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BlueSuburbia out now on Steam Early Access!

I’m so very proud to finally announce that BlueSuburbia just got released as Early Access on Steam. This is about a year of hard work, learning 3D game development, learning Unreal… and it feels good to finally have this first part out in the world. Get it for free on… Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2431510/BlueSuburbia/ Itch.io: https://alienmelon.itch.io/bluesuburbia This installment of BlueSuburbia brings the first open world. A surrealist dream-like realm where you explore poetry and find items to help you further on your quest to be free. It’s heavily laden with metaphor about mental health, survival, and struggling with the alienating weight of...

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Documenting what it’s like to be treated humanely by a journalist

Not too long ago I was contacted by a journalist that said he is a reporter for the Guardian and is publishing a piece about toxic and abusive work environments around film, TV, and game composers. He said that they were planning on mentioning my rape allegations against [Famous Composer], and that he had a couple of quick questions for me… asking if I had time for a quick call. The email itself was fairly standard, but as you can imagine I freaked out. The last time I trusted a journalist with this I was drug out in the most...

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The GDevelop Game Jam #3 is here (with prizes!) and I’m honored to be a judge…

Recently I wrote about the wonderful open-source no-code world of GDevelop and featured some of the games made in it. It’s a beautiful accessible tool that’s very welcoming to newcomers. GDevelop is running it’s third gamejam, and I’m going to be participating in it too! * The GDevelop Game Jam #3 Is Here! * GDevelop Game Jam itch page I have to say again how encouraged I am that such wonderful tools and communities exist. Recent criticisms levied toward how Adobe is collecting customer’s pictures into machine training sets (see this Mastodon post ), or other discussions about how Microsoft...

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Tetrageddon.com is officially a Webby Nominee (and Honoree)!

I woke up to some incredible news today! The Webbys nominated Tetrageddon.com! (Under the “Weird” category, which is the cool category.) Tetrageddon.com is 15 years old. It was created June of 2007, and I have been building it, tearing it down, rebuilding it, creating this strange weird online world… for over a decade. ~~~ Webby Nominations Tetrageddon is a Webby Nominee in Websites and Mobile Sites – Weird: Official listing link Webby Honors Tetrageddon is a Webby Honoree in Websites and Mobile Sites – NetArt: Official listing link ~~~ You can vote for Tetrageddon here! Tetrageddon.com also received an honor...

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Recommended Reading Roundup #2

This is my second roundup of recommended reading, in which I share articles (or threads, or youtube videos…) that bring awareness to issues that I feel are desperately underrepresented. Like I said in my first roundup… “I’m also going to try to focus on sharing things relating to marginalized groups in Europe, as they relate to my own family’s history or (complicated) identity (Eastern Europe and the Balkans).” Doing this will continue to be especially important to me as I work on BlueSuburbia. You can read about my plans for the project in my announcement post here. If you find...

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Recommended Reading Roundup #1

I’m going to try something new for this blog and that will be roundups of recommended reading. Here is the first! There’s a lot that I usually don’t get to share on my social media because that space is heavily game’s focused… so I thought of saving informative things I read, or quality resource, and then regularly sharing them on my blog. I’m also going to try to focus on sharing things relating to marginalized groups in Europe, as they relate to my own family’s history or (complicated) identity (Eastern Europe and the Balkans). I don’t get to talk about...

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On GameJolt’s new policy: why stigmatizing “sex” in games is harmful to the medium and never works…

Yesterday GameJolt emailed a lot of people saying that their game was removed because the site’s new policy bans any game that “depicts, solicits, promotes, normalizes, or glorifies sexual acts, sexual solicitation, and sexual violence“. I got an email too for F2OGGY (Only one survives!). This seemed like an obvious error to me because this game has 0 depiction of anything sexual. The game Curtain also received this notice… Source: https://twitter.com/ldreamfeel/status/1478065400286007304 Curtain is a brilliant and critically acclaimed work of art that interrogates abuse. It’s far from a porn game. “CURTAIN is an interactive first-person narrative about Kaci & Ally,...

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Part 2: In support of Wren (the abuse she continues to endure, Fight Knight, and publicly ridiculing her trauma)

This is a continuation of my original post “In support of Wren (the abuse she endured while working on Fight Knight)“. More things have happened since I originally voiced support for Wren and I think it’s really important to discuss how this is all unfolding, in order to hold those responsible for this abuse accountable. I will do my best to be as concise as possible. I am still shook up. TW: severe content warning for all this. Hello, I'm the "writer" of the Dangen Warning and the former writer of Fight Knight. I feel it's important for me to...

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Speaking candidly about things lately (there is no justice and other short horror stories)…

TW: For all the things. I’m writing this because it’s my birthday tomorrow and I REALLY need someone to talk to. My blog exists for that. Many moths ago… because of the ongoing Global Pandemic this feels like an eternity ago, but that’s another tangent… Someone reached out to me for help about coming forward with their story (abuse, the type of story we all know is too normal in the game space by now). This happens a lot and I try my absolute best to be as helpful as possible. I think it’s important to do that because I...

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In support of Wren (the abuse she endured while working on Fight Knight)

I am writing this post in support of Wren. Hello, I'm the "writer" of the Dangen Warning and the former writer of Fight Knight. I feel it's important for me to come forward about why I left the Fight Knight project. https://t.co/ccrZgh1IeA — Wren (@rivalerose) October 1, 2021 Wren is a wonderful human who endured physical abuse, psychological abuse, gaslighting, manipulation, and pretty much that entire spectrum that we’re way too used to hearing about when survivors share their stories. She endured this while working on the game Fight Knight, putting out what I’m sure was amazing work that we...

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Celebrating all the wonderful zines from the Electric Zine Jam 2.0

During the month of September I ran another Electric Zine Jam (the two point oh edition!) in which people made a bunch of beautiful zines. This jam was to celebrate the new Electric Zine Maker update which introduced a number of templates, and the brand new UI update. I’m also over the moon that PAGE online wrote about it! “Zines und OpenSource passen wunderbar zueinander, findet Nathalie Lawhead und entwickelt seit 2018 den Electric Zine Maker. Nun ist ein großes Update für das Printshop-Tool erschienen.” – by Lena Simonis on PAGE, Zine Design: Micro-Heft gestalten mit dem Electric Zine Maker...

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Generative art & tools (on the intersection of toys, tools, and games…)

I hoarded a lot of links to tools again, and am putting aside some time to share them here. Here’s another tool post! I just opened a blog category called “tools” in which you can read all my writing about open source, freeware, or small tools from small devs. At this point I feel like I’ve already said everything I can possibly say about the wonderful world of tools, coming out of this space… It’s an inspiring area that never fails to surprise! One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is the intersection between tools and games. When you...

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Tiny tools and the ephemeral nature of digital art…

It has been a hot minute since I wrote about tools. I’ve got a ton of emails to answer, too much to do, and a lot of work on the Electric Zine Maker that needs doing but… I’ll just make a moment to finally talk about tools and digital art again! These links aren’t going to share themselves. Before I begin, here is some recommended reading: Parasocial Nintendo Complex: 10 Years of Game Dev by Melos Han-Tani My Procreate Curl Brushes Are HERE!! I made over 50+ different coil, curl, kinky, and wavy texture brushes! I also made more outline...

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The Machine That Eats People

I just finished having a really long conversation with another friend that works in games and it inspired me to write this post. It’s given me a lot to think about. I’m still processing my experiences… As I write this, the game space is under another metoo “moment”. More of these horrible, but all too normal stories, this time coming out of Blizzard. I won’t be linking to any of these because I don’t have the stomach for it. We’ve had these “moments” come and go now for the last few years. Each time reminding this space of the abuse...

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A very angry & venty blog post that I’m writing just to get shit off my chest…

This is an update to my situation: I am angry. I am writing this for the sake of venting… at the very most to keep documenting what has been happening. Writing feels like all I can do… I’ve been fighting for over a year with Kotaku, and then game journalism in general, to care about what they have done to survivors in this space (in terms of misrepresenting our stories). I’m not the only one this was done to by Kotaku and the same journalist. It’s a loop that I’m tired of talking about because it keeps spinning and getting...

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Tetrageddon Games now on Github! (the entire project and all Flash games are open source again…)

Here’s a small but meaningful update. I’ve been working on-and-off for a while now to put Tetrageddon.com on Github. Now that it’s been re-built and re-launched, with a new direction, it’s appropriate that it stays with the open source nature. I always advertised it as an “open source arcade”. That said, you can download the entire thing from github here: https://github.com/alienmelon/TetrageddonGames It includes all audio assets, art, animated gifs, code, smaller HTML pages, various JavaScript… There’s a lot to it. I am not at all sure what use this will be for people. It’s super specific to this project. A...

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New templates for the Electric Zine Maker and more on what’s planned for it!

Yesterday, The Guardian published this really beautiful story by Sarah Griffin on how her using the Electric Zine Maker recaptured her creativity during lockdown. The article is just beautiful. To myself, it’s tremendously encouraging that I made something that helped people… It’s also so much more than that. It’s kind of like a very touching account of zine culture, and captures why zine culture is so special. “Last year, I sent almost 2,000 envelopes full of zines to people who wanted to read them. Something else happened, too: people I didn’t know sent zines back to me. Their children made...

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The inspired brilliance of Katelabs, a foray into glitch tools, and what zine culture has taught me about games & software dev…

Here is an inspired find that’s… just… an amazing encapsulation of everything good about freeware tools. Trust me. You need this one! It’s a level editor of sorts, reminiscent of old school tools like Nickelodeon Director’s Lab, mixed with what feels like a very personal approach to what it means to create on a computer from the developer that made it. Katelabs “In KATELABS, Kate Barrett (Ready Player F**K, Flamingo Quest) brings you her most advanced tech yet… But with a twist! YOU get to be let loose with it! It’s a deep level editor with lots of features including...

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Games are giant weird story machines! (video games, their stories, and building stories for systems)

Entomorph: Plague of the Darkfall was a 90’s action-adventure role-playing game that… I still struggle to describe today. It’s a wildly “all over the map” type of experience somehow pulled through by the very nightmarish storyline. I played it when it first came out so now… I paraphrase the following heavily and try to recall this from memory: I remember the game starting on a beach-side village, the place being swarmed by undead and giant insects. You have to go do something to save the village from this invasion, something dark that’s falling over the world… You eventually do, pretty...

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New Tetrageddon.com is here! (Cybermonkey has died, a broken desktop haunted by skeletons of the past, and more…)

At the beginning of this year I relaunched a brand new Tetrageddon Games (the web version… not to be confused with ARMAGAD, the desktop version). I did this because I waited till basically the absolute last minute to see if Flash emulators would be up to par to be able to run the games. The majority of these games are Actionscript 3 based. The ones that are Actionscript 2 based don’t run well on emulators yet… long story short, emulators aren’t really exactly ready yet. So I went with the alternative plan of releasing all games as desktop apps, and...

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