kati's blog

Hi! I'm Kati and I'm an artist working on an indie game called Heartsore. It's an platformer about a doodle trying to survive a heartbroken emo tweens' burning notebook. At our recent playtest, we had one of our participants ask us "how did you even come up with this idea?" I thought it'd be fun to try and answer this! Low and behold a little recap of our process, my thoughts and struggles along with a personalized list of tips.

Narrowing down

A good way to avoid getting ahead of yourself is to set limits. Thankfully this was already assigned for us since we had to choose a classic game to base our mechanics on. This is also a great way to avoid scope creep. (We were not going to complete a multiplayer MMORPG in a semester.) The game we chose was Donkey Kong. The next step was finding out our twist.

Let loose at the brainstorming session

There is no such thing as a bad idea! The weirder the better. We were trying to think of reasons why a character would be climbing up. What is a compelling goal? I thought of a mountain goat wanting to lick salt, others heard this and thought it could be a demon goat climbing out of hell. Another artist made a moodboard for something mixed media, where you could be escaping from an artists' sketchbook.

What makes us excited?

We kept going back to ideas about hell, running from flames, quirky demon characters, and emo sketchbooks and cringy quotes like "She believed" and various emo song lyrics. The more we found ourselves going back to certain ideas, the more we knew that we should hold onto them. One thing I had to actively learn throughout this process is that the game is our project. I had to remind myself that for this project to succeed I needed to not get too attached to certain ideas. You are all contributing, you are basically raising a baby together. Things will constantly change even after ideation. The concept art to final version curse is real... (pictured below.) Sometimes things will be so cool and fun in theory, but changes need to be made to make them actually work in practice. This is ok! It happens to every big project, and probably will in yours as well.

Any-whoo, back to feeling excitement. We all seemed rather on board to make something endearingly cringy. Something nostalgic to a lot of us. This became the essence of our game. vv

If it resonates with you, it will reach others as well

I guess it goes without saying that if you don't care about your own game, it's hard to understand why it might be compelling to others. Especially for small projects like these I think it's crucial to feel excited about your premise. As Ke$ha said in her TED Talk, The Alchemy of Pop, "you can write a song and not tell the truth, but your song will suck." Your passion has to be honest. If all six of us in our team feel like we are on board, our game will (hopefully) be the most authentically cringy and honest as it gets.

To conclude

Here's my personalized + concise list of tips for game ideation:

Have limits, be realistic for your budget and timeframe

Write down every idea

Don't be afraid to get weird

Don't get too attached: It's not my baby, it's our baby

Be honest: would Ke$ha approve?

i hate that it works so well in keeping me away from anything else. thinking, doing, experiencing, or creating… SOMETIMES i get a thought provoking video and it gets a train going… but is the one good tiktok worth the others? i’ll just scroll onwards after i’m done and derail that train just as quickly as it started.

i don’t have enough self control to consume short form content in moderation. by design they DON’T want me to consume in moderation.

i feel my humanity as an artist being stripped from me when i see that the best way to get noticed is to create short form content about my art. does it get better? was it ever better? on instagram i used to be able to scroll on the hashtags and see recent posts from small artists and now it only features top posts. now it feels you must only rely on chance to be heard, an algorithm that is not fully understood.

you have to stand out to be successful. create something that people want. follow the trends. sometimes i feel like all they want me to be is a robot. generating content. to turn my brain into a mass production factory and to get what in return?

where is the place for art in all of this? for community? connection? is it bad if i cannot bare to keep up? i feel a bit insane when i see tips on how to blow up as an artist on instagram. it feels wrong

I feel as though tween culture as its own thing has died down. With a dwindling of 3rd spaces in general, and in particular online (the death of flash, and virtual worlds being far to none), its no wonder I see tweens sharing my online spaces, fashion, and lingo.

I can’t help but feel there is a rush to grow up because of the lack of representation of your own age group. Harmful expectations, habits, and or experiences can arise from younger teens and kids in older spaces - like feeling as though you need an anti-aging skin care routine when you aren’t even 13 yet.

On another note, reading comprehension has lowered in tweens over the past years. More students feel as though they are memorizing the shape of words instead of actually being able to read and write them using the way letters sound.

For my final project, I wanted to conceptualize a digital space to help revive Tween Culture while also being a productive space.

POTTERY PLANET!

It is an MMO mobile game with a separate "forum" space! In this silly world, you are a lost soul who inhabits clay figurines named "Quarks". You explore the vast corners of a potter's home, meeting other souls and uncovering mysteries. A LINK TO MY ORIGINAL PITCH

Customization

With three default body types and freedom to glaze your Quark different patterns and colors, Pottery Planet hopes to grant a diverse and whimsical outlet for self expression. You can find and collect wearable items such as sticks, doll clothes, sunglasses, masks and more! Your Quarks will also be able to customize their own shelf and invite others over!

Gameplay

Virtual worlds in the way that I played them in the early 2000s don’t translate well into a mobile format - not many tweens sit by the family computer anymore with a mouse and keyboard in front of them. Thus, instead of a game where you point and click, you can move around through a 3D space.

Reminiscent moving around in the game Sky:COTL, shown above.

Pottery Planet, like all virtual worlds before it will have emotes to non-verbally communicate with other players. Happiness, sorrow, anger, surprise... Dancing, singing, sitting... Things we all feel and do.

Semiotics

With making a digital platform, I originally wanted to build upon the tween aesthetics of the early 2000s. "Curly girly" is one that I grew up with.

Ornate, playful, silly & frilly aesthetics marketed at young girls. The 1990s 'Groovival' aesthetic is a big influence here, along with the popularity of 'Diva' motifs, 2000s celebrity & pop culture, and some of the aspirational wealth/fame popular in McBling.

While fun and nostalgic for me, I recognize that it would feel welcoming for a wide range of tweens as it presents quite "girly"; curly girly is feminine in its associations.

I wanted to create a "gender-neutral" environment while keeping the same playfulness. A big rowdy, a bit edgy, but also surreal and playful. As the game's story and characters are made from clay, I was inspired by Godeliene de Rosamel's ceramics.

Ghost & friends / Ceramics - g de rosamel

Godeleine de Rosamel's ceramics have a sense of softness, innocence, and childlike wonder; she imagines her forms adventuring in a human-less utopia free of "politics, gender, and suffering," but still relates the works to the modern world's devastating impacts on biodiversity.

I added my own twists, of course. Adding a pop of color - I wanted to enhance the mischievousness with a "spooky color palette" to make the game feel a bit more rowdy and edgy. I also kept some of the curliness from curly girly for self-indulgent reasons. Pottery Planet was a working title that just stuck. (Alliteration has my heart.) So it was only fitting that the little characters were named after quarks as we already had a spacey/sciencey tone happening.

Balancing between Educational and Fun

This was where I felt like I needed to tread carefully. I remember feeling disdain over games or programs made "for me" as a tween that shoved learning down my throat. Even if they were fun, I was never particularly fond of them enough to regularly jump back in.

This is why I implement phonics as a more passive form of learning in Pottery Planet - Some minigames that award well with cool in-game items and or currencies were one of my ideas, of course, paired with non-phonics-related games. Another idea I had was to create little sound files that play when you enter a new area that sounds out its title, as it falls in, phonetically. "Kuh" as the k falls in, followed by "-itchen" for example. Perhaps it could even be a quirk that quarks have? The point being, I don't want it to be too on the nose that its overwhelming. The game should, first and foremost, be an enjoyable space - with captivating stories, fun games, and a platform for self-expression. This would be at the forefront of development. The main questline should be accessible to all players to ensure that the game IS enjoyable. No pay to play a main attraction. I was inspired by Club Penguin's spy missions and I especially enjoyed how the pacing was up to the player. No wait times necessary.

Something I didn’t mention during the pitch, but did spend time thinking about was...

Monetization

There have been horror stories. Yes. I think about Facebook minigames and children essentially becoming "whales" with their parent's credit cards. Club Penguin membership getting rid of minigame levels previously accessible to non-members... The list goes on. I don't want to do that, but realistically - what can we do instead? I think about Roblox when they still had tix. The player can play games and have similar experiences on the platform while still being able to gain in-game currency without spending a cent! All they had to do was log in daily to claim "tix"! It was slow enough that there was the incentive to spend, ask for as a birthday present, and such - but fast enough to actually be a viable option.

If it were truly up to me, I wouldn't at all charge. Though knowing the amount of work and time to keep up the game... especially large scale? It's not quite realistic, sadly. Anything is possible, right? Without the right amount of resources put into moderating; however, it could turn into the opposite of a safe space quite easily. I'd hope for this game to be a labor of love and genuinely a safe space for kids and tweens alike.

Forum

Hey! Let's not forget to talk about the Forum! What's this?

While also being a method of communication between the players and the developers, I wanted the app to also be accessible to tweens who aren't that into the gaming space! The Forum lets users join clubs and share their own thoughts and start discussions! You can see a feed that is either curated to your friends or global. There will also be regular challenges and that users can enter/ answer. This could range from creating Zines, making art, solving a variety of puzzles, writing something creative, etc.! In essence, the Forum is a platform that facilitates communication and discussion outside of the game, alongside encouraging activities outside of the devices.

Thank you for reading! I hope this sounded interesting ♡ ! I watched a ton of videos that may or may not have contributed directly to this project, but I had fun watching nonetheless... Look at them under the cut! Thanks Chris once again for the wonderful course! Stay quarky. (Like quarks. Quark. Quirky. HaHaHaHaHaHa.)

This is like an ad break because I think I deserve to write a short blog post after the last one…

Good afternoon! I’ve had the game Pikuniku in the depths of my downloads and I finally got around to starting it.

“Pikuniku is an absurdly wonderful puzzle-exploration game that takes place in a strange but playful world where not everything is as happy as it seems.

Help peculiar characters overcome struggles, uncover a deep state conspiracy, and start a fun little revolution in this delightful dystopian adventure!” - pikuniku.net

It’s fun! It’s cathartic! I like being a little red blob with legs! I like to kick people…. and I like to help them! Ahhh! Dystopia money robot!!!!!

Here’s the trailer. Not sponsored but if they could give me some FREE! money that I can like jump and collect that would be fun!

Signing off,

kati *.*♡ 💌

Hello! Hi! This post may be a bit of a ramble. I have watched all 9 seasons of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It’s a comfort show, and has been very dear to me since I was a kid. While I love it to death, I want to point out its portrayal of race.

From the "Buffalo tribe" being analogous to Indigenous Americans (S1), to Rarity gentrifying an Indian Pony restaurant (S6), one could probably write an entire thesis about it. However, for everyone's sake, I'll focus on the episode "She's all Yak." (Season 9 Episode 7). Spoilers ahead, of course.

Pictured above is actually me right now writing this blog post. You may have noticed the rearrangements I've made with my theme. I care to offer a bit of an explanation.

Serial Experiments: Lain. An anime released in 1998, created and co-produced by Yasuyuki Ueda, written by Chiaki J. Konaka, and directed by Ryūtarō Nakamura.

A psychological thriller with themes of identity, the series follows a young girl, Lain Iwakura, and her relationship with "the Wired" - the Internet. But, who is Lain? Who is she really? This is explored over the 13 episodes as she exhibits behaviors that suggest something else is at play.

This series predicted how we see the world today - how normalized the digital world is in our day-to-day life. (Perhaps the one thing they got wrong are the wires. Bluetooth's all the rage now! I will forever mourn headphone jacks.) It showcases multiple extremes: Lain's initial lack of digital literacy, multiple accounts of complete escapism, to consequences in children's access to online spaces. Lain dives into what it means to be posthuman; breaking the divide between real and virtual existence. No matter where you go, everyone's connected.

Serial Experiments is not conventional in terms of storytelling; it refuses to be linear, nor does it hold your hand to help you understand it. Some love it, some hate it. However, it is undeniable that this level of abstraction means discussion around the show remains active decades later. Personally, I love the feeling of piecing together the story at the end of it. Lain is a mindfuck!!! It overwhelms you with a sense of quiet dread in the best possible sense. Despite being released 25 years ago, it’s relevancy progresses alongside technology. Lain can even be seen as a cautionary tale on our relationship with the internet, where we are headed, and even where we are now. (Think: AI, Metaverse, Neuralink...) In conclusions, I changed my theme because I like Lain. That's the gist. Oh, and also the readability of my last theme was questionable.

ps. I may or may not have accidentally stayed up until unholy hours of the night finding a template for this theme and customizing it. (I got Disqus to work! Now there are actual real comments on my blog :O??????) pps. Often, I find that the more artistic, "deep", and insane a piece of media, the more lighthearted the fan-content is. Signing off with "Lain at the Gay Bar" (2008) and "lain can skate" (2023).

HELLO INTERNET!!!!!!!! If you didn't know me in 2012-2017, you might not know about my little fixation on these two British men on YouTube. Meet Dan Howell and Phil Lester. They started out as teenagers making silly videos in their bedrooms. Dan inspired by and a fan of Phil, made his own content and - come 2009, ended up meeting Phil.

(Moral of the story: Parasocial relationships work! Sometimes!)

Chaos ensues, they bond for life.

Now you can never really think of one without the other.

Without getting too much into it, yes. You know the internet. There was HEAVY speculation on their relationship and sexuality. I never got into it myself, but it was a huge part of the "phan"dom in the early days. Inescapable. Them openly denying that they were gay while their fanbase wrote insane erotic fanfiction (think: hamsters, peeling of skin), made "evidence" edits, and leaked footage from their private lives - It was a wild ride, and dare I say invasive at times. They did come out as queer at the end of June 2019! In Dan's 45-minute-long video titled "Basically I'm Gay", we get to know a lot of his personal battle with his sexuality, yet while still barely scratching the surface of it all.

"Obviously we were more than friends, but it was more than just romantic. This is someone that genuinely liked me. I trusted them. And for the first time since I was a tiny child, I actually felt safe. And the relationship we formed at that point was something that I needed in my life. We are real best friends, companions through life, like actual soulmates." is what Dan says about Phil, choosing not to elaborate further. He sets a boundary with his audience, stating that he wants to keep his personal life private (and so does Phil).

I respect that dearly, and I am glad that the fanbase has matured a bit more over the years to abide by that boundary (at least from what I've gathered. I hope... Looking up their names seems to say otherwise). Learning what to keep private and what to turn into content is a fascinating practice. Especially when you're a celebrity whose entire brand revolves around your person, stories, and hijinks. There will always be people who you can't control - those who view you as a commodity, a story to unpack and watch unfold. I feel like none of us are built to be seen by this many people at once. On a personal account, everytime I've encountered a brush of virality I go a bit cuckoo and I find myself withdrawing into a shell. It really does take a certain strength/dissociation to be perceived by so many.

Anyways, they uploaded a video on their shared gaming channel recently! "A Fan Perfectly Recreated Our House in Roblox". Self-explanatory, and also not clickbait! It was fun seeing their old apartment perfectly recreated as they occasionally showed clips of videos, reminiscing about their old content.

...Pretty jarring to see their real street views outside their windows, though! (O_o) ( 8:38 ) A bit funny, but also not funny at all. I giggled, had a bit of a haha hehe, but I also worried. There are definitely people out there who stalk creators by going to places they frequent, or even their own homes just from clues online.

Hi guys. I have to admit I love what Spotify is doing with the place.

Daylists are my new favorite thing. I appreciate the fact that it bullies me sometimes. Feels authentic. Humbling. Makes my day.

Here’s a little dump.