13rats

Just finished a short action/arcade/high-score game.

Inspired by the appropriation of African American culture in the witch house genre of electronic music. Fighting games/90's Capcom games take the place of trap music and action/arcade takes the place of electronic/house music. As a mixed race person, also growing up in the age of arcades, specifically the late 90′s early 00′s arcades where fighting games were popular, I have always been fascinated with the demographic of fighting game players. 

My experience of what games black people play have been mostly sports and Japanese games, and at the time, Capcom games. Most of the Capcom fighting games at the time had more representation of black people than other games at the time and some of the few non-sport avatar based games to feature playable black people.

I chose the Sergeant as the main character to allow players to play a somewhat disposable normally non-playable character as foreshadowing relating to the horror movie trope that the black character always dies first.

I stole all of the sprites from the Capcom Alien vs Predator arcade game.

I finished a game a minute ago called 100.

It was based on my friend James finishing 100 games. I thought the idea of his goal, while positive in the sense of exercise and not taking the medium of games so seriously, was a bit silly as a mode of producing relatively lengthy content compared to the length of production, so I made 100 games that only last 3 seconds.

Many of his games are “music video games” which feature music that he appropriates as soundtracks for his games. I commissioned my friend to make 100 3-second-songs to base my games off of.

My friend, Lillyan, is also a fan of my games that have been more “slice of life”, so in addition to basing each game off of a song, I first chose a photo that I took with my iPhone that I felt best related to the song title. I then based the mechanics of the game on the combination of music and image, adding additional illustrations. For example, many of my photos are of my cat Theo. :-)