armin littlerat’s story Peyton’s Post-Op Visits observes transmasculine friends
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
In Armin’s game Peyton’s Post-Op Visits, Marcus has just had top surgery and his friend Peyton feels inspired to reconnect a few years out of college. It’s a nice depiction of the friendship between two transmasculine people and also, as commenters have noted, just an informative piece about top surgery! That’s helped along by Armin’s charming art and writing.
How long have you been making games?
I’ve had an interest in making games for many years! I’ve dabbled with Ren’Py, RPG Maker, bitsy, Twine, and Inform 7 in the past. My first completed and published game (Night Shift) was uploaded in 2019, and my first visual novel (A Walk With A Cloud) came later that year.
What tools do you like to use?
My game engine of choice is Ren’Py. I like to write dialogue, and I also like having some art and sound, so a visual novel maker suits me well.
For art I use Clip Studio Paint! It’s cheap and effective, and the vector tools are very useful when I need to resize things or make edits to linework.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I love writing about connection, communication and miscommunication. In particular, I love those moments when people are sussing each other out, deciding how vulnerable and open to be with one another. I love a little bit of awkwardness between people who don’t have a lot of experience with talking to others. And I love it when people who don’t really understand each other find a way to connect nonetheless.
I often write about people who have something in common but experience it in entirely different ways, such as disability in A Walk With A Cloud or transmasculinity in Peyton’s Post-Op Visits. The times they spend together can be moments of grief and strife when they can’t meet eye to eye, or opportunities for them to grow closer and understand themselves better. Exploring these themes in fiction helps me think about my relationships with people in real life and how I might connect more with others.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
Writing dialogue is one of the most natural and enjoyable parts of game-making to me. In fact, game-making to me is really “storytelling, but with extra fun bits.”
“What if I wrote a story, but it had multiple endings? What if I could add pictures and sound and you could click on things?”
The rest of it is cool, but the heart of it is the story!
On the other hand, one of the most difficult parts of game-making for me is getting things polished and ready for publishing. It’s like, I’ve already spent all this time making the game, but now I have to debug, now I have to set up the itch page, now I have to prepare tweets. Sometimes I’m tempted to just upload a buggy mess on a blank page and let people deal with it, but it would be a waste of all my hard work!
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
I recently played Citizen Sleeper and loved it. That sort of narrative suits me wonderfully — definitely a “game about someone figuring themself out.”
I like that the characters are just people, as opposed to romance candidates that I had to pursue to marry, or political leaders who I had to influence to gain some bonus within their faction. Even if my character had something to gain from them, it felt more organic than simply “talk ten times to gain +5 stat boost,” and I didn’t feel obligated to pursue every storyline.
I also like that it brought in the element of chance and permanent consequences without making me feel like my whole run was worthless because I failed to get the result I wanted. I often find that to be an issue in games that have a distinct “good end” and “bad end,” but in Citizen Sleeper people keep carrying on even if things go terribly wrong. I strive to create that sort of experience in my own games. “Things may be difficult at times, but you don’t have to be perfect to move forward.”
Peyton’s Post-Op Visits is a short visual novel about recovering from top surgery. Why did you decide to make it?
I’ve wanted to make a game about transness for a long time. All of my games have some trans energy, but this was my first time making it an explicit and central part of a game.
I quite enjoy fantasy and metaphor, so I’ve tried in the past to make games about transitioning in a world unlike our own. But since it would also be my first time depicting transition in detail, I became rather overwhelmed with also trying to build a fantasy world where transition could look very different than in our own.
So for this game, I decided to stick with experiences grounded entirely in reality. I’d be happy to write more trans stories in fantasy worlds in the future, though!
As to why I chose the topic of top surgery in particular, top surgery was one of the most intense parts of my own transition, and one I have seen very little in-depth discussion of in media. So in many ways creating this game was a way to help myself process my own surgery experience. It was nice to think about struggling through things like Marcus and yet having supportive friends like Peyton and Erin.
When I was first learning about top surgery myself, relatively little of my information came from actual medical professionals. In fact, I’ve had multiple medical professionals ask me what works for me, in case it might work for their other transmasculine patients. I’m glad that they value my opinion, but knowing how much of trans healthcare is uncharted territory can be quite stressful at times. I spent a lot of time on transmasculine Reddit and in-person support groups, looking for first-hand accounts of transition so I didn’t have to navigate it completely blind.
That kind of experience, between two transmasculine people learning from each other, is what I wanted to capture in this game.
It’s interesting that the trans themes are mixed with classic “haven’t talked in a long time” themes. How did you come up with that combination?
It was totally unintentional!
I wanted to make a game about two transmasculine people, and I wanted to give them a chance to talk in-depth about their experiences. A meeting after a long time apart was a perfect chance to make that happen naturally.
Furthermore, transition can be an isolating process. Realizing that there is something about you that your friends and family might not accept makes it harder to enjoy spending time with them. Coming out can completely end some relationships (as well as start ones you never expected). Going through legal and medical paperwork can be exhausting and leaves less time and energy for social life.
Even with transness totally out of the picture, I think a lot of people end up drifting away from the friends they made in university. It’s hard to keep up with people when you suddenly move hundreds of kilometers away from them and don’t have the same schedule anymore!
So ultimately I just wanted to make a trans game, and the rest followed naturally. I guess it goes to show why the theme of two people meeting again after a long time apart is so classic!
The two characters, making different choices and coming out at totally different times, seem so realistic. Where did they come from?
I approached it from a few different angles. On the one hand, I looked at the decisions I’ve had to face as a transmasculine person and considered how people’s lives might diverge if they made different decisions at those points. And on the other hand, I simply thought about the different people I’ve met in life and how they’ve naturally ended up in different places over time. In many ways, I think Marcus and Peyton are no more different than any two friends might be!
It’s interesting that you mention the time frame in particular, since Marcus only came out a year or two after Peyton. In terms of a human life, that’s barely any time at all. And in fact, both characters came out relatively soon after they realized they were trans, so you could even say that’s a similarity between them! But the difference between “being in university” and “having graduated from university” makes the gap seem so wide. I was quite struck myself with how different the world seemed after I finished my education, and I’m sure some of that carries into how Marcus and Peyton relate to each other.
I’ve seen it said that transmasculine experiences aren’t as well represented in art. Does that feel true to you?
I would assume that the full version of this statement is “…aren’t as well represented as [transfeminine experiences] in art”, because transmasculine experiences are so often compared to theirs.
I think it’s absolutely true that transmasculine experiences are represented less often and/or less visibly than transfeminine experiences overall — the question of the quality of those representations is another issue entirely, and one I don’t have an easy answer to.
A lot of cis people think of transfeminine people as “dangerous,” “threatening,” or at the very least “strange,” and so they create many depictions of what they think transfeminine people are like based on their own assumptions. Meanwhile transfeminine people, naturally, want to create depictions of people like them by people like them. And there are also allies that see all the hatred directed towards transfeminine people and want to create their own positive depictions of them.
Meanwhile, a lot of cis people don’t even know transmasculine people exist, and thus they don’t go out of their way to spew hatred towards them. It’s not as if there aren’t negative depictions out there of what people assume to be “women dressing like men,” but from what I’ve seen, it’s at least less common than the opposite, and the assumption tends to be that they are “misguided” rather than actively dangerous.
As for transmasculine people creating depictions of transmasculine people, these do exist, but I’ve found them quite sparse and difficult to find. Maybe part of it is that they have less nasty depictions of people like them to react to. But I think another important aspect of this is that they don’t feel like other queer people and allies will support them if they speak up about transmasculine experiences.
Too often, I’ve seen transmasculine people tweet about their fears and concerns, only to be greeted with responses like “but women have it so much worse.” I’ve personally experienced transfeminine people telling me I’m wrong to seek transmasculine-specific representation when transfeminine representation exists. And in one case I confided in a cis female friend that I was afraid of working in a field dominated by men who might not respect my body or my identity, and she responded, “at least you’re not a woman.”
So, while I know not everyone feels this way, I’ve definitely gotten the sense that some people, both cis and trans, think that the feelings and experiences of transmasculine people are less meaningful or significant than those of transfeminine ones, or of any woman, cis or trans.
Such things have made it harder for me to feel safe creating transmasculine content, and I’m sure other potential creators have felt the same.
In the past, I spent a lot of time engaging with people who thought my transness was important and worth protecting, but that the male part of my identity made me lesser. I thought that everybody who supported trans rights was like that, and that if I didn’t try to engage with those people I would have nobody to support me at all.
I realize now that always focusing on those who don’t accept my whole self is unhelpful, and that there are plenty of people out there who either appreciate me as I am, or at least are open to hearing me out. If my content touches the heart of someone who thinks people like me are inferior, I am grateful. But they are no longer my primary audience.
What do you hope players take away from the game?
I hope this game gives people a little insight into what it might be like to transition as a transmasculine person, whether or not they get any particular surgery. And I hope it helps remind them that no two people experience life the same way, even if they have a major part of their identity in common.
Finally, I hope that for at least some people playing this game, it helps them to understand more about themselves, or to feel more seen.
