N.B. Spiders embodies the unsettling in their cool, eclectic games
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.
By purchasing the 2022 Queer Games Bundle, you get your foot in the door for Spiders’ incoming game The Museum of Radically Obsolete Futures. You also get Occult Spreadsheet Synthesizer, a soundboard for spiritualists. Spiders isn’t even the first or only person so far to mention making PowerPoint games! I had no idea.
How long have you been making games?
Since sometime in the murky depths of the early to mid 2000s. I think my first ever game was made with Microsoft PowerPoint running on an old Windows 95 PC. It was a point-and-click adventure about a dog detective. I remember there was an animated train in it I painstakingly made from rectangle gradients and janky clipart. Later I switched to RPG Maker when I got copy of it that was included on a game magazine’s demo CD. I spend a long time messing around with that!
What tools do you like to use?
Around 2010 I got it in my head that I wanted to do game-making the supposedly proper and neat way by learning how to code. So I taught myself ActionScript by following online tutorials. I used a very cool framework called FlashPunk to release my first game on Newgrounds around two years later. I had a lot of fun with Flash, writing hacky code and creating addons. But I think I was already late to the whole Flash thing and Adobe soon after started deprecating it.
I used a bunch of different tools since then and even tried to build a custom 3D game engine with Haxe. I really love writing my own stuff and making tiny tools and scripts. But I also get stuck with that sometimes and then realize that instead of actually making games I’m just staring at my spaghetti-mess of engine code and getting a headache sifting through documentation pages. So nowadays when I want to quickly make something shiny and tasty I just use Godot.
But if you’re asking what my favorite tools are I would have to say: Bitsy, KateLabs, and RPG Maker 2000.
[Editor’s note: KateLabs is part of the Queer Games Bundle!]
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I would say that I have a bunch of different fancies so I constantly am trying out different tools and genres and mixing up the way I make things. But my go-to themes are stuff that’s gay-as-heck and inexplicably enchanting while also being slightly unsettling.
“[Y]ou can really tell a story by just envisioning a place. Like: What styles of architecture are used? How was this place used? How did the people who lived there get around? How did they repurpose it or expand on the space?”
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
My favorite part is just making something small, a level, a character or some interactive mechanic, and just playing around with it. It’s the best part of making games. With just a few lines of code you can not only just create visuals or sounds or such but actually something haptic, something you can sort-of touch and play around with and get a feel for. There is something really embodied about game-making that just speaks to me.
My least favorite is actually finishing games! Haha.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
Two of my friends and me have been playing through Disco Elysium for a couple of months now. We do like a sessions every week where we meet on Discord and play together, but only for an hour or so every time. It’s almost a bit like a book club. We take our time and talk a lot about the game afterwards. Usually I tend to binge through media, especially games, so it has been incredibly refreshing to try out this relaxed format. Like a slow collective ritual. Disco Elysium can be a really difficult game to play at times, but is also very beautiful and goofy and melancholic. Experiencing this as a group made the whole experience just a bit more precious to me.
Tell me about the Museum of Radically Obsolete Futures, because I think I see a Klein bottle in the preview screens??
Yes! I’m really happy that you recognized the Klein bottle, it’s my favorite mathematical shape, haha! So, for the past year or so I’ve been doing this writing/researching process around old technology and obsolete machinery that once might have been cutting edge but is basically too slow or too clunky or too difficult to maintain nowadays: Like analog synthesizers and computers, scientific equipment or telescopes and planetarium projectors.
During that process I’ve started writing these small speculative sci-fi stories around these objects. Sometimes even just fragments of stories or setups. With the Museum I’m trying to collect and expand upon these pieces and to have a small interactive space where you can read them. The idea is that you are moving through this weird maybe-abandoned museum exhibition of all kinds of machinery from a bunch of different time periods. And you have this small tape player that’s like an audio guide for the exhibition with which to listen to the stories. It is a fun framework to write for!
What has it been like building out a pretty large, sophisticated 3D space?
Like I said before, I love building landscapes and spaces and just walking around in them and getting a feel for the geometry. Quite some time ago I was a bit into [the Valve game engine] Source modding, so making custom maps mainly for Half-Life 2 and Portal and other Source games. And making Source maps is actually all about building large, intricate and interweaving spaces. Mostly dank abandoned industrial buildings, haha.
But I think what I really learned from that work was that you can really tell a story by just envisioning a place. Like: What styles of architecture are used? How was this place used? How did the people who lived there get around? How did they repurpose it or expand on the space? It’s a very lowkey way to tell a story that leaves a lot of breathing space for non-linear and non-prescriptive narratives.
You seem to really enjoy futures of different kinds in your work. What’s the appeal there?
I think I can best answer this by just quoting from one of my main sources of inspiration for writing, which is the Black Quantum Futurism Collective: “Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality.”
SciFi imaginations and Speculative Fiction, for me, are a way of making different realities manifest. Or even just creating an invitation to a player or reader to take something weird or divergent from day-to-day reality as granted, for a bit. Especially realities or futures that that we are still in the process of fighting for. As a queer person growing up during and after the turn of the millennium I can really find myself in the BQF collective’s metaphors around temporality and waiting: Waiting for laws to change, waiting for medical appointments, waiting for acknowledgment. In all that you sometimes just have the yearning to create a future (or a past) that could (have) be(en).
The Occult Spreadsheet Synthesizer is like a seance soundboard for the 21st century. What led you to make it?
The Occult Spreadsheet Synthesizer was made for an event at Glorious Trainwrecks, which is one of my favorite game-maker communities. Each year in December they have a small jam called SEKRET SANTA. The idea is that you post a short wishlist of things you like to have in a game, like a mechanic, or aesthetic or a setting. And then once everyone has writing down their wishes, the lists get shuffled around and then you have to take the prompts from someone else’s list and try and make it into a game for them. And the giftee doesn’t know who’s making their game. It’s a really creative and fun way to jam together. And all the Glorious Trainwreckers have such a bare-to-the-metal approach to bashing together games, it is really exhilarating.
The wishlist I got was basically: Make a game with spreadsheets. And since at the time I was really into synthesizers I thought: Why not combine the two things and make a game out of it? It’s ridiculous but it also just kinda works!
Your output is so varied — what are you excited for next?
I have to admit that I am easily seduced by new projects and materials. Haha! Sometimes I start working on a game and when I get into the thick of it I start wondering: Ooo, but what if I worked on some music or something. And then I start on that and go: Ooo, but maybe I could build an instrument, or code a tool, or do weird web design. So I probably know least of all what will be next! But my goal right now is to finish The Museum of Radically Obsolete Futures and properly release it. Hopefully sometime soon!
