Florence Walker’s poetic games explore the body and the ground
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 La Faim Feminine (“the female hunger”) and The Stranding, writer and digital culture student Florence Walker uses a strong sense of environment and evocative language to draw players into worlds that feel like poetry. She has also gently stepped up her programming skills as she continues work on her master’s degree.
How long have you been making games?
If we’re talking about digital games, then not long at all — The Stranding was my first, which would make it about two months. That said, I’ve been involved in making LARP/tabletop systems on and off for about five years (if very minimally, compared to some of my friends!).
What tools do you like to use?
Thus far, I’m a big fan of Twine. I like its textuality; how it’s helped me bridge the gap between traditional writing and designing for interactivity. Even the slight clunkiness is appealing — there’s a lot to be said for polish, but it can work against a piece if left unchecked. I like those little touches of roughness or weirdness, the things that make you think ‘hang on, what’s that doing there?’
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
Embodiment seems to make its way into everything I create, even if I’m not quite intending it to. I am very interested in the horror and wonder of having a body — is any part of human existence untouched by it?
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
Conceptually, I really like being able to create an environment or situation for the player to navigate. I’m so used to traditional writing that being able to allow for multiple routes is a real novelty — there’s something so liberatory in that.
For least favorite, I’m sufficiently new to coding that it frequently feels like bashing my head against a wall. I’m hopeful that this will lessen with time and practice, though!
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
I’m coming to it laughably late, but honestly? Doki Doki Literature Club. I love how smart it is with its horror, how cleverly it talks about narrative expectations and the things we bring to our stories.
Another candidate is We Know The Devil, which I’ve been thinking about on-and-off ever since I played it, for very similar reasons. The terror of interpersonal relationships is a wonderful undercurrent in both; what happens when you learn too much, or get too close? Can you ever go back to the start?
There’s something remarkably vital and true-to-life about time loop stories, or games that ask you to play again for a different ending. So many of our day-to-day interactions are just iterations on the scripts we’ve used before. There’s something very queer about this, too. What do you do when your history is weighed down by so many unhappy endings? When the system itself does not want you to win? One answer: when you’ve gathered all your strength, you play the game again.
Your games La Faim Feminine and The Stranding are both very poetic and evocative. How did you decide to make them?
Significantly, the decision to make both actually happened quite a while ago.
The Stranding was originally conceptualised as a short story. My partner and I rewatched a lot of Doctor Who during the early stages of the pandemic, and I was left feeling dissatisfied by a particular episode, ‘The Doctor’s Wife’. I thought so much more could be done with the concept of ‘spaceship suddenly and traumatically forced into a human body’ — and so The Stranding was born, half-written, and left to languish for a year or two.
Then, during my MA in Digital Culture, we were asked to make a creative project exploring nature and technology. That relationship to the earth, to effectively being ‘grounded’, was something that had really shone through in those early drafts. So I picked the concept back up and rewrote it as interactive fiction.
Similarly, the text in La Faim Feminine was recycled from old poetry, written in bits and pieces across several years. So both games are largely literary works retrofitted for interactivity — an interesting tension that carries advantages and disadvantages both.
“I am very interested in the horror and wonder of having a body — is any part of human existence untouched by it?”
La Faim Feminine is almost an interactive zine. What was it like making the visuals and the mouseover effect?
I’m very enamoured of the zine comparison! It definitely felt a lot like collage. At one point, the title screen was designed to imitate exactly that aesthetic — pieces of paper cut out and glued down — but I wasn’t a fan of the result, so it ended up getting changed.
The objective was ‘make some kind of functioning game in Construct 3, a program I have never used before’. As such, the process was absolutely zine-like: DIY, minimal resources, very rough around the edges.
The backgrounds were all royalty-free images found through Pixabay, which I then tweaked and filtered until I was happy with the effect. The whole process was like this — a lot of instinct-driven experimentation and play until I reached something I thought was interesting or cool. The mouseover effect came about in much the same way; it stood out to me as one of the more compelling options given by Construct 3.
The Stranding is about an AI exploring the world where they are shipwrecked. You specify that it’s Shetland — why there?
Ever since the first germ of the idea, it felt natural that it be set in Shetland. I’m not completely sure why — I visited once as a child, and the experience has stayed with me for years. In the more remote islands, there’s hardly any buildings. We travelled up by degrees: by plane, by ferry, by another plane that was ludicrously small. There was something about it that felt like the edge of the world, a tiny strip of land surrounded by so much water.
I remember standing at the edge of these big coastal cliffs, with the wind blasting around my ears, and feeling awfully precarious. That sense of vulnerability was something I wanted to channel in The Stranding — being aware, all of a sudden, that you are a very small body in a very big world.
Also, I love the birds there. It’s possible to get a scene where Vessel is bitten by a puffin; I was very eager to include it because that actually happened to me when I visited Shetland. (Unlike Vessel, I hasten to add, I was not attempting to kill and eat said puffin.)
Both these projects were for school. Can you talk about how that was and how they fit into your coursework?
This coming year, I’m going to be working on my thesis project: a game (likely made with Unity) exploring the complex relationships between people and their personal data. I see both of these projects as a ‘run-up’ — opportunities to get more comfortable working with interactivity, gradually building up my game-making experience. Neither one was graded. I learned a lot from both, and it was wonderful to have that chance to play around without the pressure of being examined.
Both were made with reasonably tight deadlines, too, which was very valuable. Sometimes you really do need to scrap your plans in favour of Just Finishing The Damn Thing; that’s a skill in of itself. Interestingly, La Faim Feminine seems to be doing slightly better from the bundle than The Stranding, despite it being the one I spent astronomically less time and effort on.
Moving from Twine to Construct 3 felt like a very natural progression. I am, admittedly, quite worried about the considerable step up to Unity. It may well be hubris, even with the considerable limits I’ve set myself. I suppose there’s only one way to find out!
What do you hope people take away from your games?
Whatever they need from them at that point in time — or, failing that, something I didn’t expect them to!
