Pink and Purple Pixels

Do you want to play an LGBTQA+ friendly, ethnically diverse dating sim? Or are you just interested in snooping through the complex lives of an (at times eccentric) cast? Come try out the mini demo for Love Hues!

If you want to download the game immediately, please click this link that’ll redirect you to Dropbox. (You don’t need a Dropbox account to download the file, just ignore that prompt) Don’t forget to extract the game before you try to play it.

You’ve made it! After several months of waiting, you’ve finally received the good news - you’ve been accepted at the prestigious Falls’ University! Now nothing will hold you back from pursuing your dream career, whether it’s family, a broken laptop or the stringent disciplinary committee.

As you go through your day to day life, you’ll soon learn that there are a number of students that you can befriend with stories as unique as your own. Will you find friendship or love among them? There’s only one way to find out!

For more details on the story and demo, click this link.

Feedback is very much appreciated, if you have some time! :) Feel free to drop me a line at the Love Hues tumblr.

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GX Australia is the country’s first convention for queer gamers, geeks, and all of their friends. Coming to Sydney in 2016!

BACK THIS PROJECT - BRING GX TO SIDNEY!!!

Heard of GX/GaymerX? This awesome convention has been taking place in the San Francisco area since 2012! It’s great if you live in the United States already, or can afford the expensive airfare to go overseas, but what about those of us who are a little more bound by gravity?

GX is coming to Australia!

We’re thrilled to announce that GX Australia, with the support and blessings of the talented team in the United States, is taking place in Sydney next year! It will have everything you’ve come to expect from GX, but with home-grown spin and tons of Australian style! February 27th and 28th, 2016 will see us host the first GX Australia event at the Australian Technology Park, minutes away from central Sydney!

Any game that allows me to customize eye color, hairstyle, and nose size is the game for me. There’s a reason why I lost literally years of my life playing The Sims 2, and it’s the same reason I have ten different Inquisitors but only one completed game of Dragon Age: Inquisition. I just love making a wide range of characters, all complete with painstakingly imagined backstories and carefully styled cheekbones. But every time I open up a game with character creation, be it Skyrim or Fallout 3, I’m faced with a horrible choice: man or woman? What I pick here will affect clothing, hairstyles, voice, body shape, and pronouns. That is an awful lot to have riding on this question considering that, for me, there is no right answer.

Of course, not all OCs are meant to represent the player themselves. I love inventing characters to inhabit a game, and there’s no reason why they have to share my gender experience. But it’s a bummer to never even have the option of seeing yourself represented canonically. So this is where headcanons come in. Headcanons are great, and outwardly gender-conforming nonbinary folks do exist and do count, so this is totally possible. But as LGBTQIA+ people spend so much of our time headcanoning characters as queer and so little of our time getting official representation, that gets real old real fast.

The thing is, if you can play as any number of made-up races, but not as anything even approximating your own gender, it’s incredibly isolating. It’s like the devs are saying, “Yes, cat people and giants and aliens and nuclear fallout Romans all totally exist, but a trans gamer who wants to play as someone the same gender as them? That would be Too Far.” I’m not asking for much—I’d just really like to be able to play a game where my elf who fights dragons and shoots lightning bolts from their fingertips actually shared my pronouns in-game for once.

When I was analysing the structures of CYOA [Choose Your Own Adventure] works a few years back, I began to recognise some strong recurring design patterns. I came up with some home-brewed terminology, but didn’t ever lay it out in a nice clear way. This is a non-exhaustive look at some of the more common approaches, somewhat-updated (a lot has changed since then).

I should stress that these aren’t discrete categories: while a lot of works will fall very straightforwardly into a single pattern, many will involve elements of multiple patterns. (And yes, I’m aware that you can often simulate one using the mechanics of another. That’s mostly beside the point.) Also, the example diagrams I’m using are smaller and simpler than would be likely in actual works.

I don’t like Quick Time Events (QTE) but I do understand why games keep including them, why some games feel like they need them. In spite of how little I like them they do fill a very needed role in games, and so my spite is pointless unless there is a better replacement for them.

The need for QTE stems from a game not having a sufficiently robust mechanical vocabulary to allow the player to do what the game wants the player character to do. Mario games don’t need to have QTE sections that involve jumping over obstacles because the game’s controls and engine are all about jumping over stuff, and Doom doesn’t need QTEs for running around and shooting because the game gives the player a large set of mechanics that allow them to do that on their own. A game like Until Dawn though doesn’t have a robust set of running/climbing/fighting/making out mechanics though, and QTE is great for when you want the player character to do something really cool and specific that the game doesn’t naturally let the player do. Thus, Until Dawn has a lot of QTE.

For example Until Dawn doesn’t have a complex hand gesture system or even a fully committed “High Five” button, so High Fives get handled with QTEs.

Is the solution to just have a more robust mechanical vocabulary that lets the player do anything? No, or at least not in the case of Until Dawn. While perhaps there is some theoretical control scheme that lets the player act out all the different actions the game wants a player character to perform - I doubt it, but even if - that control scheme would be crazy complicated and more importantly would draw focus away from the true heart of the game.

Until Dawn is a very story centered game and I think it is fair to say that in general games that use QTE tend to be more story focused then games that don’t, or are at least less mechanically focused. In Until Dawn you spend more time watching characters and seeing the results of your choices/failures than you do inputting commands. That isn’t a failing, the game is less concerned about your ability to control the character’s physical bodies then it is about letting you explore their head space/choices.

Your actions can help bring out the good/bad in these characters, you can explore who they are as people and what their psychological strengths and limits are. That is what the game is interested in. Spending the time to train the player in a robust control scheme for letting them run, jump, climb, fight, shoot, dodge, make-out and what-have-you would be a waste of time. It would be at best a distraction from what the game actually cares about. The game wouldn’t be better if it added another 10-20 hours into the middle of it that is nothing but training the player in a system of robust platforming and cover shooter mechanics that could replace all the actions the QTEs take up.

Especially since the game is all about being played multiple times with different choices and any tutorials the game has would have to be gone through many times. Games that are about replayability have to be very careful with their tutorials because players will be seeing it a lot and tutorials get old fast the first time you see them. Given that, a mechanically complex control scheme that requires a lot of tutorials would be a bad idea.

Yet the stories the game wants to tell involves a diverse set of actions and it want to let the player fail at doing those things in the interest of creating suspense and tension (admirable goals). As such the game turns to QTEs for a solution. They aren’t great, but they are something. It is easy to frame QTEs as a yes/no situation but in truth the question is “if not QTEs then what”? Instead of just complaining about them let’s see if we can fix them - a bit.

Steam Database: you can sort by price in a variety of currencies.  There are tons of games right now for under $1 USD, for example.  The quality of these may not be guaranteed but it’s a good place to start. 

GOG: (Usually) very cheap DRM-free games.  Most of these games are older classics so you’re pretty likely to get something good.

Humble Bundle: Pay what you want (even $1) for packages of games.  The set of games changes once a week or so.  You can also visit the Humble Store for more concrete sales.

FREE GAMES AT INTERNET ARCHIVE!  MS-DOS games here.  Classic PC games (mostly demos) here.  Old arcade games here.  Several games from a variety of older consoles, including Sega ones, here.

If you have an Android phone download Google Opinion Rewards, you get a couple bucks of Google Play credit a month for answering surveys and you can use these to buy mobile/tablet games.

Cheapshark: Tells you what’s currently on sale across a variety of websites and platforms.

Some game companies have free downloads of their older games, for example Bethesda is giving away The Elder Scrolls: Arena and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.  Blizzard has free downloads of some of their older games as well (need a battle.net account.)

That’s how I found The Blind Griffin, which pretty much wrecked me in all the best ways and is positively exquisite. (Masques and Murder! is pretty great too, though gruesome and vengeful, if that’s not your thing.)

For old ms-dos games, you can also check out abandonia, which has a gigantic archive of out of print games.

In June this year Senator Scott Ludlam successfully proposed that a Senate Inquiry be held to discuss what the government could do to better support the Australian games industry. There is still time to have your voice heard in the Future of Australia’s video game development industry Inquiry.

The Environment and Communications References Committee is accepting submission of opinions and proposals in writing from individuals and organisations. You can read the submissions that have already made here, although currently this list stands at a grand total of ONE. So on that note, here are all the details so that you (yes you) can have your say on the matter:

What does a submission involve?

“A submission may be as short or as long as you like. It may contain facts, opinions, arguments or recommendations. It may cover all the points in the terms of reference or only some of them, depending on what interests you. Supporting documents may be attached.”

What is the topic of discussion?

The future of Australia’s video game dev industry, with particular reference to:

how Australia can best set regulatory and taxation frameworks that will allow the local video game development industry to grow and fully meet its potential as a substantial employer,

how Australia can attract video game companies to set up development operations in Australia and employ local staff,

how export opportunities from Australia’s local video game industry can be maximised, and

any other related matters.

How do I make a submission to a Senate Inquiry?

Everything you need to know about making a submission can be found right here on the Parliament of Australia website. Information includes recommendations on the most useful formats for a submission, and what to do if you would like your name to remain confidential.

When do submissions close?

The closing date for submissions is 18 September 2015.

For more information, or to Make a Submission…

Everybody knows what a point-and-click adventure game is, right? You walk around pre-rendered environments looking for hidden objects and talking to quirky NPCs, then use those objects to solve inventory-based puzzles. They’re usually colorful, often comedic, and tend to have little or nothing in the way of twitch gameplay - fun for the whole family.

Now, the narrative the gaming press would have us believe is that, following the golden age of Sierra and LucasArts back in the late 80s and early to mid 90s, point-and-click adventure games suffered a sharp and seemingly irreversible commercial decline, essentially vanishing from the gaming scene until they were revived by the heroic efforts of outfits like Telltale Games and guys like Tim Schafer in the late 00s.

The trouble is, that never actually happened.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: point-and-click adventure games are enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment, and the names I just dropped deserve a lot of credit for that.

No, the part I have trouble with is the alleged interregnum between the reigns of LucasArts and Telltale. The fact of the matter is that point-and-click adventure games never died.

The chronology just doesn’t add up. To pose a few obvious examples:

The Nancy Drew series, a point-and-click adventure franchise as old-school as they come, put out over a dozen titles during the early 00s.

Funcom’s Dreamfall: The Longest Journey was enormously successful, both critically and commercially, during a period when the gaming press would have us believe the genre was almost wholly moribund.

Likewise, the Dream Chronicles series managed three sequels during a period when point-and-click adventure games allegedly weren’t a thing.

Sure, a lot of these games weren’t sold via specialty gaming stores, instead appearing primarily on the discount software shelves at Target and similar stores - but then, that’s a matter of how you frame it, isn’t it? With a slight change in perspective, being relegated to the Target discount shelf becomes maintaining a strong presence in mainstream retail channels during a span when virtually all other games were increasingly confined to specialist hobby outlets.

So the question becomes: why was the gaming press claiming that point-and-click adventure games were dead when the genre was clearly alive and kicking?

I strongly suspect that the answer to that question lies in what the Nancy Drew franchise, the Dream Chronicles series and Dreamfall all have in common: female viewpoint characters and an explicitly female target audience.

None of that stuff counts because it’s for girls. When the gaming press talks about the revival of the old-school adventure game, they’re specifically talking about point-and-click adventure games for boys.

When FPSes began to dominate the young male gaming audience in the mid 90s, point-and-click adventure games saw the writing on the wall, and shifted their target audience en masse to young girls. And it worked fantastically - but as far as the gaming press was concerned, that was high treason.

There was a problem, though. You see, being a fan of point-and-click adventure games - particularly the kind with really obtuse puzzles - was once trumpeted as the badge of a “serious” gamer. There was far too much male gamer identity invested in the genre to simply turn around and say “well, they’re not real games anyway”, which is what usually happens when a genre finds a strong female audience.

And so the great myth of The Death of the Adventure Game was founded. That way, the gaming press could continue to lionise the point-and-click adventure games of the past while straight-up refusing to acknowledge the existence of the genre in its new, girl-targeted form.

The Yuri Game Jam is a 2-month long game jam taking place from September 1st to October 31st, with the intention of creating more games about relationships between women.

There are two rules to the jam:

Your story must be about a relationship between two or more women.

If the story features romance, the characters should be implicitly or explicitly queer.

FAQ

Q: Is there any other theme or restriction to conform to, other than the above stated rules?

A: Nope! As long as it abides by the rules, anything goes. 18+, threesomes, platformers, puzzle games, 18+ platformer-puzzle games featuring threesomes… Be as kinky or as chaste as you want, and use whatever gameplay elements you like. The creators of the jam came from a visual novel background, but as long as the game has a story that abides by the rules, we’ll take it.

Q: Are demos allowed, or do they have to be full games? What about translations?

A: Demos are allowed! Someone already asked us whether translations of existing yuri games are OK, and they are as long as you have permission from the original creator. We’re flexible as long as the entries follow the rules. In general, however, we’d like the majority of games to be created for the purpose of submitting to the jam.

Q: Any helpful links to get started?

A: Of course! We’ll be updating the Yuri Game Jam frequently here (along with answering questions), but there are other ways to reach us or keep track of the jam.

There is a Lemmasoft thread where you can also ask questions and find fellow teammates. 

On Twitter you can reach the duo hosting the jam at @carrogath and @kittykatstargal.

Have fun!