Saori is working on her night moves in L’Origine du Monde
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.
Saori’s game L’Origine du Monde is a tiny game about waking up in the middle of the night. I found that Twine’s dark mode really went well with the quiet, spare feeling of walking around alone at nighttime, and the game captures a nice moment that feels very peaceful. Also, you can pray to dragons. Oh, and you have fur. Get ready to eat some mulberries.
How long have you been making games?
i’d toyed with rpgmaker as a kid, but l’origine was the first game that i actually finished, so… since 2017?
What tools do you like to use?
i’m a big fan of community-focused/non-corporate tools and resources — ones like twine, bitsy, gbstudio, rpgmaker 2000/2003, or wolf rpg editor. not only do they make game development more accessible to beginner, amateur, and hobbyist devs, they also grant works made in them with this… really personal, scrappy, handmade feel to them, you know? people have talked about the “democratization” of game development for some time now, and at least for me, this is what it’s all about: demystifying the process, making it something that people can just do casually.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
i feel like, one way or another, my works always end up being about my own identity as a sapphic trans woman in some way. in l’origine this took a very simple form, with the two characters just being cute girlfriends, but in my more recent writing i usually take a more, uhh… philosophical? approach to it, i think. like, when i think about my transness, what comes to mind is not gender specifically, but rather… how my dysphoria has alienated me from my body, my memories, or my emotions. i haven’t gotten those thoughts out of my system yet, so they’re the ones i’m interested in exploring through my writing at the moment.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
my favorite is definitely the act of creation itself. my approach to game-making or even writing is rather mechanical, i suppose, with me thinking about it more as a puzzle for me to solve. how can i shape this thing i’m working on so that it communicates the exact abstract feeling i’m thinking about? that kind of stuff is really fun for me.
as for my least-favorite aspect… it’s gotta be how much time and effort anything takes to do! it feels like a really silly thing to complain about, but it’s crazy how even a tiny game like l’origine took me an entire month to make. after i finished it, i clearly remember thinking that it’s a miracle any games ever come out at all.
“i don’t have to wait until i become a Game Developer before i can make games, i can just… make games! right now!”
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
without doubt, it’s The Caligula Effect 2. i’m in love with that game for a variety of reasons, but the one thing about it that will stick with me is how much it humanizes its cast. other jrpgs like it will frequently make their characters the butt of various mean-spirited jokes, have the villains be two-dimensional bad guys who you can beat up without worries, and so forth… but in Caligula 2, an unbelievable amount of care is put into conveying that everyone is a person, inherently deserving of respect and understanding, even if you disagree with them. to be able to handle my own characters with this much care is one of my core aspirations as a writer, really.
L’Origine du Monde is a nice slice of life between a furry person (just literally) and their girlfriend. How did you decide to make it?
i made it for the first Strawberry Jam, a game jam by eevee focusing on horny games.
…well, to be honest i have absolutely no idea why i decided to enter the jam! back then i was still struggling with my ADHD, which had kept me from working on any kind of personal projects my entire life. i’m sure that at some point i thought i’d just give up on the game halfway through, as had been the case with other things i’d tried to do before. but… somehow, i managed to finish the game! wow. yeah, i still have no idea how i accomplished that. it’d still be a few years until i started taking medication for my ADHD and could actually work on things consistently, but at the time i was pretty proud of the game anyway.
This was your first game, right? What was it like working with Twine for the first time?
honestly, it was really stressful! brute forcing your way through ADHD to make something on a pretty tight time limit is… not a good time, as i’m sure any ADHD haver who’s ever tried doing homework can attest to.
that said, i think some of the credit for me managing to finish the game despite all that has to go to twine. it really is a good tool for beginner game devs! its basics are easy to grasp, and its focus on writing means you don’t have to worry about things like graphics or music, making it much easier to finish a project.
plus, i feel like the fact it’s based on html, css, and javascript could make it a good introduction to programming. even if its syntax is simplified, the logic it uses is still the same, after all.
I sensed some bad vibes toward the excess mulberries in the game. Is there a story there?
oh, haha, that’s one of the “autobiographical” parts of the story. while making the game, i was in a hurry to figure out what to put in it, so i just threw in various details about my own daily life at the time… one of which was, indeed, all these mulberries that my family had bought and that we’d been eating for several days straight. the bits about waking up in the middle of the night because you’re hungry, or need to go to the bathroom, or getting sore because someone (read: my cats) is in your bed and won’t let you move at night… they all came from real life too.
as writing advice, i don’t think “write what you know” should be considered as universally applicable as it is, but if you just want to put something out real quick then it sure can be useful!
“people have talked about the ‘democratization’ of game development for some time now, and at least for me, this is what it’s all about: demystifying the process”
These characters feel nice and lived-in — are they part of a larger world setting? Or just a well crafted one-off?
as a kid, i’d come up with a ton of ideas for my own stories, characters, etc., as i’m sure a lot of kids do… but i never did anything with them. i’m sure that part of it was my aforementioned ADHD, which made it difficult for me to do basically anything, but on some level, i think i might’ve also expected too much from those stories in my head. i played a lot of big-budget games with shiny graphics and cool music, after all, so if i ever made my own games, that’s what i wanted them to look like. or, to put it another way — if i couldn’t make them look like that, there’d be no point in making them at all.
looking back, that’s a profoundly sad way to think about making things. and that’s why — even though i now think l’origine is kinda bad, and am pretty embarrassed about it — i’m still glad i entered the jam and made the game. because in my scramble to figure out something to have my game be about, i realized that i could just… use those characters that’d been sitting in my head for so long! and sure, this story wouldn’t be the epic adventure i’d always fantasized about…
but that’s fine. it’s fine that i had to turn the 100 hour rpg in my head into a 5-minute text adventure, because you know what? that text adventure that actually exists in the real world and that i can play right now is worth infinitely more than all the epic rpgs that i’d never get to make. i don’t have to wait until i become a Game Developer before i can make games, i can just… make games! right now! that thought it liberating and empowering to me, and it’s something i hope to convey with my tiny games. if i can do this, i’m sure other people can, too.
…ANYWAY to actually answer the question: yeah, i still have a bunch of details about those characters and the setting in my head! i don’t really have any plans to go back to them, but maybe someday…
I got the “stay up all night thinking” ending which, fair, but why?? Did I pick up and look at too many things?
ah, okay, so the ending is determined by which of the three dragons you prayed to in the living room table. there’s actually a logic to it, though it’s not actually mentioned in the game:
praying to orochi leads to “the ending that’s a little bit horny if you squint”. this is because orochi’s domain as a deity is “beginnings”, usually interpreted to mean “birth”… and also sex, by association.
meanwhile, jormungandr’s domain is “ends”. this is commonly taken to mean “death”, but can also simply be, say, the end of the day, so the ending you get from praying to her has the protagonist fall asleep right away.
finally, either praying to tiamat or not praying at all gives you the “stay up all night” ending, because after tiamat created the world she was like “whew that was a lot of work. time to take a break” and has done basically nothing since, leaving all the work for the other two. so while orochi and jormungandr do respond to the protagonist’s prayers, tiamat doesn’t because at that time she was probably taking a nap or eating chips or something.
well, there you go, some never-before-seen l’origine lore!
[Editor’s note: l’ore.]
