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Unite the people and ignite the revolution. As a hacker, make your mark in hundreds of moral choices. 3D Visual Novel Solace State is available today on Steam and Xbox!

You can pick up your own copy at:

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/928000/Solace_State_Emotional_Cyberpunk_Stories/
Xbox: https://www.xbox.com/en-IE/games/store/solace-state/9nr5h934436j

Remember, you’ll get to meet Torrent! Here’s his new social profile:
Solace State: Social Media profile for Torrent

 

Additionally, we will be doing a livestream later on launch date (Sept 14, 2023)!

olace State's characters Rebecka (left) and Chloe stand in front of a purple-lit staircase. Text says: Solace State available now, dev livestream & Q&A 3pm EST @ twitch.tv/vividfoundry

We’ll be streaming live on our Twitch channel at 3PM EST. Solace State devs will be doing a Q&A, sharing behind-the-scenes info, and chatting about the journey to launch! Join us at: https://www.twitch.tv/vividfoundry

[This post was originally posted on www.solacestate.com]

Solace State is a visual novel that requires a lot of testing, due to its complex narrative, custom 3D text-in-the-environment system, and trippy sci-fi camera transitions. Less than a week before the game’s release, Kas Millard shares the process.

Long time no see! With days until Solace State’s launch date on September 14, we are trying something new with reaching out to folks across social media and even to our mailing list. This includes trying Ghost, a mailing list publishing platform! Let us know what you think about our longform content in the form of these newsletters here, because a few of us on the team love writing and sharing behind-the-scenes content.

Solace State is a game about empowering friends and hacking the system of a hegemonic biotech conglomerate. It’s also a visual novel that doesn’t look like a visual novel. This is because the 3D text system and its trippy sci-fi camera transitions are custom-designed for the game. And this means that we have a lot to quality control and test for, especially for a small team!

Kas Millard (she/they) is Solace State’s QA Tester and has done some heavy lifting to make sure that everything from the right characters show up on screen to that the music gets played at the right volume! For a game with 38 endings, 31 fully illustrated characters, and over 200k words, this is no easy feat! Without any further ado, Kas shares their insights below about what makes QA so important for a game of this scale.

Enjoy,
Tanya Kan
Director & Exec Producer


Quality assurance is one of those things that tends to be misconstrued by those not familiar with the work. Every QA tester has, at some point or another, tried to explain their job to someone not in the industry and was inevitably met with the dreaded response of:

“Oh. So… you just play video games all day?”

We’re definitely playing more video games at work than your average nine-to-five, but that’s not saying much. It’s telling that one of the first things told to prospective game developers is, “Don’t go into game development unless you like looking at spreadsheets.” To some extent or another, that’s true. Game development and spreadsheets go together like peanut butter and jam. And that’s true of everything from budgeting to tracking bugs to even keeping our scripts well organised!

black Xbox controller in pink and blue lighting

QA is not one-size-fits-all

QA isn’t the sort of thing that is a one-size-fits-all solution. Each game studio will have different needs, as will each project, from company-specific protocols and policies to particularly egregious bugs that require testers to completely redefine the way they’ve been doing things. Working in quality assurance means adaptability. QA’s job isn’t to fix bugs, it’s to find and report them, so it’s important that we do our best to ensure that we do our best to work with the rest of the team and what they need from us. Working on Solace State was no different.

While some issues could be easily logged and reported to the team, other issues were not quite that simple. Sometimes issues only occurred under a very specific set of conditions, requiring a lengthy set of instructions on how to reproduce the issue. Occasionally, it even requires video footage of the issue happening in real-time! On occasion, a seemingly new issue would appear, only for it to be a previously-resolved bug that had reappeared elsewhere due to a change to the code. In those instances, it was important to find the old report and link it to the current issue so that the new fix didn’t accidentally undo the previous one.

Animated GIF shows in-game footage from Solace State. Chloe (left) and Torrent are in an elevator talking about Chloe's work as journalist, whereupon she has to make a choice to tell Torrent about how she knows her missing friend Rebecka. The camera swoops around the two characters while cutting in and out of the walls of the elevator.

An in-game gif of a choice that Chloe makes early on about finding her best friend Rebecka.

But Solace State is a visual novel that doesn’t look like a visual novel, and it also doesn’t have routes that completely branch off from the overarching city-wide conflicts and story arcs. With that came unique problems that required equally unique solutions.

When I first started working on Solace State, we were still a long way from what would end up as the final, shipped product. Much of what would end up in the final version of the game had yet to be implemented; from complete visual rehauls of Solace State’s original demo to massive story moments with choices that would affect the whole game. For instance, Sueli – who would quickly become one of my favourite characters – didn’t even have a finished romance route yet! So how do you test a game that isn’t even finished yet?

Solace State: Sueli and Chloe sitting on a park bench in front of a bush with white flowers. Sueli is a dark-skinned woman with natural, curly brown hair wearing a green cardigan and a white top. Chloe is a woman with brown hair that fades to blonde. Chloe says: For what it’s worth, then, I think Zircon Hill is lucky to have someone like you looking out for them. Text is shown with the OpenDyslexic font option.

Right from the beginning, Sueli was one of my favourite characters. This screenshot is shown with the OpenDyslexic font option.

Testing from big questions to small

Well, my first task was to test the basic functionality of the game – especially the core fundamentals that would require extensive fixing because they don’t work with certain inputs and impact the game regardless of the scene. This was the stage where we focused on making certain that anything that would come next would have a solid base to be built upon. It is so crucial to have testing early on because of this!

This was the time to be asking the big, important questions. Can the game run from start to finish? What happens if I press the button that the game wants me to? What happens if I pressed a button that the game didn’t want me to? That last part was my favourite.

QA often requires you to play the game like no one probably will, but what if someone does play like that and breaks the game? I remember one of the first bugs I discovered was when I repeatedly pressed the interact button while the game was starting up, players would skip over the main menu and immediately start a new game. Our Generalist Developer, Seamus Ly, would later ask me why I was pressing buttons when there was nothing on the screen, and I just laughed and said it was because I got bored while waiting for it to load and that players would likely feel the same.

Solace State: The settings menu contains multiple buttons and headers to enable or disable various features. Some settings included in the image are text speed (which is set to immediate), enable character highlight (which is set to pink), and film grain in flashbacks (which is enabled). Next to the menus is Alden Aldridge who is examining his cuticles with one hand on his hip.

The main menu of Solace State showcases the most important menus of the game. From here, players can create new games or load old saves as well as adjust their settings for a better gameplay experience.

From there, testing gradually became more specific. Was continuity maintained between scenes, especially when players made choices that altered the story? Did every aspect of every system work as intended? Were the intentional functions of those systems properly communicated to the player? Were those functions communicated well? If this was someone’s first-ever video game, would they know how to play it?

This was also the stage where new content was gradually getting added, which came with a twofold problem. First, all that new content would have to go through all the previous checks. Second, and perhaps most frustratingly, the solutions to the previous issues would have to be checked to ensure that they still worked with the addition of new code. This often meant that the issues we had long considered resolved would reappear once again.

Tracking issues

To help document all these issues, the dev team utilised a project management tool called Trello. With the help of developer Ryan Miller, the dev team adapted Trello plug-ins so when we experienced a bug in-game, we could export out our log debug files as well as a screenshot that would then be uploaded online.

Four columns, titled left to right: FPS drop issues, art assets lower priority, character outline, audio bugs. Each column has several small screenshots of Solace State, each image captioned with a bug, such as characters missing highlights when they are speaking.

Trello was a particularly useful service used by the dev team to help keep track of bugs, prioritise, and communicate with each other about bugs.

Think of the log debug file like a grocery list of code, with a full written list of things that happened while the game was running as well as any errors. This log debug file is custom written by our development team so that we get the information that we want. We could then look at all the reported issues from the team, and add in any missing details, additional notes, or things like video footage and more screenshots and put them into different categories for different developers to address. Sometimes there would be an issue with a character’s art, so those issues would be filed under the appropriate art category to be fixed by one of our artists. This keeps everything organised and helps to play to every developer’s strengths.

As these bugs and issues got patched out, they’d be sent out to be confirmed as fixed by quality assurance–that’s me!–who would run tests to see if the issue had been fully resolved. If they weren’t resolved, I would make note of how and where the issue was still persisting. On occasion, fixes would be correctly applied but sometimes they wouldn’t work on a practical level.

For instance, a character was too close to the camera in one scene, but the fix moved them too far back and now the perspective of the scene doesn’t work. Or, after making a change to an object, the object would go back to its default state… which happened in this hilarious-looking character art bug of the one and only Alden Aldridge himself.

Torrent and Chloe are sitting at a table with a red and white chequered table cloth. On the table is a white ceramic coffee cup and two copies of Alden Aldridge. He is a man with blonde hair and a white and purple floral suit and is the same height as the cup of coffee.

I don’t actually think additional context is needed for this one. (There are Alt Text for all the images in this article though!)

Scope and constraints on testing

Still, if issues couldn’t be fixed, whether this be because of technical restraints or time, we would have to sit down and consider a new approach. Then it was a matter of rinse and repeat. On paper, it doesn’t seem like too much work, but I think it’s important to remember just how much content Solace State contains.

Some estimates place the average length of a novel at around 50,000 words. If we’re just talking about what’s in the final, shipped version of Solace State at over 200,000 words, we’re looking at over four times that! That’s not counting the in-game codex (it’s a dictionary of names and terms), either! And all the additional documentation? The scripts? All the documents containing all the planning? Every single piece of writing that’s behind the final product? We’re probably looking at double even that number. That’s enough to be giving several multi-installment book series a run for their money. It all adds up very quickly.

For every page of content that ends up in the game, there’s easily three that didn’t and an additional five pages of documentation, planning, and drafts.

It’s very important to take that into consideration with game development. What may seem easy at first may not end up that way. That’s important for every member of the development team, and that was something I had to remind myself of when I was making suggestions to the team about features that just weren’t working in the final product. We had a small team, and that meant limited resources. If I discovered a problem, I would both have to consider how and why that problem occurred, as well as what the solution could be.

While the ideal fix for a problem might have been to rebuild the system from the ground up, sometimes there just isn’t the time or the manpower for that. It’s easy to think of what we could do if we had an infinite amount of time and just as much money, but it’s less easy to be aware of bugs on a technical scale while also managing player expectations, staying within budget, and also making certain members of the team can hit their respective deadlines.

So how can we fix the problem?

Well, let’s look at it a different way.

What is the problem? Is it a problem on a technical level? As in, is the problem actually one that is purely just based on code not working properly? Or is it a problem because it’s working as intended, it’s just that the intended function is unclear or otherwise not communicated well? Can we solve the problem by adding an additional line to the tutorial instead of completely redoing the entire section?

A bug. Chloe is standing in front of a conference room with glass walls. On the right side of the screen, her instant messages are open with a series of buttons reading flirt or be friendly three times.

This was a particularly fun issue to discover. Reloading a save with instant messaging choices could infinitely duplicate the choices. We later discovered that this affected all instant messages, leading characters to spam text the player if the player reloaded a save.

An intro on accessibility

Another thing I had to test for was accessibility, and accessibility is a much broader category than one would think. There’s the traditional accessibility that people tend to think of–audio, visual, and physical impairments–but there’s also accessibility in the sense of the base level requirements necessary for even able-bodied individuals to play comfortably.

This meant that accessibility checks ranged from checking for colour blindness friendly colours options to different fonts options for those with dyslexia to making menus autoscroll so players didn’t have to manually scroll every time. This was an extensive process, and it’s one that we look forward to talking about in a different blog post!

Solace State: The settings menu contains multiple buttons and headers to enable or disable various features. Some settings included in the image are text speed (which is set to immediate), enable character highlight (which is set to pink), and film grain in flashbacks (which is enabled). Next to the menus is Alden Aldridge who is examining his cuticles with one hand on his hip.

The settings menu underwent several revisions throughout the development process. As we added more features, we added more options to enable or disable them so each player can customise their gameplay experience to what works best for them.

Solace State is multiplatform, and that means taking the technical limitations of each platform into consideration, as well as each input method and the standards and expectations set by the average player on each platform.

In conclusion

So, yeah, as one of many crucial steps, we are playing games for a job. But we are also editing, we’re documenting with clear and technical language, and we’re providing the back-end support so that others can spend more time doing what they’re good at. For a project like Solace State, that’s a lot of work, but it’s work that needs to be done, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy doing it.

At the end of the day, game development is about picking and choosing your battles carefully.
Sometimes the easiest answer isn’t always the correct one, and sometimes the correct answer isn’t always the easiest one.

That doesn’t mean that the answer still doesn’t need to be found, and for anyone looking at working QA in games, I wish you nothing but the best of luck.

Kas Millard (she/they) is a Toronto-based game designer and freelance artist currently working as a QA tester and Social Media Manager on Solace State. You can see Kas’ website here.


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Solace State is a cyberpunk visual novel where you play the young hacker Chloe who confronts political plots as she fights for her friends and her neighbors. Your choices in building up relationships and communities can revolutionize into more or less freedoms.

Solace State is available NOW on Steam and Xbox! Please buy or wishlist today!

Solace State Tanya Kan and Gabi Kim Passos at GDC 2019

Solace State has seen both challenges and growth in 2019. We’ve also got a chock-full of pictures to share with you. Let’s celebrate our efforts from 2019 – from GDC, to Kinda Funny Games E3 showcase, to TCAF Comics x Games, and more!

Summer 2018 has been a season to remember for Solace State!

In May, Solace State brought on board Gabi (@UndeadOoze) working full-time as a programmer from May through the first week of June, then part time for the rest of the summer. We also worked with Silverstring Media (@Slvrstrng), narrative consultants, and Seage (@Seageart), 2D character artist, on contract throughout the last few  months. Everyone has been contributing their utmost; Our first ambitious milestone was to make a submission to Indie MEGABOOTH. Indie MEGABOOTH for PAX West is one of the most competitive pavillions in the world to apply to showcase indie games to excited consumers.

 

In June, we continued to polish this build, and by the last week of June, I travelled to Utrecht, Netherlands, for the INDIGO 2018 Expo on June 29, along with 40 other games. Run by the Dutch Game Garden, most of the games are by the Dutch, and some are from European developers; Solace State was the only one invited from North America. From the event, we connected with Utomik, had three pieces of press, and was selected by XGN.nl as one of four best-in-show games. Later in July, Utomik even followed up to connect with me to do a live-stream!

 

 

On July 13, less than two weeks after my Netherlands trip, I traveled to New York City with an updated build to Game Devs of Color Expo that took in some of the earlier feedback to improve on its choice mechanic. We had been periodically improving on the game build since it has had a lot of public exposure and concentrated feedback from local devs. I also did a talk about how Solace State became a social impact game (full stream here). Both the game and talk were well received, with Solace State mentioned on 7 publications and shows, including Kotaku, NPR, Polygon, and Intelligame Radio. It was shortly after this trip that I realized how much I need someone to help me on vlogging, video promotions of development, and marketing in general.

 

 

I received some timely feedback that my business and marketing plan are weak, which is actually a blessing because it coincides with my gut feeling about how I should structure my company and project. After consulting with Ryerson Transmedia Zone (TMZ) Mentors, TMZ teams such as Blackout, Paere, and Cherrydale, non-profit leaders, friends working at tech titans, and other published interactive digital media studio owners in Toronto, I refocused on sharpening the company’s vision to create an audience-community that encourages social healing and advocacy for marginalized stories.

 

 

The hard work paid off. In July I received a wonderfully surprising email: That I have been invited to participate at Indie MEGABOOTH. I will be showing the game with new build additions at PAX West, in Seattle on Aug 31 – Sept 1, at the smaller, more experimental pavillion Indie MEGABOOTH’s MINIBOOTH!

 

 

Please stay tuned! After PAX, we hope to keep building more content and perhaps even a vlog or two about my experiences travelling to show our new Solace State demos!

 

Peace and love,

Tanya Kan

 

GDC was such a whirlwind of experiences, inspirations, and constant learning. Learning came in many forms, whether they were in workshops, at chill-out lounges, at talks, in the Yerba Buena Gardens, at parties, at the expo, at luncheons, at roundtables, and more. It was cathartic to be surrounded by so many talented individuals from so many diverse backgrounds, and, because of that, I can only have room for improvement in my own craft. I think that it is so important to have people in the industry to look up to and also to approach and talk to about work and life. GDC is one of those places where that there will always be a diversity of people to share their insights and inspire others.

I would not have had the opportunity to attend GDC if it wasn’t for the generosity of the GDC 2015 Dames Making Games Scholarship and the sponsors which made it happen for our convoy. Thank you especially to our Convoy Partner, ID@XBOX, whose generosity helped support women developers who can travel to GDC for the first time. Sharing the GDC experience with so many diverse talents is incredible, and developers I’ve talked to have been very excited to hear about the initiatives to encourage more women and other minority groups into the games industry.

IGF 2015 with Nathan Vella

IGF 2015 with Nathan Vella (Capybara Games) hosting

 

I went into GDC with the mentality that I wish to experience a little of everything that the conference had to offer. I was successful on trying something different each day. On looking back, there could have been an additional networking strategy that I should have struck out with: To find developers and designers who did similar work with similar themes and tonality, so that I can inquire as to their failures and successes and perhaps even find a suitable mentor there. I think that I met a lot of diverse individuals at all stages of game development, from students to seasoned pros, but I should have been more proactive and forward-thinking in seeking out specifically narrative game developers. I think, should I go to Indiecade Festival this October (22-25), that should be one of my top reasons to make the trip.

Playstation booth at GDC Expo

Different folks will tell you different strategies of how to tackle your first GDC or major developer conference. Student guides will always say to go to events during the day and party till you drop at night. Veterans will tell you to skip the talks because they’re all in the GDC Vault anyways. Some will say that the expo is a see-once experience, but worth it for the swag.

Everyone buzzes about the parties, parties, parties, but there’s certainly no agreement as to which one is the “best party”. I personally like the ones where I can network and chat at normal volume without feeling rushed; Others like thumping dance parties where they can decompress the conference day away. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed dance as a practice, but my brain is one of those that finds it hard to switch off from networking, once I’ve got the ball rolling.

Resting my feet at Mild Rumpus, in the middle of a packed day of networking, learning, and chatting to other devs.

Resting my feet at Mild Rumpus, in the middle of a packed day of networking, learning, and chatting to other devs.

This is also what worked for me, which my boyfriend picked up on easily: “What is it that the pass really pays to get you into?” he asked me, “The talks, the workshops, the roundtables. Go to those. They’re in the Vault, yes, but the people who are there bothering to attend the presentation are those who share the same niche interests in game dev as you. And they’re the people that you need to talk to.” And the thing is, I’m the kind of person who feels really engaged with lectures. So I tested this theory on Thursday, Friday, and indeed, I felt like I connected very well with people who are also attracted into a certain specialized talk. As diverse as game-making can be, people at highly specific talks are attracted to the same concerns and questions that I have in my own career trajectory.

Since everyone likely has such a different experience of GDC, I will document my highlights:

Daniel Cook on Emotions of Game Design

  • Game Design Workshop, lead by Robin Hunicke (Funomena, thatgamecompany) in my section to iterate in design teams of six on a tabletop game that emphasizes Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics in a causal loop (MDA Framework). We learn how to tune our card game in an iterative feedback system that balances cooperation, betrayal, negotiation, and aesthetics. Slides are available from 2014 session here!
  • Design Bootcamp elective on Putting More Emotion into Play, where my favorite take-away is that design should evoke a “body loop”. It is the idea that there should be a direct emotion involved with game mechanics’ direct motion, so to encourage the player to remember and to be stimulated by gameplay actions. One of the most obvious loops is the feedback of delight in an “aha” moment, a really clear example of which is expressed by figuring out a puzzle. Daniel Cook (Spry Fox) lead the workshop and he has more articles here on experimenting on emotions in game design
Alexander Martin, Damian Sommer, Leisha Riddel, Taylor Bai-Woo and friends at Yerba Buena Gardens

Alexander Martin, Damian Sommer, Leisha Riddel, Taylor Bai-Woo and friends at Yerba Buena Gardens

 

  • Exchanging stories in the Yerba Buena Gardens with game dev friends from around the world, old and new

Paloma Dawkins presentation at Mild Rumpus GDC 2015

  • Chilling at the Mild Rumpus with friends and in awe of Paloma Dawkins’ presentation of her exploratory 3D game, Gardenarium. It’s so immensely dazzling, you should check it out here

Disasterpiece and Teddy Diefenbach's GDC 2015 musings + music

  • Keep Grooving: Teddy Diefenbach + Disasterpiece’s live scored “poetry slam” about gamedev life & musings was an experience with spiritual transcendence. It was beautifully tempered and a most engaging performance piece. Glad I got to see this live with so many great friends!

Unreal Engine booth at GDC 2015

  • Spending hours at the Epic Unreal expo booth talking about rendering distance field, procedural generation, and especially the new UMG UI system, or just generally about the Blueprint system in general. The support teams from Epic are just phenomenal. Then, spending hours at Intel Lounge also talking about Unreal. Haha!
  • Getting a perfect score on SpaceBro at Alt.Ctrl with developer @nkornek
Brittney Oberfeld, Gabby DaRienzo and Kara Stone at XBox Women in Games Award Luncheon

Brittney Oberfeld, Gabby DaRienzo and Kara Stone at XBox Women in Games Award Luncheon

 

  • Enjoyed Xbox Women in Gaming Awards Luncheon with fellow DMG convoy members, catching up with @stinkerfish over academic interests and meeting our ID@XBOX Convoy Partner Sponsor. The Xbox Luncheon highlights the achievements of women in gaming. Four female game development leaders – Colleen Macklin (Parsons School of Design, PETLab), Abby Lee (LXP of Microsoft Studios), Amy Robinson (EyeWire), Robin Hunicke (Funomena) – delivered incredibly personable and inspiring talks, an experience that I would not trade for anything: From the art of failure, to embracing difference, to prototyping often rather than just ruminate on ideas, to having the positive outlook to believing in others.

Never Alone Slide of Inupiat Cultural Values GDC 2015

 

  • Adventures in Storytelling: Telling the World’s Stories Through Games discusses the community collaboration that brought the indigeneous Inupiat representations in Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa) to culturally respective design. Creative director Sean Vesce and Writer Ishmael Hope shared the oral tradition which has a direct source back to the lineage of Elders, and how to transmit emotion and specificity of culture in game form. What particularly resonated with me was their tips on how to create partnerships: To build trust, mutual respect, and exist in a framework of equal power – that is, that game developers do not have all the answers, but must be better listeners to be better storytellers. E-Line Media worked directly with the Inupiat community and was gratified that Elders and community members supported the game.
Ken Seto, Lyndsey Gallant and Andy Smith at Tonga GDC 2015

Ken Seto, Lyndsey Gallant and Andy Smith at Tonga

 

  • Meeting up with fellow Canadian developers at the OMDC party and Tonga, the most stylish Tiki bar in town
  • Startup Accelerators Roundtable run by Execution Labs’ Cofounder Jason Della Rocca, which helped cement the idea that I am much more project-based currently in my career, and may be more suited currently to seek grants and publishers in the middle term.
  • Meetings for potential sound and musician collabs
  • Low Budget Indie Developers Roundtable run by Oded Sharon of Corbomite Games: Developers from all backgrounds and experience levels share their ideas of how to find coworkers, how to leverage social media and Kickstarter, and how to keep motivated
  • Date dinners and bonding time in North Beach, Union Square, Telegraph Hill, Japantown; The breaks were necessary and helped me reset my enterprising and networking energies

And, my goodness, I think I missed meeting up with at least 60% of friends that I wanted to see this trip. The week felt like it came and went so quickly! I’m so sorry. Next year? Next conference? We’ll have to have the opportunity to meet up again!

What astounds me about the whole trip is that I was able to connect with people, not just about work and games, but what makes them engaged about the world. I’ve talked to people I’ve never met previously about the flux of change in political states, I’ve listened to a conversation about military practices, I’ve exchanged style tips heartily, I’ve reminisced about our beginnings. That human connection between devs at every experience level and background is something that makes me so excited to be in the game development industry. I look forward to my own work, just as I look forward to new innovations from all of you!

Scar Tissue Narrative Interactive Story Video game presentation at Dames Making Games, Tanya Kan and Mikki Benaglia

While buried with other work obligations, I was really pleased to have the chance to work with some really talented people at this year’s TOJam 9, the largest game jam in Toronto. For the uninitiated, it means that participants in teams of their choosing have 48 hours the weekend of April 25 to 27 to create a game from start to finish. For TOJam, there was a great creative atmosphere of students, aficionados, and professional game developers all collaborating together. The point is to try something new, or work with a new team, to put together a playable prototype. If it doesn’t work, it’s okay! It’d still be a productive weekend of experimentation.

Platform art by Mikki Benaglia

We created a team with Eric Roberts as Programmer, Oskar Pruski as Composer/Sound Designer/Artist, Mikki Benaglia as Artist, and me, Tanya Kan as Designer/Writer/Artist. Because Eric Roberts has a lot of experience with 2D games, I was inspired to try my hand at designing a 2D game as well. He told me to stick with my strengths, which is writing and art direction, while I am simultaneously trying something new. I feel like this is a great advice for many jammers, especially for those, like myself, who have not played the designer/producer role under a jam’s time constraints. As such, I designed an interactive novel-platformer game hybrid, under Eric’s advice. The whole idea is that whatever one player goes through narratively will not be the same experience as another player’s, even if the number of platforms is static.

The story is about a superstar so stressed out by the pressures of her industry (and plastic surgery) that she skips in and out of time, and creates disarray of her “private” life as a result. The narrative itself has been living with me for some time. It first inception was in my little Twine experiment, Sound is a Spectrum, which is playable (but narratively incomplete) on this site.

Scar Tissue Interactive Game spreadsheet preview of dialogue

As also recommended by TOJam organizers, we came prepared with a list of programming priorities. I also created a spreadsheet of all of the game writing/dialogue and corresponding art assets. I created a Grooveshark playlist of the atmosphere that I was trying to set. On Google Drive, I defined the look of the game with reference images with consultation with Mikki, and then we all tried out these experiments at the jam itself! Eric went with an engine structured around 2D called Godot, currently in beta, as he wanted to test drive it at the jam.

Jam version of the game is available for download on itch.io, but is unfinished:
Scar Tissue as created at TOJam in Godot, programmed by Eric Roberts, designed by Tanya Kan

After the jam, I realized that I quite like the idea behind the game as a free release. As such, Mikki and I have continued to adapt the game. We changed the game engine from Godot to Unity, even though the languages are not compatible, because I am trying my hand at programming for the first time. I went with Unity because I really like the documentation and community that Unity has to address most of my questions, and I know that the Engine is flexible around the development needs of my future games. It was definitely an interesting learning curve to say the least, but not as much of an uphill climb as I feared! The other part is also that I can ask silly, simple questions of my Toronto friends about programming.

 

ScarTissue_Prev02

ScarTissue_Prev09

Now, for this new version, we have a lot more art assets to augment the story. Each platform is meant to have a different visual design to hint at the story inside each of its collectable dialogue boxes. Mikki designed and illustrated about 2/3rds of the platforms and they inspire me to have better design for those that I am in charge of! We tightened the art style so that it is more unified in the fashion illustration meets Dadaist hybrid. I am also playing around with the inclusion of some harder-to-reach platforms so that we get more narrative variety, and have some great friends to help out with the programming side!

ST_DMG_01_sm

Mikki and I were very kindly invited to present our game at Dames Making Games Speaker Social, where we shared some of our design considerations! It was a fantastic experience, where we received positive and constructive feedback. Thank you DMG and Bento Miso! Here’s the unabridged Powerpoint slides if anyone’s curious.

Update 2015: Scar Tissue is currently on hiatus.

My review on the indie game, To the Moon, created by Kan Gao, has been published on Indie Game Reviewer. Click here to read! “The game is more than a sum of its parts, but really teases at the fringes of our personal philosophies on the subconscious mind and emotions, of how it affects our personal identities and understanding of reality.” I gave it 4.5/5 stars.

In hindsight, I had a lot of fun new experiences in the last month and a half. This was despite my developing minor but chronic medical complexities since January of this year that lend itself to a whole host of stresses. Two months and a few days ago, I joined EVE Online after very inconsistent or indirect gaming experiences for years and years, such as logging into MUDs for socializing with old friends (that’s text-based multi-user dungeon for you folks playing Crysis on Ultra mode) and watching my boyfriend play his PS3 titles.

In fact, I knew what I was getting into when I was joining EVE Online. I had meant to play the game because I was thrilled by its portended difficulty. Also, less than two months after establishing my account, I would’ve completed a 45 page essay on EVE Online’s game interface and interactivity towards my degree in Cinema Studies. This was a few weeks ago. Now, looking back, the ache of the stress over academic pressures and the debilitating lack of self-confidence had faded almost into nothingness. Not just for this one paper, or this one class, but now I look back over the course of the last year and I think to myself: Wow, I did that. With the guidance and the kindness of many people, I have played hard and I have worked hard.

I had read a lot of articles about EVE before ever starting out on a trial account. Thus, on the thirteenth day, I was gutsy enough to be the last writer to meet the deadline for the 17th Blog Banter presented by CrazyKinux, where each of the eighty participants addressed the topic of how women have engaged with EVE Online, and how EVE Online ought to engage them in turn. With my modest knowledge amounting to an entry of nearly 3,000 words, and where other players may have far more in-game experience and astute writing background than I, CrazyKinux must’ve had his work cut out for him! Somehow, I have managed to find myself in his top ten winner’s list. My heart skipped a beat and butterflies (or frigates!) tickled my stomach when I read his announcement of the winning entries:

  1. The Ghost Report: Eve Blog Banter: The Girls Who Fly Spaceships
  2. “Prove It”: Women In EvE
  3. Blog Banter #17 – Women in Eve
  4. The Ladies of New Eden (An Analysis on How Men are not from Mars, & Women are not from Venus)
  5. Cloaked and Watching You: The Ladies of New Eden
  6. Space Broker: Gal-Ristas!
  7. Tech 2 stilettos
  8. It’s a woman’s world (they just don’t know it yet!)
  9. Ladies of New Eden
  10. Lady Vengeance, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pew-Pew

And a list of recommended reads:

CrazyKinux pronounced that it was near impossible for him to designate who is actually ranked #1, and whom #10, because of the complexity and expansive style and content of all entries. Regardless of where I am placed, I am honoured to be mentioned at all in the 10th spot, on the same list as the talented individuals above me. There is much that I would like to learn from the diversity of style, humor and experience that these and other entries exemplify. The lovely thing is that creative activities such as this generate continual discussion, from forums to TeamSpeak to commenting on other blogs, and are furthermore written by individuals of differentiated interests and backgrounds. After all, I take the attitude that games do matter, even when actions taken within it appear to only affect a self-sustaining alternate universe, with a certain set of rules and premises for conventional behavior. Indeed, they help us build connections between peoples and ideas, both in mundane and exceptional actions in our lives.

The sudden flurry of shared experiences within a game community must be one of the most unpredictable and satisfying things to be engaged with. When it’s a game that’s as prolific as EVE Online, with in-game politics as well as fan-made blogs, guides, databases, and creative media, these vast networks of internet media become the overall EVE Online identity to those who are familiar with the game as well as those who are not. Case in point, this very blog post is part of a network of 79 other blog posts responding to CrazyKinux’s EVE Blog Banter contest on the Ladies of New Eden. The questions posed to all blog participants are as follows:

What could CCP Games do to attract and maintain a higher percentage of women to the game. Will Incarna do the trick? Can anything else be done in the mean time? Can we the players do our part to share the game we love with our counterparts, with our sisters or daughters, with the Ladies in our lives? What could be added to the game to make it more attractive to them? Should anything be changed? Is the game at fault, or its player base to blame?

Despite the immense pools of existing talent, I will still consider that the low female demographic in the game is a loss to the diversity of opinion and politics within the game (Oops! Rather daring of me to say so, huh, right after citing CrazyKinux’s extremely diverse blog banter! My faux pas). Working towards drawing more female players will further diversify the careers and tactics that are at the disposal of all players, and experimentation amongst players itself may bring about new careers. I must stress that this is not an essentialist argument that says that women seek entertainment in fundamentally different things, and thus attempting to gain female gamers would completely eradicate all that EVE stands for. Rather, I would argue that women can be thoroughly engaged by the interplay between entertainment and creativity, leisure and competition that EVE has. But the devil’s in the details, so I will discuss some mechanisms that will enhance the game’s experience, rather than reform it.

And, despite the funhouse mixing of movie titles in my header, you may be able to tell already that the tone of this blog post is gently didactical. However, I also hope that it engages with my personal anecdotes and observations as a female gamer. Although theoretical at times, I hope that you get something out of my writing and continue this seasonal conversation. Feel free to jump around to different sections of the blog post, as the first few lines in each section should be fairly self-explanatory.

Personal attachments: I started playing just thirteen days ago. But I had been immersed for a couple of months before in the fan-made and CCP-made videos through Youtube, and browsing through the wikis to get a glimpse into the scope of the game. There was something that seemed different about the level of commitment that EVE Online machinima compared to that of other videogames: its nitty-gritty level of social and political negotiations and maneuvers between real players had me at the edge of my seat. I held out for a bit, and then curiosity got the better of me.

One of those tipping points was my gradual awareness of how much creative and technical writing has had built up the world of EVE Online. As a budding roleplayer and creative writer, having a community and developer interested in the lore of the world is a huge selling point to me. A hearty narrative also simultaneously functions as respite and as motivation in most games. I was not disappointed when I started my first days as a capsuleer: early career quests already cited the Caldari-Gallente conflict in its pre-written dialogue, while folks on public channels kept recommending me to sites within the broader EVE community.

The second selling point for me was that I heard how challenging it was, by just the game mechanics itself. I had always wanted for something unconventional and tactical, and it delivered in spades. Within hours, I became really enthusiastic about the ingenuity of the click-to-fly system rather than wobbling about in space by pressing the arrow keys. Of course, it allows a whole variety of fittings for items that can be specialized towards certain tactics based on distance and speed. Furthermore, it allows me to think of what I want to do with all that adrenaline at the moment of engagement. I can plan, coordinate, follow orders, remonstrate and call for diplomacy with my enemy. What a maddening mess it’d be if blob battles contained tens of thousands of ships that veer in all sorts of direction and can’t calibrate their distances and speeds for the optimal damage and tanking? The lucid number of menus only made it more immersive for me – as though I was simultaneously in the field of battle and engaging in combat remotely. The screen itself was the world of reality, and it was a good, strong feeling to be had.

Of clothing and of creed: I’m going to get momentarily philosophical here (posthumanist, if you were wondering). Perhaps not everyone is comfortable with the experience of associating deeply with machines. In my case, I feel materially connected to the screen as though they are my eyes, looking out towards the ship that I own, as though I am controlling it remotely from hundreds of thousands of light years away. In a way then, the screen of my eyes is traveling at superluminal speeds to give me information to react to so quickly. At the same time, I am interactively associated with the hidden character within my pod, which obtusely only becomes visible to another set of eyes – my enemy’s – when I get podded. Perhaps this invisible body is something that is more uncomfortable to women than to men, because women are asked to reify their bodies all the time, and their bodies are inscribed with extra meaning many times over. Because of this, women may be more ambivalent about relating to technologies than men, who has had a historical comfort, if not hegemony, in interacting with technological apparatuses. But I will not pursue this line of inquiry any further, for it does not productively give us an understanding of what should be accomplished to bring more female players aboard EVE Online, but only gives a hypothesis of why females may have been avoiding it at a subconscious level.

Neither do I want to jump immediately into the disposition that Incarna will draw more women gamers because of increased customization and fashion and having a body, without a broader framework to support this argument. I’m rather skeptical of stereotyped values. The above opinion is rather frivolous without basis, because there are undoubtedly female gamers who do care less about fashion and socialization, and this opinion is unproductive as to the broader type of innovation that CCP should bring to EVE while allowing it to remain quintessentially the same product that we love. Like the idea of it or not, Incarna shall come to be implemented in EVE Online. The question becomes, what sort of supportive infrastructure both in-game and within the internet community can help EVE flourish in a way that attracts productive and diverse women gamers?

I have no notions that there needs to be equal representation by people of different race, creed, gender, and religion in EVE. Not only is that an impossible ideal for any game, but it is also a fairly useless one to aim for. Difference will never be measured in equal numbers. Rather, what I am interested in is the diversification in ideas, of subjective intuitions that are as differentiated as our real life experiences. This generates discussions and tactics as never before, because the discourse of differences intermingled together creates simultaneously inclusion and dissimilarity. Women may very well respond and enact competition much more differently than men. Having more women in no way makes the game more ‘balanced’ – but in fact it will unsettle and make outcomes more unpredictable than ever. The existing EVE community would have to take on new negotiations and schemes to meet the expectations of their female corp-mates and enemies. Is that not thrilling? The EVE community has always touted itself to be the most difficult of all games, so I hope that it is not just hot air when it comes to treading readily into unknown territory of differentiated engagement.

There is a Ph.D. of Economics on the CCP staff who makes quarterly reports on EVE’s virtual economies. Blogs discuss whether corporations in EVE are realistic to real-life corporations, if they are business partnerships, or even the feudal hierarchal model. These characteristics are not necessarily fundamentally more impressive to men than they are to women. Similarly, investing strategically in multiple regional markets in New Eden is not intrinsically less creative than manufacturing outfits for Incarna. The main difference, I contend, is in the form of the competition. The markets may be measured by your margin of profit for your success, but the thrill of fashion design remains a more subjective competition.

Must we always compete?: So we’ve just entered the heart of my argument, which claims that the corporate mentality of competitive capitalism in EVE Online is a very masculine enterprise. That’s not to say that women can’t get into it because it’s masculine, but it is associated with the industrial military complex writ in large has historically privileged a masculine ideal first, and had been sustained by it. So, female players, who are aware that there is a certain masculine association with the art of war and the industrious stockpiling for war, may find themselves putting EVE Online down onto the “maybe I’ll join later” list.

There’s a multivariate solution to this:

  1. Create a niche economy that has nothing to do with competition and military strategies, not even like mining. This can include developing for stations, entertainment and fashion, for planetary interaction and other things that are not measured by strength but by a more subjective measure of trend-based products.
  2. Advertise discussions, creative writing, and media creativity by the developers and fans alike across multiple platforms.
  3. Integrating forums as a space of discourse within the game client itself with more streamlined functionality than through the in-game browser. Include methods of following and subscribing threads and PMing specific players within and outside of the game client, and by removing the word limit if possible. Make it easier to read for an extended period of time with white on dark or dark on white text and background (not grays). CCP may have been working already towards the direction that I am thinking of, with EVE gate in the next expansion to facilitate the networking aspect.
  4. Advertise different career paths beyond mining and combat (I’m looking at you, you gorgeous Butterfly Effect trailer, as much as I adore you) on Youtube and other sites heavily frequented by gamers.
  5. Install more mechanisms for group engagement such as a directory for public channels, an easier-to-read channel window, and more streamlined function and less lag for having text conversations through this medium.
  6. Incarna as the means to facilitate casual engagement, rather than necessarily focusing on dress and customization, but more as a smooth-running, chill-out zone.
  7. Promoting the crafting aspects as tied to its narrative aspects and roleplay potential.

In the next section, I shall detail some of the threads of thought of one of my broader suggestions from this list.

Planetary Folksperson Interaction and other curious inspections: Remember that there is something that is expanding the EVE Online world before Incarna, and may change the interaction of exploration yet again? Planetary interaction may also draw more girl gamers who have always wanted to fly somewhere to explore new planets and go into low orbit to observe curious new species and cultures, rather than rocks and ships.

Has anyone played the single-player PC game entitled Black and White? Maybe there’s something that can be taken from the page of that very unique game, and one line from the Sim City franchise. How are the people on planetside going to react to a capsuleer whose body is immortal, and takes their natural resources? Should they get a cut to keep them happy? Would they work more to your benefit if you pay for using such resources, or will they be militant in their labor demands? Are they religious? Should you institute a religion to keep them in line, or to aid them in a network of shared faith with other planets and societies? Can you learn trades from the peoplefolk towards working in Incarna space stations? Where else am I supposed to know to distinguish the mind-altering boosters from the girly cocktails? The Servant Sisters of EVE epic arc really didn’t go into that particular detail…

Speaking of exploring mysterious things, what if wormholes were more tied into the canon of storylines and mission running, even with the threat of that space closing up? Planetary interaction as also not neatly fitting into the calculus of pure profit margins, but also depends on your politics and ideology. Maybe ganking in lowsec does not fit into the same moral framework as indentured labour of a whole planet or dealing with pollution spillovers, since the capsuleer you’re ganking is immortal, anyhow. Maybe it doesn’t. Whatever the reason, it offers broader play styles and choices that may not be directly reducible down to military superiority or profit margin.

The naiveté of MMOs: MMOs are still in some ways in their infancy, and the visual MMOs that we associate with today have only had slightly over a decade of innovating the styles and gameplay that we’ve become familiar with. A lot of us still chose our games based on social aspects. This is a positive thing. The less positive would be that more casual players are more likely to chose games that appear social, such as upon a networking site like Facebook, or due to their popularity, or because they have great avatar customization. The latter especially shows how easy it is to slip into the trap of thinking that a game has a great community because no two avatars look alike, and therefore everyone can retain their individualism and let their personality burst forth.

Genre is also a deal-breaker for some, but at the end of the day, genre is not nearly so important as gameplay and the social experience that you get out of playing an MMORPG. If you don’t look after the truly social aspects of your game experience as the one that you feel is the most satisfying, why bother with an MMORPG at all? A console single-player would likely have better graphics and better immersion. I am no sci-fi buff, but I like it enough that it is a truer fantasy for me to fly a spaceship than to be a night-elf. But if there is no such thing as corporations and the institutionalized potential for meeting like-minded capsuleers, I may have very well let my trial time run dry without subscription.

The primary way to solve this would be through diverse marketing, and to let the game players mature in their viewing and interactive strategies. It’s comparable to the advent of film, in a way, that audiences will grow to be more sophisticated over time. Encouraging EVE’s player base to continually generate more EVE-related content can only bolster the interactive strategies that potential new players may come across, and take time to immerse him or herself in.

Diversification, or: It only does everything: CCP has been working towards the direction of inclusivity all along, but never at the behest of its original world. With Dust 514, the FPS players and those that want to joystick their ships will get their taste of on-the-ground battles, they way they like it the most. But it is more than just profiting from the market for CCP: it is tooted to add a whole new dimension the beautifully coordinated sandbox that we love so much of EVE. Dust is like a direct response to the Halo machinima Red vs. Blue, where the soldiers don’t know their own backstory and their own origins. FPS fighting in the sandbox (an FPS/MMO hybrid), tied to EVE Online, certainly expands the range of impact as well as the lore of the world, connecting many diverse forms of leisure and entertainment together.

As you can see, I’ve moved away from the paternalistic notion of “how can we market this towards the girlies” to “how can we diversify and enhance what is already at the heart of EVE’s characteristics”. Maybe with all this diversification, we’ll see a new class of ladies who are the ones to establish themselves in null-sec while sending their boyfriends into the plucky battlefields of Dust 514. Here’s to seeing things flourish.

Please take a look at some of the other entries in Crazy Kinux’s Blog Banter!:

Sorry, No Pink Spaceships Here Please
EVE Blog Banter: Chicks ‘N Ships
The Girls who Fly Spaceships
Is eve a man’s world? – blog banter
Blog Banter #17: The Ladies of New Eden
CK’s Blog Banter #17: What women want…
Blog Banter 17 – The Female of the Species

My follow-up to this topic into my third week of the game is available here. The post is entitled “Lady Vengeance returns: A roundtable about women at EVE University.”

Contest results: I am happy to announce that my entry is part of the top ten award winners of CrazyKinux’s 17th Blog Banter. Results were posted on his site on June 14, 2010, and can be viewed here.

Good luck to all entrants, and thank you for reading.

Best Regards,

Marceline Nantakarn