP—the shareholders don’t want to be beholden to the playerbase of OldSchool Runescape (this is my theory).

The classic protest protocol is to throw down cannons in Falador Square. It’s a riot symbol mostly BUT there are guards who wander around Falador Square and as many people kept actively feeding cannonballs and firing, it was an ACAB statement as well. We got a lot of bigots banned for hate speech, but their voices were tiny and pathetic compared to our cacophony. Runescape subreddits are full of posts dunking on the CEO right now.

(SapphicRowan provided screenshots of these in-game protests.)

In one of them, flowers swarm the whole ground: That’s actually because someone was growing them in swastika patterns but an impromptu anti-flower countermeasure coalition was spontaneously formed to flood the whole area with a field of flower seeds, erasing the hate symbols almost as soon as they appeared.

Franny: Based on what I’ve read, the mods and other staff are kind of in resistance with the players against the CEO and Jagex, too. 

Rowan: From what I have put together from various sources, the Mods hosted – on their own time – the Pride March stream and giveaway. This is where the mods lead us in a march around part of the world. The video of the stream wasn’t up on the YouTube channel for rewatch for the first day or so afterwards but they did put it up on the official YouTube channel, possibly after complaints.

That’s where I first heard about this, directly from the Play and Jagex moderators at the in-game Pride march. We’re very lucky that a pretty big queer content creator (RenderScape) was covering this and spreading the word. 

The Pride Event is an in-game temporary quest with a short storyline and NPCs and some pride gear as a reward. They’ve been well-done and very sweet and have referenced historical queer icons. […]

To be clear, one of the oldest defining traditions of RuneScape is for Mods to create & host fun little events for the players on holidays—Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Game Anniversary, and most recently Pride—to show their appreciation for us and celebrate with us.

Franny: There seems to be a larger and longer-historied queer community in RuneScape, especially Old School RuneScape than I had any idea about. What can you tell me about that, and your place in it? 

Rowan: I made the clan with my best friend in OSRS—Local Honey—almost 4 years ago now.

Back then, I didn’t know any other queer people in OSRS. I met Local Honey as one of the only queers biting back in a very homophobic and transphobic minigame chat that we happened to find ourselves together in, on a dedicated mass-player world for that minigame. We decided to hop to another world and have our own game just to ourselves so we could chat without a flood of grossness.

It was an extremely cozy and bonding experience as the minigame, called Wintertodt, is about fighting off a giant freezing ice tornado entity by helping Pyromancers keep magical fires alight. We spent a long time there and became best friends, eventually seeking to gather together what friends we had made and try to make a safe queer space for people to hang out and game with each other, away from the places which inevitably turn toxic due to the mass of players. Turn off Pub Chat, tune into Clan Chat.

RuneScape was a safe haven in our childhoods from real life bullies and insults, and the Gender-changing Makeover Mage Pete/Peta has been in the game since its ancient history, helping to guide players on a test journey in a virtual world with a different gender presentation then they’re used to, if they so wish. Always reversible, always re-reversible.

Here’s the totally-not-queer Barber, from whom I got my first haircut which was allowed to be long – because it was just in a game. (Riot ongoing in background—Yes, the famous riot spot in Falador Square is directly across from a queer barber—I’m sure he very much supports it, as well as the people removing Nazi symbols from the front of his shop).

Franny: Despite the fact that Jagex and RuneScape seem to have always been inclusive and later explicitly supportive of its queer community, why do you think they’re backing away from it now, even when members of their own team disagrees with the idea?

Rowan: It’s very simple—CEO Jon Bellamy is a spineless coward who has caved in to his fears of what pathetic bigots on the internet might say, instead of embracing the community who dearly cares about the game he is in charge of guiding.

Back in 2017, Jagex had a notable bout with the anti-queer gamer crowd when they introduced a quest called Gilbert’s Colours, which involved finding the six strands of a rainbow and returning them to an NPC who would then give the player a rainbow scarf. It became a sort of manufactured controversy, wherein this single rainbow scarf was deemed too political, irrelevant, and inappropriate for a kid’s game by a portion of the player base. It sparked an unbelievable backlash of in-game riots where many of the participants weren’t even active players, but rather people who had hopped on from outside bigoted groups, and a disturbing amount of death threats and harassment directed at Mod Wolf, who created the event. RuneScape no further Pride events until 2022 because of it, but even the mod’s creator went on to say his only regret was “caving into pressure, fear and hate”—the same fear and hate that Jagex is now using as a reason to scale back Pride events nearly a decade later. A few years of resumed (and well-received) Pride events now facing an interruption out of fear of more manufactured controversy, would empower the same people who were sending death threats to RuneScape mods the first time, and it sends a completely backhanded message to the community Jagex is, in the same breath, promising to support.    

The main thing that strikes me as odd about this whole thing: why has Bellamy—speaking on behalf of Jagex—made an explicit statement about this fear of backlash, the perception of queer content as controversial, when they have an established routine of these events. RuneScape isn’t alone, either. Many other games and studios have consistently shown up for their queer players without crumbling under retaliation. Games like Warframe, Destiny 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3 have done just that and continue to do it. Studios like Bioware and companies like Wizards of the Coast continue to do it. RuneScape would be fine, especially continuing as they have been. 

To get some more perspective on this, I spoke with RenderScape, a player and RuneScape content creator in the UK. 

Franny: How would you describe the queer RuneScape community and your place within it?

RenderScape: So, I can only talk for Old School as that’s what I’m part of, but I’d say OSRS’s queer community is the game’s most dedicated, yet under-served section of the whole game. LGBTQ players routinely complete some insanely impressive in-game feats, and yet never receive the recognition that would be given to cishet players achieving the same thing. Queer players just do not pull the same numbers on social media that cishet ones do, I think as a combination of people ignoring them and the queer folk themselves trying not to draw too much attention to themselves to avoid too much hate.

OSRS‘s biggest content creators are also almost all straight guys with dubious at best track records on allyship. Bigotry is allowed to run rampant in their fan bases because they either don’t care or don’t want to risk losing the money from the viewership. Some are also clearly just bigoted themselves but Jagex refuses to ever address it, and even awarded one of the most notorious creators a “golden gnome” which is an award for making content that Jagex gives out once a year.

This is all to say that the LGBTQ community of OSRS has not been well served by Jagex, and the pro-Pride push we’re seeing now has been fuelled by years of frustration on their part for the way they are treated by large parts of the player base and the company itself.

As for my place, I should state that I’m a cishet guy myself, just so I don’t mislead anyone. I became known as “OSRS’s Biggest Virtue Signaller” by the right-leaning players on Twitter when I started calling out the horrendous way they talk to LGBTQ players, and I ended up adopting that title ironically as a way to stick it to them. Since then, allyship has become a big part of what I create and talk about. I built a substantial LGBTQ following because, in their own words, I was one of the only OSRS creators who was a safe space for them, since almost none of the large ones had any interest in ever taking a stand for them. 

This video showcases some of the stuff I’ve made in support of my queer friends. And they always loved to see it because it made them feel seen. And so, I’ve become something of a symbol for the “woke” side of OSRS, which is a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. 

Franny: Can you speak to some of the in-game feats you mentioned earlier? Just to get an idea of what that looks like to someone not familiar with RuneScape.

RenderScape: Of course! So, by in-game feats, I’m talking about achievements and accomplishments in game. OSRS is defined by extremely long grinds and our LGBTQ players are some of the most dedicated players around. One notable one is my friend Witch Aileen, who is the rank 13th Hardcore Ironman in the game, which is very impressive as this means she has both never died in-game and also never traded with any other player. This stuff is a big deal to RuneScape players, I promise!

Franny: In your words, what kicked off the protests in OSRS and what’s been the general vibe around them?

RenderScape: The spark that ignited them was definitely this Reddit post talking about the Pink News article. Once that hit the front page of r/2007scape, people started assembling in-game to make a fuss. The vibe is very pro-pride, pro-LGBTQ, and very anti-Mod North. 

Counter-protesters do show up but they’re small in number and very quickly drowned out by the majority. Everyone is wearing colourful outfits, trying to spread the message, but also have a bit of fun with and make friends. It’s been an amazing opportunity for the often fragmented LGBTQ groups to find each other and start connecting.

Franny: Why do you think the CEO made this decision, despite Jagex already having gone through something similar in 2017, especially with this response backlash from the community and the RuneScape team?

RenderScape: If I may be blunt, the reason Jagex canned Pride is because North (or the shareholders he represents) already wanted to get rid of it. Pride has never caused players to quit and hurt their finances, and anti-Pride sentiment has been on the decline since 2022. The 2024 event had such little hate thrown at it that it barely registered. We know they didn’t scrap Pride to save development time because it was mostly already done and the devs offered to work for free to finish it on their own time, and yet were still denied the right to do it. I feel they are scrapping it now because the way the world is going right now, with us slipping backwards on a lot of progressive issues, they feel they can get away with it like many other companies are also doing by rolling back DEI and removing rainbows. 

Simply put, Jon Bellamy is either a bigot himself, or cares so little about queer folk that he refused to push back on whoever told him to do this. There is no logical or business explanation for the removal of Pride. It’s incredibly popular with OSRS players. 

The community has also really come together to try and make something positive about this, a Discord group got set up earlier [last] week for LGBTQ RuneScape players and has hit over 300 members already, which is pretty substantial by our usual standards.

Franny: In that Q&A, Bellamy spoke about how he knows OSRS is a safe space for queer players and wants to support that community, or the staff, in other ways, though of course it’s only been a few days or so, the results remain to be seen.

RenderScape: I feel he’ll say whatever he thinks will keep him out of trouble, while continuing to do whatever he wants. He can’t make any claim for keeping staff safe when we have players harassing jmods and getting them attacked by [infamous Twitter trolls] and doing absolutely nothing to stop it. He can’t claim to be protecting players when the removal of Pride has emboldened the worst side of the player base to start slinging f-slurs again.

Franny: Obviously there’s a desire for it, even just judging by the attention around your post in the subreddit, and between now and 2022 Jagex already withstood any backlash that was to be had. By making a public statement about rolling the events back, he’s just ripping open an old wound. And well, I’d also love to know about the inter-community responses! Like I said, I’ve been speaking with a friend who’s telling me about the protests, but I see you’re also working to promote queer artists, and have the community-organized Pride events taken on a new tone? 

RenderScape: You’ve put that perfectly, it really is like an old wound! And yes, the tone has certainly changed. When I first started planning the event, it was going to be this small gathering to have a bit of Pride fun. We suspected we weren’t getting a Pride event but didn’t know the full story, so it was fairly chill. But when the news article came out, it really exploded the enthusiasm players had for a big Pride gathering. Ironically, the cancellation could lead to the OSRS community having an even bigger Pride event than ever before! It became very apparent from my perspective that the queer community both needed and wanted more, so I started expanding the event plans into a much bigger deal than the initial small gathering. 

Franny: I feel like these online spaces are so parallel to real life, resistance matters here too. Like, it’s really not just about RuneScape, it’s important to resist bigotry everywhere we can, physical or not. 

RenderScape: My thoughts exactly! Exposure to people different from ourselves builds tolerance, and that counts whether it’s in the real world or the virtual one. These days a lot of us are spending more time in the latter than the former anyway.

At the conclusion of our chat, RenderScape connected me with some other members of the community. As someone who’s—again—unfamiliar with RuneScape, I wanted to gather more voices about the relationship between RuneScape and its queer players, and how this decision has affected them, so I asked for some statements.

Eme/Devotedpupa: Well I’ve been playing since 2006 and honestly I can say that this news [was] a bit soul crushing. Runescape was my first MMO and the unexpected joy I felt when first changing my gender with the Makeover Mage all those years ago remains a formative memory as a young NB person from Mexico. Even more recently, the Pride events felt… different from pandering from other games. Not only the rewards (I wear my NB flower crown for 90% of my gametime while skilling), the actual events feel genuine like no other thing like in the gaming space. The last couple Pride events have [dealt] with the history of our community and the struggles of trans folks in such a heartfelt way, I was honestly amazed. there’s a saying that you don’t quit Runescape, you just take breaks. Well, those definitely [played] a role in me coming back to OSRS. They didn’t feel like corporate rainbow Doritos®, they felt like some of the mods CARED. Mod North really did something unnecessary and heinous removing the events.

Sweater Paws: As of writing this, Runescape’s queer community is on Day 6 of rioting. We’ve been met with death threats and harassment, along with a slew of other nonsensical arguments, such as :keeping politics out of the game”. The main flaw in this argument is that the removal of the event itself is inherently political.

First and foremost, the cancellation of the event is a result of Mod North caving to pressures from one specific side of the political spectrum, at the detriment of the other. That is choosing a side, no matter how it is phrased.

From another angle, the ability to call oneself apolitical is a privilege. It is claiming that you are above issues, since they do not affect you. Your rights are not actively threatened, so you may fail to see, or willfully ignore, why this is such a big deal. They fail to see how deeply ingrained politics are in every aspect of our lives. Everything touched by a government entity is a matter of politics.

When my rights are threatened on a nearly global scale, having a game like Runescape, of which I’ve been a player for nearly two decades, suddenly flip their script and decide that my existence is ‘too controversial’, is akin to being told that I am no longer welcome somewhere because of my identity. Whether they like it or not, whether that is the intent or not, that is the message that is getting out there. That me, and my queer friends, are too dangerous to be celebrated.

In the end, what is left of this so-called safe space they claim to “protect”?

Newt: I’ve been playing for the better part of 15 years. The cancelling of Pride just makes me really sad, it was always fun and you could tell there was some real passion behind the events from some of the developers.

The worst part of this is that bigots are often emboldened by backing down more than even direct support; so North coming in and unilaterally canceling any official support of Pride is just telling the bigots that Jagex listens to their hate, even ignoring their own players to do so.

Ellie: I’m part of the LGBTQIA+ community and also play OSRS at a high level.

Jagex removing the pride event when it was already made in light of the current “world events” is so against what the community is and how the Jagex mods have poured their hearts into the game. The implications are that it communicates that LGBTQIA+ people aren’t welcome in the space that we exist in online and even moreso irl. Queer people are some of the most inclusive and loving people and to hear that mainstream don’t want us to exist is heartbreaking.

I feel like we have been loud enough at this point and to not get any word from the CEO is deafening. He has ruined all good will and burned any trust he had coming in.

OSRS is not just a game or space. It’s a community where we all go to hangout and feel a sense of progression and accomplishment. The world doesn’t give that in the slightest currently.

Astra Vampyre: I’ve been playing the game for about 5 years now, and as a trans woman, I always look forward to the Pride events. While the events themselves are typically short miniquests and may not seem terribly significant at face value, seeing myself and others like me represented is incredibly important. I think that the inclusion of such events have helped LGBTQ players feel more at home and welcomed in the community, and helps to remind us that we are accepted and that we are not alone. This has been very impactful for me, as there have been times in my life where I felt very isolated and like I had to hide who I was.

I think that the CEO’s decision to remove this event is incredibly cowardly, and is ultimately giving into a hateful (and unfortunately very vocal) minority of the playerbase. The large majority of players I have talked to are either in favor of these events, or indifferent to them. The events themselves require very little development time, and the team at Jagex has even offered to work on the events on their own time. I see no reason why these events should be discontinued, and it is incredibly saddening and disappointing to see the CEO give in to such hate.

I have cancelled my subscription, and I encourage others to do the same until this decision is reverted.

Sophie: I’ve been playing Runescape for over 20 years now, and it has meant a lot to me during various times in my life where I faced different struggles. One of these struggles was with my gender and sexuality, which I resolved by transitioning! Even back way before this would happen, I always remember playing as a female character in Runescape because it just felt nicer to me. With the launch of OSRS in 2013, I would eventually start playing again in 2017 or so, and really struggled to resonate with the community for a long while. The protests and backlash to the original Pride event back then still resonate in my mind and while I can take comfort knowing that many of the protestors were in fact not regular players of the game (as one of the former head moderators has stated), future events were canned. Nearly 10 years later, that pain is still fresh with this year’s cancellation. All around us, those of us especially in the US and UK, there’s been a massive and well-funded hate campaign directed towards trans people, and though I may not need the escapism as much as I needed to growing up, it still meant a lot to me to have Pride events in Runescape. I’m surrounded by so many other trans and queer friends that play the game now, and we have a lot of communities for each other, yet I still struggle to recommend friends to play Runescape because bigotry is still yet very common in the community, especially in high level PVM and skilling clans. The cancellation of Pride events enables the loud bigoted minority to feel validated in their hatred and makes Runescape even harder to recommend and is a financial loss for Jagex – I’ve seen several friends opt to quit already. Those who were against Pride events in the first place would never cancel when they did happen, but that non-action does not go both ways.

Morfred: I’ve played OSRS on-and-off ever since I was a kid, and I’ve had the fortune to witness the OSRS Pride events through two lenses: First, when I returned to OSRS around COVID, I had known I was Bi for a while, and felt pretty safe in my day-to-day life when it came to that. Second, the 2024 Pride, which had a very large impact on me, and resulted in me realising I was non-binary\I’ll mostly focus on the second point of view, and how it leads into the lack of a Pride event in 2025.

When OSRS Pride 2024 came around, the main character of the story – Kit Breaker – is heavily implied to be Trans, to the point that I’d not even really call it an implication. I didn’t realise it immediately, but seeing a character visibly working through gender-related issues made me realise things about myself. Pride needs to continue in any game that it would suit, so that people can interact with identities they may not see day-to-day.

However, we know that OSRS has cancelled Pride this year. Of course this sucks: it’s cut content. But what impacts me the most is the rise in hateful activities in the community. Reports of players using seeds to plant flowers in the shape of swastikas, slurs, and relating both sexuality and gender identity to pedophilia and harm to children – the latter of which I’ve been subject to at the Falador protests, as I’ve been wearing the non-binary colours. Gender identities seem to get the worst of it (not that anyone comes out on top, really), with lesser slights being messages of ‘Two Genders’, or LGB-minus-T speaking points like ‘Is this gay pride, or gender shit?’.

Jagex is a British company, and in the UK we have a struggling Trans community, which make up 0.5% of the population, but are twice as likely to be victims of crime than cis people (according to the home office figures), with an increase in hate crimes, especially since the recent UK ruling regarding Trans rights in women’s spaces, which has ended up with Trans folks being advised to just… avoid gendered public bathrooms altogether. With all this going on in the background, Jagex should be supporting those that are struggling to stay safe themselves, not just ignore them. Instead the CEO demands the removal of a complete/nearly complete Pride from the game for being ‘controversial’, whilst still selling Pride merch. It clearly indicates that we’re only good for them so long as we give them cash, and that stings when the creators that actually want to support us but can’t.

The CEO’s choices have shattered any goodwill I had with Jagex.

When my country is turning back the progression of social changes, the last thing I want is senseless bigotry being thrown both at queer players and queer jmods, emboldened by the choices of a CEO.

Birdhome: The stance Jagex and CEO Mod North has taken on this issue is plainly wrong. Withdrawing support for Pride within the company hurts the community. Old School RuneScape has always been a game made by the players and for the players. We (the players) want Pride in our game. The removal of Pride effectively communicates that Jagex does not want us in their game. I can’t help but worry that the events we are witnessing signify a greater culture shift within the company leading towards a future where the voice of the player base no longer matters. We, as a community, simply cannot stand for this. It is in the best interest of our games long term health to continue to provide a safe and welcoming environment for marginalized players. The leadership team at Jagex should be ashamed of themselves for abandoning the players and developers who work so hard to make this game as incredible as it is. I implore them rise to the occasion while there is still time for them to right this wrong.

Oog: I’m the administrator of a Discord Server called Rainbow Road, which is a space for LGBTQIA+ RuneScape (both Old School and RuneScape 3) players to gather and hang out, plan events, and find clans or other communities of like-minded people. Render and I have been friends for a while and managed to independently decide to put together some kind of community-run event since Jagex was holding out on us. The day after I opened up the Discord server, the Pink News article dropped and between Render and I, we managed to grab a pretty significant chunk of the LGBTQIA+ RS community on social media into one space where, so far, it has worked extremely well even though a significant portion of the community has history with each other. We’ve managed to come together and put aside whatever beef for at least a while and focus on the one thing we all have in common. Even bridging a gap between OSRS and RS3 is more difficult than you might think, but we’re doing that too. We’re planning to continue running pride events all year and trying to make enough noise that Jagex’s CEO cannot ignore us.

I’m a cis pansexual man and I have been a RuneScape player for almost as long as the game has existed. My original account was registered sometime in January or February of 2001, when the game was about a month old. I was a young teenager at the time and RuneScape was the first game I had ever really been social in. I grew up in a very rural area in Appalachia and my exposure to anyone that wasn’t white, cis, and hetero was pretty limited. My parents were bigots in every facet of the word, but my dad especially hated queer people. He told me as a young kid that if I turned out to be gay that he’d consider it a failure and kill himself. I was raised to believe that gayness was a sin of the highest order. When I was in my tween years and starting to get the feelings tweens do, I noticed that I didn’t only get those feelings for girls but I was always too afraid to ever admit anything like that. I hated myself. I was terrified of what would happen to me for being that way.

It wasn’t until I started chatting with some people on RuneScape that I started to really understand what I was feeling and feel less like it was a problem. A group of friends I had met while playing one day invited me to their IRC channel and I hung out with them and chatted. We were all around the same age and it turns out that the whole group was LGBT+. I never told them about my feelings or anything, I was just the “straight friend” in the group but seeing them be unapologetically queer was eye opening for me and started me down a path that eventually (almost 2 decades later) led to me accepting myself as pansexual. Pride was not a thing in games back then and especially not in RuneScape, but when we finally got a Pride Event, I thought back to those friends and how, despite their temporary presence in my life, their influence on me remains eternal. Pride isn’t just about the cute cosmetic items we get in-game, it’s about being accepted for who we are and sharing ourselves with people who’ve felt our struggle. It’s about knowing that, while the real world wishes we’d disappear, the virtual world we also inhabit doesn’t want us to be invisible and instead gives us ways to express our true selves through the little pixels on the screen. It allows us to see another avatar in-game and even if you never speak to each other, you know you two are at least a little connected.

RuneScape is slow and deliberate in many ways and [at] other times hectic and chaotic. The narratives are whimsical and goofy but also sometimes a little heartbreaking or terrifying. The world in the game was shaped by religious ideologies and political aspirations. All of these things mirror our world and make it feel alive, and somehow in the middle of it all there is this mage that you can talk to that can change your character between body types. The mage constantly flips back and forth too. The Makeover Mage has been there for decades and has always given players the opportunity to express their character in a different way if they choose. It was never controversial, and the game even required male characters to change to female for a quest at one point. Prior to the Pride event’s introduction, this was the smallest glimmer of queerness we had in the game. An NPC whose creation was mostly one of function, but whose significance to a number of queer people could not be overstated. Pride made us feel like we belonged just as much in Gielinor as a Pride event makes us feel welcome in real life.

Jon Bellamy’s unilateral decision to cancel a finished event is a direct attack on us and is not taken lightly. We’ve been actively protesting in-game for 6 days at the time I write this, and soon will have achieved the longest in-game riot in the history of the game. The kind of people that are happy about Bellamy’s decision are the people in-game creating swastikas out of flowers or fires, and attempting to trade us a chair and a rope, their not-so-clever way of telling us to kill ourselves. They’re the people that show up and spam slurs, or have names with slurs, or names that reference Hitler. These are the people Bellamy sided with over the ones who’ve passionately enjoyed RuneScape for two decades. […]

It might sound a little silly for us to be so invested in a medieval point-and-click MMO game, but it’s our silly medieval point-and-click MMO game and it’s been our congregating space for 20+ years. Bigots can’t have it. We’re not allowing it.

Sage: I’m transfemme, and RS was one of the earliest hints at my gender identity for me nearly 20 years ago. (Thanks, Makeover Mage!)

Pride events made us visible, they gave us time to celebrate each other and form communities together. Removing the pride event was such an abrupt slap in the face-  Calling our identity ‘too political’ is gut wrenching. It has done nothing but embolden the people who spew hatred and slurs at us. And those same people see Jagex as endorsing their behavior, telling us directly that “Jagex sided with them” and not us. 

Jagex sided with hate, plain and simple, with this decision.

Brew Sipper: Runescape to me has always been a way for me to escape the world around me and immerse into a fantasy, where I am creating my adventure with millions of others. Over the two decades I have been a player of this game, I have made so many friendships, created so many memories, and accomplished goals I am genuinely proud of myself for achieving.

To say Runescape is a big part of my life is a wild understatement. I even have a tattoo of a blue partyhat on my arm! (IYKYK)

I am also a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. I am proudly demisexual, pansexual, and non-binary. I have felt that I was different my whole life, but it wasn’t until coming into community with other queer people that I learned about the feelings I had. Through the struggle of realizing my self-identity, I found comfort, peace, and pride in myself that I had never felt as a straight man. Pride to me is about honoring the people that came before me in the struggle, the friends that have stuck by me through everything, and myself for having the courage to say my differences are valid and do not disqualify me from a happy and fulfilling life

So when I heard the news that Mod North the CEO of Jagex (the company that owns Runescape), had canceled this year’s in-game Pride event, I was beyond heart broken. I looked forward to this event every year since it returned in 2022. See, I say returned because the first Pride event in Runescape happened in June of 2017, after a gay developer in Jagex created the event, celebrating the LGBTQIA+ community in Runescape. The event received incredibly visceral and violent backlash from a very loud minority of players, including homophobic and transphobic flooding in the comments sections where the event was posted, in-game protests where people spammed slurs of all types and wished violence on the queer community, and even death threats against the developer of the event, to the point that the developer left Jagex and cut ties all together with the community. When Pride returned in 2022, I saw it as the company having the backbone to stand up for the large LGBTQIA+ community that has always, and will always be, a part of the Runescape community.

But the new CEO of Jagex, Jon Bellamy, or Mod North, shut down this year’s pride event over fears of “backlash”. After an earlier article was posted about the event being canceled, a Jagex Moderator posted on Bluesky, saying not only was the article true, but the situation was so much worse than we thought. Internally, developers had volunteered their time to create the event, working for free and after hours, and had nearly finished the event. When they presented it to the Bellamy, he shut the project down, and over a meeting told everyone that there would be no official pride event in OSRS this year. Those same developers decided to host a parade in-game for Pride on their own, using their personal laptops and streaming the event from home, but they were not able to deliver to the community the event they had worked so hard on.

In my opinion, Jon Bellamy should be ashamed. What his actions have shown to bigots and trolls is that with enough pressure, they can get their way. He has said without saying that hate can be weaponized against marginalized groups in his games. His failure to demonstrate even a base level of respect for such a large portion of his game’s communities is very telling of not only his feelings towards queer people, but the climate he is creating within the company for queer employees of Jagex. His messaging is loud and clear, and we hear him all [too] well.

Kama: As a trans woman with a lot of queer friends of all flavors it was obviously upsetting not only seeing the lack of representation for most of my close OSRS friends, but that it happened only because the hate of the few was loud enough to do so.

But even with that, the fact that it sparked so many people to get together and make their own community pride with blackjack and hookers in response that it’s kinda hard not to feel hopeful that things’ll be alright in the world.

RuneScape is slow and deliberate in many ways and [at] other times hectic and chaotic. The narratives are whimsical and goofy but also sometimes a little heartbreaking or terrifying. The world in the game was shaped by religious ideologies and political aspirations. All of these things mirror our world and make it feel alive, and somehow in the middle of it all there is this mage that you can talk to that can change your character between body types.

I’m sure you heard that a few years ago (2017?) the original Pride event was met with right wing riots including people dressing up in desert robes and hoods to paint themselves as klansmen, and jagex (rightly) stamped on that shit, and many jmods (notably mod ash) have previously firmly responded to bigotry on social media by politely telling them to leave, more or less.

Of course, this decision by the CEO is cowardly and seems to go against what much of the jmods who actually engage with the community want, and is shown to be extra hypocritical since the CEO also claims to stand with the queer community, just… further away then before for “reasons”.

Previous pride events have been neat additions to the game though, like all events, they’re at most vaguely canon. there was one a few years ago that involved in-game representations of a few major queer figures irl like Marsha P. Johnson and Oscar Wilde among others.

And as someone who’s been involved in online communities for a very long time, and involved in moderation/leadership, a critical part of maintaining a healthy community is kicking bigots to the curb immediately and loudly when necessary. there’s the old “Nazi bar” thing everyone says, and it makes the overall vibes absolutely rancid. these guys say they don’t want politics in their video games, and respond by furiously putting their politics in the video game.

Anonymous: Honestly I’m heartbroken especially after the quality of events the last couple of years. Last year specifically I actually cried, it being a story of making someone truly believe in themselves and raising them up.

To cut this year’s content especially after having large portions of it already done is heart breaking. 

The riots have filled me with so much hope and good feelings, seeing so many people be supportive and loving and standing up against what feels like tyranny almost.

OSRS Pride Zine Organizers: Our response to the news that the OSRS Pride seasonal event had been cancelled by upper management was to start organising a digital fanzine of creative fanworks and commentary. Our project goals are to:

1. Showcase fanwork creators from the OSRS LGBTQIA+ community
   
2. Express support for LGBTQIA+ OSRS players and Jagex staff members
   
3. And create a record of thoughts, feelings and actions on the topic of LGBTQIA+ representation and inclusion in the game

We’re aiming to release the zine at the end of August. We hope, of course, that by the time of release Jagex has already issued a statement through official channels and reinstated this year’s Pride event. In the event that they have not, we intend to make the zine’s release a focus for further protest action. For example, hand-delivering a printed copy to Mod North at Jagex’s office.

Our website with the full zine info is here if you would like to learn more. And we are on social media including Bluesky.

UnionizeNow: Many people have asked why we care about an in-game Pride event in a medieval clicking simulator. My answer is this: There are no battles against fascism too small to be worth fighting. The removal of pride is a victory for a wave of violence and hatred sweeping over the whole world. A wave which is going to drown more than just us if it continues. Allowing it any victory, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, without a fight, is a mistake. It won’t stop until it IS stopped, by people, working together against the dark.

I’ll close on a short poem by A.R. Moxon which sums up my thoughts on the issue.

Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.
I take one step forward. He takes one back.
"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man

As of publishing, that aforementioned community Pride event organized and hosted by RenderScape has come and gone, a successful gathering of some of Old School RuneScape’s queer and allied players. Admittedly, I was hoping to publish this sooner, but life always finds a way to disrupt. So, I asked him one more time for a little reflection on the event and some final thoughts. 

RenderScape: I would say that the event was a massive success! At peak we had somewhere around 300 players in attendance during the main event, with so many players in one spot that the game couldn’t even show them all at once! The vibe was incredibly positive, so many people just hanging out, making friends and realising that they aren’t alone in this game has been incredibly heart-warming. I’ve received no end of messages from players who attended expressing their gratitude for the event, it’s very humbling to be part of something so big!

And, despite the event being advertised far and wide, including on the hateful platform that is twitter, there were almost no haters turning up to the event! I think I had to mute only about 5 people from stream chat and 3 in game all day, so the “backlash” to Pride is clearly not a big factor!

I think one of the most notable moments for me was when the former jmod, previously known as Mod Wolf, who made the original OSRS Pride event back in 2017, popped in to the stream chat to talk with us for a bit. He was delighted to see the little event he had put together all those years ago still inspiring people to celebrate Pride in game to this day. I was incredibly grateful for his efforts!

I spent a long time denying indelible truths about myself, having to rely on environments that didn’t really allow me to explore who I might have wanted to be. Those little windows into other experiences, seeing queer people, relationships, and narratives in video games, books, movies, whatever, were all steps toward examining the bigger picture of myself until I discovered my own ineffable qualities. There’s no reason for these qualities to be deemed controversial unless you look toward a future where they don’t exist at all. If it wasn’t for things like video games and pro wrestling, where queer narratives are abundant and beautiful, who knows how much longer it would have taken a younger and closeted me to fully understand myself and live in a way that actually made me feel aligned with my own heart in spaces where I belonged.

The protests within RuneScape went on for over a week, players gathering every day to support themselves and each other, buffeted by all kinds of hateful spectacles. These are the kind of stakes involved – it’s never just about RuneScape, or any other space where inclusivity is being sheared away, it’s about challenging these notions of intolerance regardless of where it pops up.

The post We Gay We Pay – The Player Side of Protests for RuneScape Pride appeared first on Gamesline.

The written version of this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Maverick: Thank you so much, Shinri! It’s a great pleasure to be here with you. How are you doing?

Shinri: Hello! Fantastic, thank you for having me.

Maverick: So, as of now, you have been two years into your career as a VTuber in HOLOSTARS. How has your approach to the medium developed since you started?

Shinri: I think one of the big things for me was trying to find out exactly what kind of a streamer I was. Generally my brand was horror games, so I kind of knew “Oh, I want to do horror games!” But at the same time I didn’t want to end up just doing the same kind of loud screamy “Oh, look it’s a jumpscare, wow chat I’m so scared!”, this type that you see so often.

So, I was looking for what would make my stream and my kind of content unique and different, even though we’re basing off the same gameplay of horror games. And I think over the past two years, playing around games with my community and seeing their reactions and responses and the feedback that I get from them, I’ve really nailed down and focused on this… well, some would say a little bit of a cursed cozy horror vibe, where even though we’re playing a horror game, everything’s still pretty chill and comfortable.

Maverick: Yeah, I think that’s a really big aspect that you lead with. Seeing some of the other members of Guild TEMPUS, there is a lot of energy, and I think the defining feature for your streams is that comfiness that you describe. How have you noticed the focus of “cozy” develop as you have also become closer with your Guild members?

Shinri: Here at HOLOSTARS, we all have our own unique talents and strengths. And I think my content really shines best when it’s looked at in contrast with the high energy and the excitableness of the rest of the boys. Especially when we do our collabs—you know how in comedy routines you have the slapstick humor guy and then the straight man, and they bounce off each other? I try to play into that. I know my Guildmates are a lot more excitable and they have a lot more energy, and they’re really great to get really hyped about everything. And I’ll be there to calm them down, and act as a potential avenue for lower-energy viewers to relate to, no matter how crazy the craziness gets.

Maverick: Not only do you have your members in TEMPUS, but you’ve also recently had the individuals from ARMIS. How has that been, to not only debut yourself in the last two years, but also have this additional cast of folks to draw from?

Shinri: It’s really opened up the number of interactions and collaborations that we have. For example, among all of ARMIS, we have Jurard who’s really high energy, screaming constantly, very loud, and has a lot of showmanship. Then you have Octavio who’s really great with his voice, puts in a lot of effort into his singing, and GB who also puts in a whole bunch of high production value, like in his karaoke recently. And then Ruze kind of shares my down-to-earth energy, although he does have a little bit of gremlin to him.

So, it really opens up more partners to collab with, more people to bounce ideas off of. We talk a lot off-stream, sharing our ideas back and forth. It’s really nice to get a wider selection of feedback and perspective from each of the members, and their different strengths.

Maverick: I can definitely notice from the amount of collaborations, that really comes into focus.

Shinri: To be fair, I don’t really collab as often as I would like. A lot of my content is really geared to being solo. But I do stop in every now and then to the boy’s streams. I will lurk, and we’ll talk about stuff behind the scenes. Most recently, the most consistent collabs I’ve been doing are with Ruze, playing some Grounded, and just kind of vibing that way. Sometimes it’ll just be little quick easy pick-up games where we’re not really trying to accomplish any task, we’re just hanging out and having a good time, just vibing with some friends.

Maverick: Your fanbase, the Koipanions, have really been eager to see not just those collaborations, but your work in general. How do you feel your relationship with them has grown since you started?

Shinri: Mostly, it’s fostering an example. To be quite honest, I actually don’t interact with my fans directly. We’re not allowed to hop into their Discords and hang out with them. So, a lot of the communication I see from the fans comes from what they tell me in chat throughout the streams. A lot of it is acting like an idol they would want to represent and support, with the ideals and values that I have. And then they carry it on to their community and how they interact with each other, and with other people in their lives. Directly, I don’t have much influence. I want to let the Kois do their own thing.

Maverick: I think that makes a lot of sense, and folks are very lucky to have you as that sort of idol. What motivates you to be that kind of individual?

Shinri: This draws a little bit from my first year. I debuted as one of the older members of TEMPUS, and I think from my past history, I do have a lot more time compared to the rest of my Guildmates. I wanted to show that it wasn’t too late to chase your dreams. It wasn’t too late to go out there and try something risky, try something scary. That makes you happy! That gives you a little bit of inspiration. Something that gives you that feeling when you wake up, “Oh, I can’t wait to do this kind of stuff! I want to see myself making progress on this kind of thing!” 

I find that it’s very easy for people to fall into the mindset of, “Oh, it’s too late for me. I had my shot 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and now I gotta hunker down and focus on just doing this one thing.” To use a Millennial term, “We gotta start Adulting properly!” 

So, I just wanted to show that it’s not too late. There’s always ways to start, there’s always time to start. There will be time, but you do have to start. That’s what inspired me, and hopefully the stuff I’ve done is also helping inspire some of the fans who watch me. I’ve heard a lot of them talking about how they started picking up art again, or they’re seeking their graduate degrees, and tuning in to my stream gives them motivation to focus and study hard through midterms and finals season. One Koipanion even mentioned that they had finished their master’s thesis defense while studying to my streams. I love hearing that kind of stuff, and that’s the kind of stuff that inspired me, so I’m glad to hear that it’s inspiring the Kois as well.

Maverick: That’s incredible! I think that focus of being someone who might be older than their contemporaries, but still choosing to do whatever it is you’re choosing to do, to say “It doesn’t matter how old I am. I want to go and do it.” That’s very, just… that’s awesome, for lack of a better word.

Shinri: [laughs] I know that my particular brand of content doesn’t apply to everyone, but at least for those who do follow along and watch my content, I hope I can act as a little bit of inspiration.

Maverick: I know you had talked about this in prior opportunities, but just this focus as well on being in tune with your emotions… how have you seen that relationship to your own vulnerability develop in this time?

Shinri: That’s definitely a personal journey for myself. I grew up as the eldest son in my family, and there were a lot of situations where emotions were not particularly encouraged. It was frowned upon to express emotions. You weren’t really allowed to feel the emotions, you had to bottle it up and just put it away, tuck it aside, and grit your teeth and get the job done for now, and then never talk about it ever again. That has led to a lot of stress in my past.

Streaming has provided me an opportunity to really experience a lot of those emotions, and re-dive back into those and let myself feel those feelings. It’s also really fantastic to have so many supportive fans who encourage that kind of emotional exploration in myself.

This is partly why I really gravitate towards horror games in general. The stories that they tell, the exploration of the human psyche, some traumatic loss—not all horror games are about horror, you know? A monster might not be a monster, but they might be the player character’s manifestation of some guilt or trauma that happened in the past that’s causing them this torment. These kinds of stories allow me to experience those emotions and ask myself, “Oh, if I were in this situation, would I be comfortable enough to let myself feel these?” The Koipanions being as supportive as they are really gave me the safe space in my streams to let those emotions out. You will see me crying on stream, you will see me getting frustrated on stream, really giving myself the chance to feel those emotions.

Maverick: Frankly, it is awesome that you allow yourself the space to do that. The openness to show that emotion, and to show yourself in whatever capacity, “Hey. This is affecting me, and I gotta cry about it, or I gotta be really excited about it.” That streaming allows you to show that off, that’s incredible as well.

What’s been a game recently that you felt has allowed for that kind of back and forth between you and the fans to develop?

Shinri: I wouldn’t say this is too particularly recent, it happened last year, but it’s a game that’s kinda stuck with me for a long time. The game is called A Space for the Unbound, it follows the story of—well, I don’t know how much I can say without spoiling it. [laughs]

Maverick: I know of the game, but I will ask to keep it broad, if only because I do want to enjoy it.

Shinri: Without saying too much, it was an incredible emotional story. A lot of my fans are actually from Indonesia, where the game takes place, so they had a lot of fun times just teaching me about the names of the street food, the animals there. There are mystical supernatural elements to it, but the biggest thing was that so much of the game was based around the daily life of a high school student in Indonesia. So it’s a lot of those, “Oh I went through that!” and then chat will be like “Oh, I did that! I drank those things with my friends during the hot summer days!” The little sodas and the little bags and everything. 

Having that connection with the fans, and having them express to me just how much it meant and how they could directly relate to this game through their own experiences, really helped me feel more connection to the characters and the story. Without spoiling, when the moment hit, it was like “Oh! Wow! I can understand why this moment hits so well.” It drove home a point that became really personal with a lot of the viewers. I still think about that game every now and then, and I would say that’s probably one of the biggest ones that stuck with me and my fans, together.

Maverick: As soon as I can, I need to get into it. One of our other contributors to the site, Franny, has played it and they also have just glowing words to say about it.

Shinri: Oh, that’s fantastic. It sounds like they enjoyed it too.

Maverick: How has recognizing that you do have an international fanbase adapted your own relationship with your audience, and thinking about what you put out for them?

Shinri: I think the big thing there is just forcing myself to become self-aware of the platform that I have. The things I say aren’t just going to be heard by people from one country. There’s going to be people internationally who listen to it, who hear it, who have their own emotional connections and feelings towards the things I do, the content that I make. From Japanese viewers who maybe watch my streams because I speak English clearly, “Oh I’m going to use Shinri’s stream to study English!”, to all the Indonesian fans who have been teaching me so much about their culture through the folklore, the scary ghosts and supernatural things, and all the food.

It hit me a good amount into the first year that wow, the audience here isn’t just from America. There’s viewers from all over the place. It’s wonderful seeing so many international viewers becoming friends with each other, commenting on social media, sharing art and sharing their passions. 

It’s a little bit of pressure knowing that so many people from so many places will be able to see the things that I say. It’s gotten to the point where I have to remind myself not to take this platform that I have for granted, and that my actions do and will resonate with a lot more people than I think. The things that I say might just be, from my point of view, talking into a microphone. But there will be so many different perspectives who will hear it and interpret what I say, in all their different ways.

Maverick: I think it’s a very responsible way that you approach that, especially recognizing that spread. To hear that you do think about that, even if it might be some extra pressure, it does sound like it pushes you towards a direction that allows you to still focus on that level of freedom that you gain from streaming, but also keep yourself in balance.

Shinri: Definitely, definitely. I know of situations where a talent will off-handedly mention their favorite soap brand, and then suddenly there will be a whole bunch of fans talking about, “Oh I want to find that kind of soap, because I want to know the soap that my oshi uses!” Or what they smell like, or whatever their shampoo is. Or maybe it could be a snack, “Oh I recently had this snack from this store,” and then people will go out of their way to try to find it so they can have that sense of connection. So even comments that for us may seem off-handed, those can and will resonate with a lot of fans, and will connect a lot of fans in ways that we can’t anticipate.

Which is why I think it’s so important for us to at least be aware that the things we do and say, even an idle casual tweet we might put out, might be received by a fan like, “Oh, that’s my oshi saying that!” It might have a lot more meaning than what we put into it.

Maverick: Has there been an interaction or a tweet that you were surprised had such a resonance with folks?

Shinri: Ummm… this one’s a little cursed. [laughs] This one’s a little cursed. During the recent Halloween stream, I was mentioning, as a joke—are you familiar with the creepypasta Eyeless Jack?

Maverick: Eyeless Jack… I don’t know if I know that one in particular. Please enlighten me.

Shinri: It’s just your usual run-of-the-mill creepypasta. There’s a really freaky entity out there, a killer, who has no pair of eyes. When you’re sleeping, you open your eyes and you look up and you just see pitch darkness, but it’s darkness because you are staring into the empty eye sockets of Eyeless Jack, who is hovering over you while you sleep. So, as a joke, I made a comment about what it would feel like to press your eyeball against that eye socket. You know, take a closer look at what’s going on there. That little moment got clipped out of context and spread around like, “Oh, Shinri’s such a freak, he has this eyeball eye socket thing going on.”

Now that’s kind of what I’m known for. The other talents will mention “Hey, Shiri, what’s that thing about eyeballs? Do you want to explain that to us?” [laughs] Because the fans will make these memes and they’ll share it and they’ll go to one of the boys’ streams and they’ll be like “Hey, Ruze, have you heard about Shinri’s eyeball thing?” And then it’ll become a whole thing within the community. That’ll be just something we toss out. When we’re on as streamers, our streamer brains kick in and we just kind of say things. But sometimes a random comment that we say will just catch fire and ignite throughout the fanbase.

Maverick: Luckily, in this case, you will not just be known as the eyeball guy, so no worries there.

Shinri: [laughs] Hopefully, thank you.

Maverick: Well… we’ll see. [laughs]

Shinri: Oh no! [laughs]

Maverick: I did want to highlight that, earlier in the year, you had put together a tournament within HOLOSTARS for Balatro. What sparked the inception there?

Shinri: It was just a fun little small tournament with the boys. Balatro had kind of taken off, everyone was playing it, all the streamers were streaming it. The Koipanions were all like, “Shinri, when are you gonna play Balatro?” So, I tried it out, I had a blast with the tutorial, and something about it just clicked. Because of the roguelike elements, everyone has their own playstyle, and as the runs go further each of their unique individual playstyles shine more and more. So, I wanted to see, if we all had to pick one game mode, how would we all differ? 

That’s what really took it off for me. I had a lot of fun with the game, and I saw the other boys were having a lot of fun with the game. I know Axel particularly loves talking about gambling a whole bunch, he loves poker. So I was like, “All right, let’s do it!” I wanted it to be as low-pressure as possible, so we weren’t trying to schedule things with 10 boys and all of our schedules all over the place. We have a month, play it on your own time, but the only requirement is that you must stream it so everyone can see your run. No cheating, no flubbing, you have to reveal all your hands publicly. You know, give the fans a little bit of content there, they can see all of us and say “How did Hakka do? How did Flayon do?” 

That was the idea that I had in my mind, and it was fun! I learned a lot from that, and I hope to do some more fun little mini-tournaments like that with the boys in the future. 

Maverick: Mentioning both the busyness of everyone on HOLOSTARS, and this being a way to cooperate without being on-stream at the same time, how else do you envision this sort of opportunity coming forward in other potential collaborations?

Shinri: …I’m gonna be honest, I haven’t really put too much thought into that one at the moment. [laughs] The conventional way of doing a collab is seen as “Oh, we’re live together at the same time, we’re bantering in live time.” I think one of the big things I’ve learned is that you can apply this kind of asynchronous collabing, where everyone is doing the same subject matter, but they don’t have to be live at the same time. They don’t have to be playing together in the same room in order for it to work. I’m still looking at some different ideas we could do. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a game, it could be something else. 

Hopefully in the future we’ll have some more of these fun asynchronous tournaments, where we’re all competing against one another, we’re all collabing with each other, but without the pressure of everyone needing to clear a certain schedule. Especially for some of the boys who may live in different time zones, when our evenings are their early mornings or vice versa. It gets a little crazy that way.

Maverick: That want for something that is asynchronous, to accommodate for everything, does feel very kindred with how we at Gamesline operate. A similar way of multiple different time zones, people having to juggle work with other responsibilities, and still putting the time in to be like, “We want to do this, we want to focus on this, how can we show up as best we can?” Hearing you describe that, it’s good to know there’s something else that experiences those pains and also those joys.

Shinri: Yeah, yeah! Even if the whole team is working on it, there might be times when you never actually cross paths, but the work that you do still comes together at the end of the day.

Maverick: Thank you for taking the time to sit with me, it’s been a pleasure, and I really appreciate it!

Shinri: Thank you for having me here! This is one of my first live interviews like this, so it’s a little nerve-wracking.

Maverick: Likewise. [laughs]

Shinri: [laughs] Thank you for the questions, and thank you for the opportunity! I really appreciate it.

∗ ∗ ∗ 

Maverick: And just like that, we’ve arrived at the station. Thank you again to COVER and Shinri for being open to this opportunity. It was such a blast! If you’d like to experience more of that cozy horror vibe, you can find Shinri on Youtube and Twitter at @josuijishinri.

I’m not typically on socials these days, but you can find me over at Bluesky. 

To support and find more of us, that’s right over at Patreon. $3 for all of our content a week early, like Unlimited Rail Works, our anime podcast. We just covered Samurai Flamenco, which was such a fun time.

At the time of me recording this section, we just introduced four new members to the Gamesline crew, and they’re going to be recording live on Twitch the newest episode of the Gamesline Podcast.

If you want to talk shop and hang with with us, you can also join our Discord.

The theme song for Starlight Car is a super chill remix of “Aquamarine” by Magic Circuit, which is available off their self-titled album Magic Circuit over on Bandcamp. Keep an eye out, they’ll be doing some new stuff pretty soon!

Thanks, and we’ll see you soon.

Edited transcription by Crystal.

The post Choosing to Start with Josuiji Shinri – Starlight Car Episode 12 appeared first on Gamesline.

Away from Home is a rhythm-based pixel RPG. We have high-detail cutscenes and high-detail quick time events that are also played to the beat similar to Rhythm Heaven. For a reference of what the game’s like, think of Undertale, Final Fantasy, or Earthbound, but imagine it’s to a beat.

Long story short, the elevator pitch with the story would be you, the player, enter their world and control the main character against their will. It’s meant to be fourth-wall breaking and kind of meta. 

Let’s go into the story a little bit. 

So, you enter their world, you’re this orb entity, I was thinking an orb is the best way to make something otherworldly because it doesn’t really have a shape or form, it’s just something weird, right? So, you’re an entity that has entered their world and in the prologue you take over Abby, but she’s not actually who you’re supposed to be controlling, it’s supposed to be Michael. What ends up happening is she ends up gaining these powers from this and you end up helping her and feeding her thoughts to her through the dialogue and questioning. A lot of conflict comes out of it, but throughout the prologue, you’re gonna meet a lot of characters that will, in our full release (which takes place years after the prologue), go on to either be villains or start new businesses or start new things with themselves. You see them later on. 

Why rhythm, why this genre? Was it personal preference, background, something else? 

I’ll say this honestly, I’m not even a huge guy for rhythm games, I just love particularly Warioware and Rhythm Heaven Fever, they’re like wacky games that have rhythm.

Was it a challenge to develop rhythm game without having a big background in them? 

Yeah, it was a challenge because different computers have different processing speeds, so we had to program it to kind of like, detect what your RAM’s doing and if there’s lag, it has to auto-correct itself to what positions things should be in. What we did to simplify the entire music programming is we created a program that converts Reaper (which is like FL Studio) files to bars in the game using MIDI. 

A bit like Audiosurf, if you remember that. 

Exactly, but what we have to do is we have to put in the bars into the program, but it just converts it, it’s pretty cool. What we actually did for that is we taught our musicians how to do that, like I did the first few songs, but after we just paid them to go into Reaper and plot the points, send them back to us, and we convert it. 

Tell me a little bit about the music design. 

The music design – I carefully vetted the kind of people who I wanted for this. I got 3 different musicians and they each have a very strong thing that they’re particularly good at. There’s a musician that goes by Chaotrope – very good at guitars, very good at electric kind of music. There’s a musician named Nick Nuwe, who is incredibly good at EDM, and he handles all the battles, right. And then there’s a musician who goes by Zakku, he’s really good at atmospheric, emotional type music and his inspirations are like Porter Robinson and stuff. I gave each musician their own parts of the game that I feel like they fit, so a lot of the hard hitting boss battles will have Nick Nuwe’s music and a lot of emotional moments will have Zakku’s, and a lot of the traveling and atmospheric stuff or hard-core battles will have Chaotrope. 

For such a music-heavy game, did you have these parts of the story already and you found the musicians to fit? 

That’s such a fantastic question, because we made the music before we made the art. I’d give them a description of the characters I had in mind and I’d send them a few pictures, but how the battles play out and all the backgrounds and all the battle scenes and timing, I based it all off the music. I’d get the music first and if there’s like a pause in it, I might take that moment for a character to laugh or I’ll have them pause before doing an attack. I’ll create choreography around their music.

What’s been the biggest challenge? 

Money. So expensive, I’m around $150k in for this game. 

How is it being at PAX, how’s the community reception? 

It has been fantastic, up until this exact moment we have not had the booth not have three people or a line. It absolutely blew up here, we got a lot of really cool offers. 

And what are some next steps? 

Next steps are going to be making some of the fixes that people suggested here, we’re going to make it more colorblind-friendly, we’re going to change some of the colors to match the icons better, we’re going to make the middle part transparent so people can see the bars colliding rather than assume. Those were the main things, we might make it a bit more forgiving too, like as long as it’s touching the center, it’ll work rather than having it straight in the middle. 

For people like myself! 

Right, those are some of the fixes we’ll make based off PAX, and afterwards, I gotta just work really hard for one of my bosses because this is not approved time!

And what are you most proud of? 

Well, truth be told, I’m most proud of my team, like they are honestly – I mean this in a very serious sense – they’re exactly what I wanted them to be, they are so perfect at everything they do and how they do it. They’re so reliable, not a single time have I been let down by them. 

What does the team look like? 

A marketer, a programmer, me, and a few part-timers.

Sometimes that’s all you need! What about the art direction? 

So, the art direction, it’s kind of hard to pinpoint what exactly inspired me because there’s a lot of different things, but I would give it to three particular things: I realized I needed better graphics after I played Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, that made me realize RPGs can have really good pixel art. And then I really like Undertale for the vibe and atmospheric emotional parts to it. I love the darkness of LISA: The Painful. So, I thought I’d wrangle all three into that art style. And the outcome is this!

What about your background in game development? 

I played Undertale when I was a 5th grader and before that I was really into robots and I’d buy those little robot kits and stuff. I loved the idea that you could create life, in a sense, like you could make things move and come to life. And then I played Undertale, and luckily enough back-to-back played LISA: The Painful, which are two of, in my opinion, the best RPGs. And for the 5th grader, who doesn’t have a grasp on that stuff, it blew my mind, and on top of that, I didn’t even know that indie dev was a thing. I thought that only big companies could make games, I didn’t know that a single individual could do that. So when I found out that I could do that, I ended up loving game development for the same reason I loved robotics – now instead of making a little life in front of me, I could make an entire world on a screen. I made a lot of not-very-good RPG Maker games and stuff that I never released or anything. And I slowly got better and better, and then when I was in my freshman year of high school, I came up with Away from Home and I started working on it. I restarted it eight different times because I kept getting better at art, better at programming, and better at all that stuff, and just realized it needed to be restarted. 

You’re thinking “well now I’ve improved, but I don’t want to leave this one behind.” 

Yes, what I learned is – and I will say this as my biggest piece of advice to any game dev – don’t start with your biggest project first, because you’re gonna get better at programming and art and all that stuff, and because of that you’re gonna keep restarting the same game, when you could be making a ton of small games and showing your improvements in those small games until you think you’ve reached your peak.

Wishlist Away From Home on Steam (there’s also a demo available) and find them on X, Bluesky, and Instagram, just to name a few. You can find more information, relevant links, and announcements on their website and also join their Discord!

The post Conversation with Cameron Smith-Randick of Away From Home appeared first on Gamesline.

What was the biggest challenge in making this game?

The biggest challenge is legal. We’re operating in extremely nuanced and complicated areas of the law, so we’ve got a great legal team helping us navigate what we can and can’t do. That is an enormous part of our budget, I would really not recommend people do anything but create their own stuff to be honest.

Were any of the characters you’ve got now in a legal gray area? 

Well, it’s interesting, one of the ways that we’ve arrived where we have with the character Screamshaver came from an iteration where it was Sherlock Holmes. At the time, a few years ago, there were Sherlock Holmes stories that were in the public domain but some were not. The Conan Doyle estate was arguing and winning on the premise that you can’t have Sherlock Holmes show human emotions because that only happened later. He has to be an unfeeling robot, so to speak, and I said ‘bet, he’s a robot.’

Ultimately we found Sweeney Todd to be a better fit on the concept. He’s an electric razor, a sort of demon barber pole—and by now those later Holmes stories have joined the public domain anyway.  So Sweeney Todd became the robot.. 

I didn’t even know Sweeney Todd was in the public domain. 

Yeah, Sweeney Todd is a penny dreadful character from the mid-1800s. 

And what are some of your inspirations? 

Other than the source material? Smash Bros., and I guess to be more specific to myself, I was a big Wikipedia kid growing up, so I would just go down every rabbit hole I could about, like, Ben 10 and Pokémon, so I kind of want to create that experience for people in the modern age. I want to be able to give kids a rabbit hole to go down about Sweeney Todd, Mother Goose, Lilith, rather than the trophy section of Smash Bros., where I spent a lot of my time. That feature hasn’t appeared in Smash for nearly a decade, so it’s really been fun trying to think of how to pass that experience on to the next generation of players. 

Is there any specific process with deciding how you’re going to put a twist on these old characters, other than the most natural evolution, like Sweeney Todd as an electric razor? 

It’s sort of about making a diverse cast of characters. Needless to say there are a ton I’m working on that are not here at PAX and they are not public information, but I look at the whole of the picture and I say “oh this guy’s a little too close to this guy, maybe do we combine them or do we separate them out and make them even more different?” 

Lilith, for example, you’ll notice that her hair and her grass skirt are like one-to-one the original Peter Pan illustrations. She’s also combined with the plant Audrey from The Little Shop of Horrors, which, in the 60s, they thought “no one’s going to like this movie” and they just never bothered to copyright it. So the original black and white Little Shop is part of this character. I thought, “what’s the natural extension of the fruit growing and budding into a new creature?” Oh, it evolves mobility and this sort of predatory process of evolution by becoming a full human-type creature with arms and legs, and her toes can grow into plant roots for one of her attacks, and the leaf at the end of her braid is a hungry venus flytrap mouth. So it’s really wacky when you lay the whole process out, but the end result is surprisingly simple: it’s a plant girl… that’s it!

When you have to focus in and get something done, especially creatively like this, is there certain music or a certain playlist you put on?

There are some YouTube compilations called like, “classical music that goes hard,” stuff like that. 

I’ve heard like, the lo-fi beats, hip hop, classical. I put on the Succession score. 

Yeah, I try to avoid anything more recent than a hundred years old when I’m working, because I don’t want to accidentally get inspired by something that I shouldn’t be. 

How’s your experience been at PAX? 

Incredible. You know it’s kind of tough to thread the needle between the casual audience and the fighting game audience. There are a lot of kids who will just take to these cartoon characters, not even knowing who they are in the first place. And there are a lot of people who recognize the names that we’re using but don’t really play fighting games. So it has to skew a little broader than something with a highly technical component.

The way that we thread that needle is by simplifying the attack commands. We have light, strong, and special attacks that work on the ground and in mid-air, and that makes a total of six attack options. Very easy to follow if you don’t know these types of games. At the same time, we’re fighting game fans ourselves, and we chose to maintain the fast pace, the high technical elements like wavedashing and tech-chasing that make some of the games in the genre really fun. In fact we’re canonizing these things by giving them fun animations and simplifying them down to two-button commands. They’re easier to use than ever, and it’s been really rewarding to see that actually pay off. Fighting game players love it, and people who have never picked up a controller love it. It’s been really incredible to watch. 

What’s next? 

More fighters! 

You get home after PAX and it’s like, back to the drawing board.

We have a pretty good idea of who’s coming next. 

Any final thoughts? 

I would encourage you to please go check out our social channels. That’s @royaltyfreeforall on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. On X and BlueSky, it’s @royaltyfree4all with the 4 because otherwise we exceed the character limit. 

You can also check out AAAA Games and Royalty Free-For-All on their website and Steam. There’s an upcoming Discord server and a Kickstarter planned for later this summer, so keep an eye on the Royalty Free-For-All socials for more information!

The post Conversation with Colin McIsaac of Royalty Free-For-All appeared first on Gamesline.