Runa Liore Winters wonders why ghost stories favor the listeners
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.
Runa Liore Winters is a trans woman and game developer living in North Carolina. Her game 77 Oleander Avenue is the first section of an upcoming (soon!) full game about a mysterious haunted house. You find out in the first few minutes that there definitely is a ghost, Evie, and together you unpack some of the baggage of the paranormal industry. (Evie is just delighted that she might be photographed.)
How long have you been making games?
I’ve been making games for longer than I’ve kept track — About six years ago I moved from making Tabletop games and systems to Visual and Kinetic novels coded primarily with Python (in Ren’py or otherwise). I released my first game, An Oath in Kind, a few years ago after realizing a short story I wrote could become a kinetic novel. Last July, I created the initial version of 77 Oleander as part of a game jam and its full version will go live next month. Everyone who buys the bundle will get access to the full version automatically too.
What tools do you like to use?
Apart from the coding, I use FL Studio 9 and Audacity to compose the music and create sound effects for the game, Clip Studio Paint for most visual effects though I run some through Microsoft Word’s photo processor to get distorted, heavily artifacted images sometimes, and like a lot of developers I find public domain images and sounds from sites like FreeSound or the creative commons search engine.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I primarily work in Horror and Mystery genres but even when I work in other spaces, my work is focused on longing, particularly queer longing whether it’s romantic or otherwise; Secrets both terrible and precious; and the way we construct knowledge about the people and forces around us. Horror, in particular, is a great place for exploring all these concepts and the medium of games really invites players to be in conversation with these ideas.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
Out of everything, the thing I struggle with most in making games is limited time and resources. Like many independent devs I don’t have the money to hire anyone else to work on my game or even consistently commission freelance contributors, and while I can do a lot on my own I’m always aware of how much more I could accomplish with even just one or two additional team members.
In terms of my favorite things about development though, It’s hard to pin down a single aspect but I can say that very few things in my life have made me feel as fulfilled as being able to give someone a game that makes their jaw go slack and keeps them awake at night thinking about what they’ve just played.
“I wanted to inject an amount of uncertainty in players. I wanted to get players thinking about who Evie was and why she would be in this house if it wasn’t her own.”
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
There are two games I’ve played recently that have left me short on sleep, the sort of games that I couldn’t stop thinking about even after I laid down in bed, exhausted after a long week at my day job.
The first is Tokimeki Memorial, the SNES version of the original game from the '90s. It’s like the decryption key for so many genres and games that followed after from dating sims to visual novels to daily life simulators to AAA RPGs. It’s constantly fascinating me with the complexity of its mechanics, the level of randomness that makes the characters feel alive and unpredictable, and all of the choices that we can now see reflected in hundreds of games every year.
The other game that I’ve been obsessing over recently is Unsighted, which is both gorgeously designed and has some of the most clever mechanical ways of conveying the narrative stakes that I’ve seen in a long time. The art and character animations and fluidity of combat and the wistful, hopeful melancholy in every interaction is really making it hard to put down even though its (almost) as hard as Tokimeki Memorial.
77 Oleander has a lot to say about who decides what the “truth” is or the most popular details. What made you want to write about that?
In 77 Oleander, I wanted to make a game that could converse with players about the narrative nature of ghost stories. With paranormal and true crime podcasts still going strong and a constant demand for content about mysterious deaths or hauntings, it’s not hard to hear a dozen or more retellings of any given case.
I myself listen to a lot of paranormal podcasts, have spent hours and hours reading articles and digging through the library for local ghost stories, and generally just soaking in all the lurid details about a long dead family and their long abandoned home. All of this got me thinking about the way we construct meaning and share stories about people we never knew, particularly when they’re all dead and gone.
In a loose parallel to this, I’ve always been keenly aware of the ways in which popular media, even small scale media, discusses trans people and our identities and lives. I’ve heard a lot of stories about haunted houses, missing persons, murder victims, serial killers, etc. intermingled with a writer’s speculations about the subject’s potential queerness or, in many cases, denying such a thing could be possible.
In a lot of ways, I’ve seen people within the paranormal research community afford far more credibility to poltergeists than to trans people, living or dead, and I wanted to really dig into that alongside a more general conversation about why we believe the things we do about hauntings and the dead. The perfect ghost story is crafted for the listener, after all, and not the ghosts. What is it we’re choosing to tell one another, and what are we choosing to believe?
The game plays with textural fading to imitate Tabby’s blurry mind. What was it like using those effects in Ren’py?
Ren’py thankfully has a pretty solid set of tools for using layered, transparent pngs and animations to create unsettling effects. I’ve played a fair number of visual novels made in Python generally, Ren’py, and a few other languages that have played with similar ideas. DokiDoki Literature Club is probably the most well known example that uses techniques similar to what I use in 77 Oleander and it’s a lot of fun to play with images that can intrude upon the User Interface or obscure dialogue. As you might guess from what goes on in the game so far, Tabby’s physical, mental, and emotional state of being will be pushed to extremes at various points and I wanted the players to get a solid sense of that visually.
This is a haunted house that definitely has a real ghost. Why did you decide to make it a sure thing?
The main reason I wanted Evie to be such a clear presence is to focus the players’ attention on the question of who Evie is, what her intentions are, what really happened to the Larkspur family, and ultimately what they believe. While the basement route presents Evie’s persistence as a ghost at 77 Oleander, the other two routes that will come to the game soon will explore things might seem to contradict the things you learn in the basement.
Ultimately, after completing the basement route, visiting the garden, and heading upstairs, the player will need to determine what exactly they believe about Evie, how she died, what kind of people they think the Larkspurs were, and what Tabby should do next in order to reach one of the game’s endings. There will be a full ending following the belief that Evie doesn’t exist and that there’s no ghost in 77 Oleander, but I’m also more interested in the question of “What do you think about Evie and Tabby’s encounters with her?” rather than “Do you think ghosts are real or not?”
I like the processed artwork throughout the game. How did you develop the look of the house and all its features?
As I mentioned before, I mostly use Clip Studio Paint to composite and process images together in order to make the artwork for 77 Oleander. In some cases though, I drop images into Microsoft Word, use a few filter effects, and then export the results back to add some jpeg artifacts or sometimes a specific sort of look that you could find more commonly in visual novels from the ’90s and early ’00s. I’m thinking in particular of 07th Expansion games such as Higurashi no naku Koro Ni, which utilized photos of real locations run through simple filters to create an abstract, sometimes dream-like haze. Aside from that, I drew heavy inspiration from homes I’ve visited and lived in throughout North Carolina.
“In a lot of ways, I’ve seen people within the paranormal research community afford far more credibility to poltergeists than to trans people, living or dead.”
It’s so clever, and moving, to have a ghost of a trans person in this way. What inspired you with Evie?
Evie is based in part on my own experience growing up as a closeted trans girl in an evangelical family and in part on bits and pieces of all sorts of people and ideas I’ve heard thrown around in haunted house stories over the years. Shirley Jackson’s work, particularly Hill House, has always been a foundational story for me and Evie’s just as much a girl like me as she is like Eleanor or Merricat.
In terms of why I wanted to have a trans character, a ghost at that, in 77 Oleander there are three main reasons. First, as I mentioned before one of the big things I’m setting out to tackle in this game is the ways in which popular conceptions of hauntings can fail to capture the full scope of someone’s life. Second, I wanted to inject an amount of uncertainty in players specifically once they learned about the Larkspur family — official records state that the family was comprised of a grandfather, a daughter, her husband, and their son with no young girl or anyone at all named Evie involved. While you don’t spend long in that uncertainty, I wanted to get players thinking about who Evie was and why she would be in this house if it wasn’t her own.
Finally, I, like many trans people, have a complex relationship with physical bodies and I’ve often wondered if I would even bother to take a human form if I became a ghost. Evie deals with the lingering dysphoria from her life in a similar way, but in the current version of the game I didn’t have as much time to go deep into it — she’s someone who isn’t sure what shape she would want her body and so she floats around as a tiny orb instead. I can relate to that a lot, and most days might be happier as a tiny orb who didn’t have joint pain or need to shave.
