Posted by squinky on Feb 14, 2025
Hi everyone! I haven't posted in here in *checks* oh my god, over a year? Seriously? Time flies something something, I guess.
Anyway, last time I wrote a blog post, I was starting to work on my contribution to the "Joy and Dread" Soft Chaos game album. For a lot of reasons, many of them being that we ended up busy with a lot of other things, that particular concept has been dropped (though who knows, it might resurface in some other form someday in the future?) but I kept on working on my game as a standalone project, which became slightly bigger than "song on an album" length because I had more I wanted to say with it. And now it's finished and I'm here to tell you all about it!
The game is called A Post-Apocalyptic Dinner Party in Purgatory with a Dysfunctional Polycule, because overly wordy titles that describe exactly what the thing is about bring me great joy. It is a web-based point-and-click adventure game available for free on itch.io (though donations in the tip jar are always appreciated!) and should take no more than half an hour to play. Here is a short blurb describing the premise:
The world just ended and everyone's dead! This, as you can imagine, causes all sorts of logistical problems in the afterlife, as there are now billions of human spiritual essences stuck in purgatory all at once. As one of the many new recruits hastily hired by the Ministry of Purgatorial Processing to satisfy its sudden staffing shortfall, it is now time for your first assignment: a dinner party with a queer polycule gone horribly wrong.
It's been really healing to allow myself to work on a solo game project after a prolonged period of burnout, with no pressure to make money or win awards or do anything other than just have fun. From making digital collage art assets out of stock photos to learning how to do new things in Godot and Ink to rediscovering how much I enjoy writing character dialogue, I've been having a delightful time. Sure, it's taken me longer to finish than I thought, mostly because I've also had to do client work for money among various other adult responsibilities, but it also felt good not to rush, and to have this game as a fun project to fall back on whenever I felt like doing something creative.
Of course, now that it's finished, I have to admit I'm feeling a little ambivalent. Not so much about the game itself - I'm proud of what I made! - but I just have no idea how the heck to Release A Videogame at this moment in time without putting myself through more stress and burnout. I don't really do social media anymore, as I mentioned in a previous post from a while back, and while I might still try and submit to festivals, I feel like the indie games landscape has changed in the past 10-15 years to the point that I'm not sure what I make is particularly relevant anymore. There are so many games now that even I don't have time to play most of them, so asking people to play mine feels too much like I'm imposing!
I guess it's only fitting that I've made yet another game that's apocalypse-themed; it's a sad sign of the times that apocalypse stories are as evergreen as they are. Nothing is ever going to be like it used to be, but at the same time, this has been the case for almost an entire decade, if not longer. And yet, some things do stay the same, like the need to deal with mundane relationship drama, or the unfortunate fact that we still have to have jobs under capitalism. Or perhaps more optimistically, the drive to continue making art throughout it all in order to maintain some semblance of sanity.
So yeah, feelings of imposition be damned, give the new game a shot whenever you've got a half-hour to spare! In the meantime, let's hope this won't be the only blog post I write in 2025?