Indie Side — Robots, Murder, and Emos
One of the fun things about writing this blog is that I get exposed to many different types of games. It’s a unique art form, and developers are able to do and say quite a bit with the resources that they have. It’s also one of the hardest to get into, but the results can absolutely be worth it.
Tomorrow Is My Birthday follows suit by taking us into a world filled with sentient robots, civil rights conflicts, bullying, and murder. Inspired heavily by emo themes, the game has a very distinct vibe that’s hard to find anywhere else. I can’t say that I’ve played a game quite like this before, but I’m glad that I have.
It’s a short play, but it’s a very worthwhile one. It sports multiple endings and a relatively calm, story-focused point and click style of gameplay. There are even supplementary blog posts to add additional context to the experience. I recommend giving it a go.
I sat down and talked with the developer, Rileylessthan9, about the development of the game and what went into some of the creative decisions.
The game has a unique psychedelic style to its visual presentation. What inspired this?
One thing I really like is flatness that feels really genuine. And I see this all the time in fan art from the early 2000s. This kind of art is often really flat. You can also see these imperfections. And you can see how far this person is with learning or their drawing skills. So when I see this fan art, it feels very genuine.
And I wanted this genuine unity, I think. Also to be seen in the game or make the game feel like that. That it doesn’t try to hide anything by its presentation. Because then I feel like I can really grab something when I see something like that. And this ties in with the photographs I’m using in there. Because these photographs are a drastic contrast to that. They’re very saturated. They are playing with light a lot.
I used an old camera for this, I think the camera is from 2004 or something. Because it’s a photo, it’s really on a 2D plane. And I think that contrast works really well at the end of the game. Because it’s also about trying to be genuine. But you can’t really be genuine, even if it’s your best friend. It’s this tension that you can also see between the two styles I used.
What led to the choice of the background images in the game? Did you choose the locations the pictures were taken in deliberately?
The background images are interesting. I didn’t have a plan at the beginning. I was just walking around in my hometown where I live. And also in a second place. And while I was walking around with a camera in my hands. If you also do this sometimes, you also know that when you have a camera in your hand and you walk around, you look at your surroundings very differently. I could feel it once when I was standing on a bridge that goes over a highway. It feels really different than anything else.
I got this idea of taking pictures for the game that are often dangerous. So in the game you sometimes walk next to a highway. So it’s really close to an accident. You sometimes walk over rails. You sometimes walk in high places where you can fall off easily. You sometimes walk through weird forest landscapes.
And also near water where you could drown. And I like that because it makes me feel more alive when I can see death. Because you can already feel that contrast. And it’s also talked about in the game with Bios, the robot who wants or plays with that actually. Because Bios feels most alive when it feels like its internal system is really unstable and sort of almost shutting down already.
What led you to go to the correction of making this a point and click adventure game?
I think these are the limitations of my knowledge. Because I’m not that well versed right now in coding. This was my first game I really coded for. I originally wanted to make a small 3D game where you just look at these two characters from above and you just control them into one direction.
While you’re doing that, you’re walking away and they talk to each other. Turns out it’s a bit more difficult to make a 3D game than a 2D game. So I just made this one and I think it really played out well. I think I could still tell the story I wanted to tell with this kind of setup as a point and click adventure.
The game implements themes of transhumanism through one of the main characters being a robot. How does this integrate with the overall themes of finding yourself as a person?
I’m realizing that this game has many contrasts. I think the transhumanistic aspect is something generally that interests me because you can display almost visually how finding yourself works in a way. You sometimes have stories where humans turn into angels or angels turn into humans or robots turn into humans. which is interesting on its own.
But I think if two people, like we have here a human and a robot, that contrasts each other constantly. You can have this dialogue between them. That is happening in the game and that is about either being an object or a subject. We have Petal, right? Spoiler alert, they killed someone and through killing someone, they think they can now finally take action on their own and be a subject and not be objectified anymore by people around them or bullying them. And Bios is completely different. Bios comes from a place where it got objectified because it’s a robot. But it doesn’t want to give up its robot identity in a way. It still wants to be an object, but it longs for the world and everything in it, also humans, to be an object.
I’ve been thinking still and it’s almost a year since the release of the game. So I don’t know because one thing that is interesting is when you want to be a subject or think everyone has to be a subject, you’ll run into a problem because oftentimes subjects build a hierarchy around them, where someone is more worthy than the other and you try to grow your worth in a way to prove yourself as a subject more and more. So there’s always this competition where objects don’t have that.
There’s heavy tones of running away and trying to find peace that tie into your description of the game as chemical. Would you be able to go into detail about these themes?
I think running away, this theme of running away, going away from something, fleeing, even, is something that was always on my mind. It was often on my mind when I was 15, 16. I was thinking often, well, what if I just leave this school, this village I was living in.
I was thinking about that a lot, but sometimes even fantasized, you know, sometimes even dreamed about it. But I never did it. And I wanted to try out, okay, what if I did it? Or what if I even killed someone, which I was also thinking about, but didn’t do it. What would happen then?
And I wanted to see that in the game, and I saw that, well, wouldn’t be that great. So I’m glad I didn’t do it. But it’s an interesting conversation to have if running away or just not confronting something is actually the solution. And I think this ties in with emo a little, because sometimes I have this with emo, with the emo mindset, you know what I’m saying, that you want to run away from something, maybe even from the world, because you think the world is bad.
So I need to build my own place somewhere. And I was like, oh, that’s something on my mind. And then finding out that you actually can’t run away from the world, even when you think it’s bad. Sort of resignation sets in. But you still feel like this world is bad.
So what happens then often is this feeling of weltschmerz, what settles in, which I also feel sometimes it’s a feeling of fragility. You feel fragile about the world and you feel fragile about yourself. So everything gets really emotional. Which goes into that, you know, being, I think now I’m just spilling words.
So you see in the game, right? There’s this, the way they talk, the way Petal talks with Bios, Bios talks with Petal, they use very big words to describe very little. They actually often talk about how they feel about themselves right now, actually how they’re feeling and how they feel about this friendship and what fears they have. But they use very big words. They almost try to be poetic.
I don’t think they do that because it’s artificial. I think they do that because they don’t know how to put their feelings into words in any other way. And I think this comes from this weltschmerz feeling that you feel so fragile about everything. That you can’t possibly just say, oh, I feel sad today because this just doesn’t describe how you’re feeling.
You need to use big words. And you see this world in this saturation, how the game displays it with its backgrounds. And you need to run away and you need to kill someone because it just seems like that this is the only thing you can do that is here for you, how you can survive. Which is a tragic aspect in the end of the game, that there wasn’t another option, probably.
You mentioned in some of your blog posts about the game that the themes of it are a reflection of your own experiences with friendship and bullying in school. Would you be able to go into more detail on this?
It’s a big theme in the game and it’s also something I experienced myself. It’s something I had on my mind a lot last year, this year still. And it’s, you know, I’ve seen many stories, I’ve read many stories where bullying is a topic. But often it’s talked about while it’s happening, while the bullying is being done by others, often to the protagonist. There aren’t many stories I feel like, maybe people who read this can correct me, where it’s talked about, okay, what happens with this person after the bullying? What happens now? I wanted to see that because, you know, the story, the game, starts when the bullying is over.
Because Petal did kill someone and has to leave. And I mean, that’s the sad situation I’m in right now too. I’m thinking about, okay, what this bullying does to me, is it still holding on to me? Am I still under its influence in some way? And what do I have to do to finish this chapter?
And in Tomorrow is My Birthday. This is a big theme. Petal thinks about, okay, is it now over? Is this bullying now over? Am I now free? They realize now I’m not, I’m actually not free yet. I have to do many, many other things. Or this is just the beginning of the end.
About the friendships: It’s something I circled back to — to my friendships during school. They were difficult. And I wasn’t good to them too. And I think I wanted to put this aspect into the game as well. But today I’m very grateful to have the friends I have right now. Very, very grateful. And I wanted them to be in the game in some way, because I wanted to have a game that makes me happy.
One friend, for example, made the music, one friend made the artwork, another friend did the voice acting. And they made it all great. I gave them a lot of freedom. I wanted them to have so much freedom so that I can feel them in the game.
And I can feel them a lot in the game. And they all did a great job. And it’s cool to see the main idea displayed in different ways, because I didn’t tell them actually what was happening in the game. I gave them maybe a short abstract of it. And they made these beautiful things that I’m really grateful for.
Do you have any other projects you’re working on that you’d like to highlight?
Yes, actually, I’m right now trying to bring Tomorrow is My Birthday to Steam, which I think is taking a while. It’s a weird process of posting selfies. You have to send a selfie of yourself with your passport. It’s really weird. And I was actually thinking now about another project, even though I wanted to take a break, but I’m thinking about writing a mobile phone novel that is made up with SMS. So there will be very short messages getting through to you. And the story will be told that way. I’m thinking about making it a little game. I can tell you the working title. The working title is The Boyfriend You Wished For.
