In Plush Bunch’s Boiling Over, a trans barista gets to push back
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.
Boiling Over is a demo of a barista and life sim where you play as Hazel, a young trans woman saving money for a study abroad trip. It was made by a student group, Plush Bunch, who are now regrouping after some have graduated. Emily Horton answered some questions about the game.
How long have you been making games?
I have been making games since middle school, when I spent a lot of time making Super Mario World hacks and uploading videos of the levels I made to YouTube.
What tools do you like to use?
These days I primarily use Unity and Visual Studio to make games. I do most of my writing and planning in Google Docs and Google Sheets, since they’re free and so easy to collaborate on.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
When I think of games, I tend to focus on what sort of interesting choices I can give the player. The design professors at [Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)] would always encourage this way of thinking because as a designer, it’s our job to setup the environment and the rules in which the player engages with our game. I would say that my focus is on any potentially interesting story, system, or mechanic that challenges the player with a new way of thinking. This focus could go across any genre; most of my lightbulb ideas are in a new genre every time they happen.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
My favorite part of making games is seeing people getting excited about playing what I’ve created. Whether they’re laughing over some dialogue, leaning in close to the screen when they’re focused, or swearing because they just ran out of time and were so close to finishing something, I’m at my happiest. That’s how I know my team and I have done our jobs well.
Making games is work, no matter how rewarding the work may be. I think there’s no single thing I really dislike, but rather I dislike when the process starts to feel like a chore. It’s unavoidable, sometimes we have tasks that just suck to do, or sometimes we spend hours trying to fix a bug we just can’t figure out. Being a “professional” means that you persist and work despite the challenges, but the challenges still suck.
“Finding a balance between the player having fun and the player feeling the drain of customer service has been a challenge, to say the least.”
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
Yes, but maybe not in the way you might think. A few months ago I started playing Kingdom Hearts with a roommate and it quickly became one of my favorite franchises of all time. The games being fun action RPGs with Disney and Final Fantasy characters mixed together, they explore some pretty difficult and dark existential themes, with many of the characters being put through a lot of suffering and questioning the nature of people’s hearts. It’s the type of series you get sucked into and grow attached to the characters.
More than that though, I played each game largely with my roommate watching, and it’s really helped the two of us bond. Unfortunately I’ve moved since, but I’m still playing the games and will likely be streaming them with this friend.
Boiling Over is, basically, a customer service simulator. How did it come to be?
Boiling Over was a project from my first year at RIT’s [game design and development (GDD)] MS program. Erika Mesh, a great professor and close friend, teaches the Game Development Processes class in the program. She teaches us agile development principles through a hefty mix of both theory and practice. Each semester she devises a challenge that limits the project and pushes students into unfamiliar territory. For our class, she wanted everyone to work on a “game for change,” which requires not only a very different design mindset from purely entertainment games, but it also requires research into issues and learning how to portray them accurately and inoffensively.
I gave everyone a vague pitch that only said I wanted to make a game about trans rights, nothing more specific than that. I attracted three team members, and through brainstorming we decided to focus on workplace discrimination. The coffeeshop location appealed to us because it’s a space that many people find themselves in as a patron. They would see a real-life situation with a trans person in which they could change their personal behavior and affect the world around them. From this idea, everyone slowly grew into place as we researched issues with transgender representation in media and identified pitfalls and failings that we personally would try to address.
The barista mechanic is thoughtful and cool. Was it difficult to make work?
It took some time for us to get the barista gameplay fully functional, but it wasn’t particularly challenging. The real difficulty has been in making the interactions engaging and meaningful, and it continues to be a challenge. I know a few people who do not want to play our game because being harassed by customers doesn’t sound fun to them.
We’ve been trying to make the coffeeshop gameplay — specifically making the drinks as quickly and accurately as you can — appealing in and of itself. You might have heard somebody in public-facing jobs say “This job would be great if it weren’t for the customers” — that’s sort of been a motto we’ve been following. Finding a balance between the player having fun and the player feeling the drain of customer service has been a challenge, to say the least.
How did you decide that the main character could regain energy by being mean to mean customers?
Hazel regains stamina when she is mean to rude customers for a few reasons. We want Hazel to be an agent in her own situation. The truth is the most service workers want to treat people who are jerks appropriately but can’t. In a way this mechanic is fantasy; being rude does affect your job in Boiling Over, but like getting shot in a game like Call of Duty, the consequences aren’t immediately fatal. Service workers must choose to be the bigger person for the sake of their job at the cost of their mental health.
However, it’s not really a choice, is it? Eventually, even in Boiling Over, you’re forced to be nice and be abused or else you can’t finish the shift for the day. This is a mindset we want the player to be in because it’s one that’s important to understand in order to empathize and be a better person. Being rude needs to feel cathartic to the player, so let’s give them a reward. Interestingly, we might not be taking this far enough, because players invariably request the ability to spit in people’s drinks.
The scheduling system is cool, and balancing stats and recovery is surprisingly complex! How was that to implement?
Similar to implementing the barista gameplay, the scheduling system has come along slowly, with its biggest challenges being that of design and not of tech — though the system did take a while to implement. We went through a lot of back-and-forth to figure out things. How many times of day there are, how does the player transition between days, times, etc? What can the player schedule and how do events become scheduled?
Once we had the pieces together our next biggest challenge was contextualizing everything and making the system feel interesting to the player. Players were incredibly confused about our scheduling system for the longest time, and it has taken literally a year worth of iterations to finally hammer out the details of the system and to give a tutorial that gets the players using it. Now we are facing the issue that some players don’t feel a big point to everything outside of the coffeeshop, while other players feel that the coffeeshop is getting in the way of the story. We will need to use more story content, as well as a careful balancing and rebalancing of our numbers and stats to bring both groups of people together and make for the best gameplay experience.
This is just a demo — is there any timeline for the full game?
The project is mostly in hiatus right now and has been for the last month and a half. Most of our team just graduated and are figuring out their lives, while a few of us are still in school. Our timeline, and exactly what fans can expect, are still up in the air right now.
That said, we are aiming to get a full product finished and available by the end of this year. Exactly which features and story content will be included remains to be seen. However, we do plan to keep updating the game even after it’s finished as sort of a passion project we keep adding more to. The best way to follow us for updates is to follow us on Twitter, itch.io, or to join our Discord server, which is linked on Boiling Over’s itch page.
