Hawky and Col’s transmasc fable Lookouts is tense, beautiful, and happy
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.
Col and Hawky collaborated on Lookouts beginning with a game jam in 2019, with the final full release earlier this year. It’s a starkly drawn, romantic story about Robin and Joseph, lookouts for rival outlaw gangs who decide to rewrite their own destinies. The game uses some Western genre tropes and subverts others, creating an immersive world of queer joy.
How long have you been making games?
Hawky: Since I was about 14? 15? I messed around a lot coming up with a game with a friend who already made them, and then I started teaching myself GameMaker. I remember being very clear to my mum at the time and saying that I wanted to learn to make videogames haha.
Col: I don’t think I’ve ever made a game before? Does using Scratch in high school IT class count?
What tools do you like to use?
Hawky: GameMaker has been my beloved for a long time but since I started uni a few years ago (and GameMaker became more annoying to use) I’ve been using Unity as my go-to. I’ve been trying to teach myself Godot recently as well which has felt like a mix between the two, that’s been a pleasant surprise.
Col: I make almost everything in Photoshop, I’ve been using it for over 10 years for drawing and editing and if my laptop is on then Photoshop is probably open. I’m in the boat of “people who use Adobe products because they’re trained on them all throughout education and it’s the professional industry standard but they also hate Adobe and think they run a really scummy business model.”
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
Hawky: Oh gosh, I’m not sure honestly, I don’t think I’ve made enough work to truly know. I like a lot of stories with themes about identity, time, family, power structures, etc. When it comes to genres I obviously love cowboy and desert aesthetics, but I’ve become a big fan of horror in recent years too.
My big fave genre though is time travel/time loop stories, I’m obsessed with them and anything in their general purview of living multiple lives, or experiencing the same thing multiple times. It’s such a rich ground for exploration of identity and memory and lots of other topics to me — but actually writing one is very daunting haha.
Col: I think most of what I make is just gay fluff or characters that I get gender envy from, but I do like dipping into stuff about mental health and interpersonal relationships like how things are in my own life. I struggle to explain my experiences to others with the right words and I find it a lot easier to convey it through art.
“We get comments sometimes from people assuming that there’s a bad end they managed to avoid, but they always survive.”
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
Hawky: i HATE making games. Not really lol, I think favourite is when I get to put lots of stuff to screen. I still find coding so cool when I can just write some lines of stuff and it’s like wow! Stuff is moving on the screen because of what I did! It’s still kind of magical to me, as silly as that sounds. Least favourite is probably like… UI? Or something like that, but nothing really sticks out to me.
Col: I’d always joke with Hawky that I hated it when he’d ask me to fix something but I think doing the CGs were my least favourite parts, just because it was so time consuming and daunting to do. I had to make sure I was getting the framing and the composition and the colours and the character consistency and the mood right but honestly if you see them all together you can see the inconsistencies with them. There’s certain CGs I see now that I still cringe at how bad they look but I’m yet to see anyone say anything bad bahahaha
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
Hawky: My first answer was no because I have cringe gamer syndrome and play a lot of multiplayer games so I couldn’t remember anything that affected me, but looking through my library I’d definitely say The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. Beautifully written and funny game, and some of the most poignant meditation on the nature of the industry right now and the long shadow that beloved games can cast years later on their own creators.
Col: I haven’t played Cosy Grove in a while but there’s something about the real-time clock mixed with an unfolding character arc that really got me. It takes real months to see a single story through. I’d be doing a few [tasks] every day and it still took real weeks between character revelations. You make such a bond with the characters in a way that reminds me of the bonds that I had with Animal Crossing villagers as a kid, watching them get better in such a natural way makes you reflect on your own life in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. Getting better takes time and patience and Cosy Grove does a great job of showing you that.
Lookouts is a stylish visual novel set in some version of the Old West. What inspired you to make it?
Hawky: I’ve always liked deserty and cowboy aesthetics and when we saw the Gay Western jam was on in 2019 we thought, fuck it why not and made the original pretty much over a weekend. Wild to think how much that changed the trajectory of our lives haha, never in a million years did we think it would get as much attention as it has.
Despite my interest in the aesthetics I’m not a huge fan of cowboy movies themselves and haven't watched any properly, and I’m generally not a fan of the whitewashed Hollywood version of the wild west, which served as a basis for a lot of the decisions made about Lookouts. I wanted a cowboy narrative that hit familiar beats while being pretty explicitly like, anti-racist and stuff and based in the oft-forgotten history of queerness at the time.
The art and styling are striking. How did you decide how this world would look?
Col: We didn’t actually have much time to decide on the art style because this was originally for a game jam. I think it came from a drawing I did of a cowboy that was totally unrelated to Lookouts. Hawky was like “I like that” and that’s where we went with it! I’m so glad we went with that kind of look though because that style was super easy and comfortable to draw, and since I was the only one doing the art it meant I could actually keep up with Hawky’s pace!
The main characters, lookouts for different outlaw gangs, forge a bond partly because they are both transmasculine. Why is that important for the story?
Hawky: I think this probably has a few components. For one, the impetus was that we knew we were going to do a gay love story and then were like “…what if they were trans” and it was like a fireworks moment, we were very excited by the idea. There aren’t a lot of transmasc gay love stories out there so we were happy to add to that canon.
Secondly, we both have very queer experiences of masculinity, col being trans masc himself while I’m a [gender non-conforming (GNC)] cis man, so I think we saw a lot of ourselves in these characters even before they’d fully formed.
Thirdly, and most relevant to the story itself, the whole genre of wild west and spaghetti westerns is full to the brim with toxic masculine ideals and ridiculous power fantasies about stoic rugged men in the desert dealing justice with their guns and cool words. Having the chance to create a story about men that didn’t have to be like that and could play around with those tropes and conventions was really fun and interesting to me. While it wasn’t necessarily conscious I think that’s why all the characters ended up being men, a whole range and diversity of masculine identities.
Col: A lot of people think I’m the one that pushed for them being trans but that was actually Hawky’s idea! I think at the time I was in a relationship with another transmasc person and I did always feel disappointed by the lack of content about T4T relationships when I knew so many people who were in them. I’m glad we were able to fill that void a bit with Lookouts.
Clemency, the town in the game, is kind of a haven. What was it like to create Clemency and its residents?
Hawky: It was hard!! While we had a good sense of what characters we wanted to have it was difficult to get a handle on how they fit into the story without stepping on each other’s toes, as well as how to make the town feel lived in and real with our limited resources and cast. The town itself was also difficult to figure out the layout of, it was a bit wishy washy for a while and I had to research the layout of mining towns to get a handle on how it might look.
I struggle with imagining things like towns with the kind of natural layouts or lived-in spaces you might expect and worry about creating locations that feel fake or shallow bc idk what they look like lmao. Col of course also did an amazing job (like everything else) with fleshing out the town and its locations, I think our efforts are very complimentary in making these places feel genuine and detailed.
“I struggle to explain my experiences to others with the right words and I find it a lot easier to convey it through art.”
Col: I think all the locations were based off a description Hawky would give me of how he was picturing it in his head, sometimes with an MS Paint doodle as a visual aid. Also The Town with No Name but that’s just because it’s burned into my skull. I think making the characters was the part I enjoyed the most — the setting is roughly around the Mojave desert and Death Valley which has some incredible wildlife that were insanely fun to work with.
I think the designs were made before we’d decided on some of the specifics so that’s why some of the characters are native species to the area but then travelled to Clemency from somewhere else. I don’t know if anyone even noticed that but I did and I’m probably the only person who cares bahahaha
Lookouts has a genuinely tense final act marked by intrigue and fighting. Was it challenging to put these lovely characters in danger?
Hawky: I always knew that I wanted the characters to fight to be free, that was always going to take place, even in the original draft for the jam version we’d planned to have a fight of some sort. So in that sense, no it wasn’t a challenge, we aren’t precious enough about them to not let them get hurt haha.
I would say that them dying was never on the table though, I think that’s something a lot of people expect especially in any visual novel with violence that lets you make choices and puts the characters in danger. We get comments sometimes from people assuming that there’s a bad end they managed to avoid, but they always survive.
Besides that, the actual fight itself was a huge challenge to make LOL. It was a logistical nightmare that I had to make excel sheets and flowcharts to plan it out, and a ton of work from me and Col to pull it together. While I’m really proud and happy with it and it’s very gratifying to hear from people that they find the fight genuinely tense, I don’t think I would do it the way we did again lmao.
All the versions of the fight were written from scratch but I really should’ve been smarter and reused things between them. And again while I’m really happy with the result, by the end of it I was definitely very sick of writing action scenes which are largely same-y. Writing one is fine but writing four is just a chore. There’s only so many ways to say there was a gunshot or that you’re in pain.
Col: The fight scene CGs are by far some of my favourites. There’s a lot of energy and tension in them. I originally thought there was going to be a bad ending where they both decide against the plan and go back to their respective gangs but Hawky told me that was never going to be an ending because that would have been so brutal.
I also remember Hawky considered an alt ending where Sheriff is the only one who dies (I think of old age and the idea is that Robin and Joseph replace him spiritually) and I told him he wasn’t allowed to kill off Sheriff bahahaha there were a bunch of endings we cut and I’m glad we did because the one Hawky wrote is absolutely phenomenal. A lot of queer stories and lives don’t always get a happy ending and I’m glad we could give this one like we all deserve.
