CJ and Mabbees on their ’00s roleplaying visual novel Terranova
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.
Name and Pronouns: CJ (they/them), Mabbees (he/him)
How long have you been making games?
CJ & Mabbees: We’ve been making games for about 15 years. We mostly did game jam games for Global Game Jam, and Terranova is our first full game. CJ is the lead writer and Mabbees is the lead programmer. We both worked on design. We actually met through game development!
What tools do you like to use?
CJ: Twine, Ren’Py and PICO-8. I like really constrained formats that let the story really shine. And of course, the tools that Mabbees makes.
Mabbees: I make a lot of my own tools because it lets me be in control of how the game takes shape. I like Twine a lot for prototyping, and in general I like tools that are fully free to use and open source.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
CJ & Mabbees: It swings between really cute and feel-good themes and dark, unsettling psychological horror. Think Doki Doki Literature Club. Mabbees tends to be on the heartwarming side; I think he keeps me from going full horror all the time.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
CJ: Favorite part is brainstorming with Mabbees! We have great conversations. I also really love writing and diving into a fantasy world for hours on end. Least favorite is asset management; making sure you know where all the design files are and that everything is at the right resolution.
Mabbees: Favorite is the brainstorming and creative collaboration, and that moment where you are starting to converge on a game and you make the first prototype and are getting people’s reactions to it. Least favorite is all the administrivia we have to do to get a game sent to a publisher (like Apple notarization or Steam Store submission).
“Part of our process for the conversations was to roleplay it. I think that led to more believable dialogue because each of us could take on one character and stay in that voice.”
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
CJ: The House in Fata Morgana. It’s a tragic visual novel and the reason why it is so tragic is that there are so many gut wrenchingly beautiful moments about being human. About loving someone but not knowing the right words to say or accepting yourself even though the people you love don’t accept you. I love games that make you think about them long after you play them.
Mabbees: Hades. 1) They did a really masterful job of establishing believable characters and 2) it has a really good difficulty progression and manages to keep the game interesting even though there’s a lot of repetition in it.
Terranova is an interactive fiction set in a fully realized 2000s desktop computer. How did you decide to make it?
Mabbees: First, we started with two characters: Tourmaline and Cherry. We knew the IM window was going to be the environment we told their story in because their story is about online friendship.
Terranova has been very character driven like that. Anything that added to the “atmosphere” of the story we wanted to add into the interface. That’s how we got the roleplay community blogs and the characters’ personal blogs, too.
What was it like to build the Windows XP-style interface with all the moving and working parts?
Mabbees: I had a lot of fun putting in little details like when the player minimizes the windows the border animates to show you where it’s going to minimize into the task bar. I also had a lot of frustration trying to work out the bugs.
I was the same age as these characters at the time, but never into roleplaying. What was that community like and why is it a good setting for a game like this?
CJ: Especially in the era of the early ’00s when we all were just starting to figure out names for queerness, roleplay communities allowed us a sandbox to play in that had no limits to sexuality or identity.
If you were born female but wanted to be a boy, you could be a boy; if you wanted to be an androgynous robot you could be that. It allowed us to play with our identities in a way we could not in the real world, I think.
Many of the roleplayers I wrote stories with back in the day came out as trans, or genderfluid, or some color of the LGBTQIA flag. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
I liked the development of the friendship vibes in the instant messaging in parallel with [the fictional online community] Terranova. How was it to write in both threads at once?
Mabbees & CJ: Really fun and really confusing. Part of our process for a lot of the conversations was to roleplay it between the two of us. I think that led to more believable dialogue because each of us could take on one character and stay in that voice. CJ mostly played Tourmaline and Sendaria and I played Effie and Cherry; at times, another writer friend of ours, Greg, played Effie.
We have a big timeline of events that happen over the course of the game and getting the timing just right was tricky; that was the latter half of the game development, getting the game flow just right.
Is there another nostalgic setting you’re interested in? What’s next for your team?
CJ & Mabbees: As for what’s next, we have some updates for Terranova like more mini games and a music player; Mabbees has been talking about doing some Apple II or Commodore 64-era nostalgia, but no concrete plans yet.
