Violet Fairy’s hopeful games have tactile, experiential mechanics
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.
Violet has two games in the Queer Games Bundle: Every Letter, a mechanical typewriting game; and Autumn Wish, a short proof of concept for a neat magic system starring two really charming main characters. She is inspired by anime and the idea of making players have meaningful emotional responses. (And she wanted to make a keyboard, but “worse.”)
How long have you been making games?
I’ve been releasing games for 4 years now, though I spent a lot of summers as a kid making up board games on loose sheets of paper.
What tools do you like to use?
I like using Unity for my games. I also make a lot of assets in Audacity and a pretty old version of Photoshop.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I love making games about hope, the importance of bonds between people, and being queer. My friends have played a huge role in helping me become who I want to be and have given me a community as an artist and as a queer person, so I think those feelings tend to work their way into most of my projects.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
My favorite part of making games is seeing everything come together to meet an experience goal. It’s hard work designing a game to evoke a specific emotional response, so when you test it and see the player connect to the feelings you put into the game, it’s so wonderful and satisfying.
My least favorite part though has be just how long it takes to make a game. There are so many pieces to a game, and each one takes so much time, so sometimes it feels pretty daunting knowing that one polished project might take months to finish.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
I’ve been enjoying Yume Nikki lately! I love the dream like feeling of it, and I love the sense that the imagery is important even if you don’t know it represents. I’d love to try to make something with that feeling sometime.
Autumn Wish is an adventure game with a neat magic mechanic. What inspired you to make it?
I was inspired by some of my favorite shows like Little Witch Academia, The Owl House, and Cardcaptor Sakura. I also knew I wanted to make a larger rpg involving Fen and Celia at some point, so I thought Autumn Wish would be a great way to practice writing the characters and test out some game design ideas.
I love these two. Will we see more of them and their world at some point?
Oh absolutely! Autumn Wish was essentially a proof of concept for a much bigger rpg I’ll make when I can. So even if it’s not for a while, look forward to Celia, Fen, and some new friends having an adventure at magical summer camp!
The magic grid is really cool. How did you come up with that?
Aw, thank you! I got the idea a few years ago when I saw someone unlocking their phone. It was one of those lock screens where you draw a pattern on a 3x3 grid of buttons, and I thought, “That symbol would totally be the symbol for a lightning spell. Wait, I could use this!” So then I held onto the idea and eventually found a home for it in Autumn Wish!
Just a couple about Every Letter, too. It’s a beautiful letter writing game inspired by (but not requiring!) Violet Evergarden. Why did you want to make it?
I actually wanted to make Every Letter as a smaller project after having worked so hard on Autumn Wish, though I still ended up spending a long time polishing it. Violet Evergarden is my favorite anime and means a lot to me personally. I thought it would be interesting to put the heartfelt letter writing from the anime into the medium of games and try to convey some of the feelings that Violet Evergarden gave me.
I loved the typewriter mechanic. What was it like to design and implement that?
Oh my gosh, I had to watch so many reference videos of typewriters! To me the game was always “a typewriter game,” so it was important to me that players felt like they were using a typewriter, not just typing. To make it feel different, I thought it was important to capture the restrictions of a typewriter, like not being able to easily erase, and needing to manually start each new line. I like joking that I spent months making a keyboard worse. Although my initial focus was on realism, and I was very glad when I realized that those restrictions made the gameplay feel much more interesting than ordinary typing.
