alienmelon

Nathalie Lawhead is a net-artist and award winning game designer that has been creating experimental digital art since the late 90's. Past works include titles such as the IGF winning Tetrageddon Games, "Everything is going to be OK", and the Electric Zine Maker. Follow them on Mastodon

When there is nothing more left for them to take

This is really just an extension of this post: http://www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/abusing-you-was-by-the-book-documenting-two-years-of-abuse-from-game-journalism-after-sharing-my-metoo-the-whole-painful-story-all-in-one-place If you are not aware of the situation, read that instead. I’m posting this because I need to scream. It’s better than silence. “Abusing you was by the book” (documenting two years of abuse from Game Journalism, after sharing my #metoo… the whole painful story all in one place) Today I had another grieving outburst about game journalist and the game crit space. It’s been years of dealing with the fallout that they had on my life. The way your perception changes when you keep getting dogpiled on by people...

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Play my new interactive liminal-space horror essay about technocapitalism and individuality!

individualism in the dead-internet age: an anti-big tech asset flip shovelware r?a?n?t? manifesto * https://alienmelon.itch.io/shovelware “This is an interactive-essay-meets-walking-sim about technocapitalism and the things we lost along the way. Follow coins under the electric mist of a clouded starry sky. Discover hyper-links. Listen to the words both inside and outside your head. Seal your fate before the productivity machine.” I just published this interactive essay. This was meant to be preformed in a live setting but it’s not a good fit, so it transformed into an interactive essay format. Please enjoy the narration and ambient vibe. :) My previous “From...

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Airport layover musings: AI, tech, internet culture & giving space for constructive criticism

I’m writing this during another long airport layover after attending IEEE Conference on Games 2024 to give a keynote… I found a place here, out of the way of the crowds, where I can intently tap the touchscreen keyboard without feeling noticed. The American couple next to me forgot their medicine. I feel bad for the occasional person sprinting past, obviously about to miss their flight, but they might make it? Airports are a weird headspace to be in. So… It’s been on my mind… How social media does not facilitate constructive criticism, it facilitates reaction. Attention is a currency...

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From monopolies to tiny tools by solo devs

Freeware and shareware have existed since the beginning of software. Software is art, and an empowering conduit for unending creative experimentation on computers. This is a discussion about the large and largely underrepresented space of tool development from solo devs, individual artists, or tiny teams. In light of recent controversies surrounding AI, and how larger mainstream software is being criticized for its missteps, we will explore why the small tool space matters more than ever in the broad spectrum of internet culture, games, and tech.

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Thinking About The Berlin Computerspiele Museum (Computer Games Museum)

As I write this on my iPhone (oh god it’s so hard to blog like this, nobody’s fingers are this tiny o_O;), I have an 8 hour layover. I got plenty of time to think… Moments like this make me appreciate that I have a blog. There’s only so much browsing airport duty free in Zurich one can take. When I visited A MAZE a small personal side-quest I wanted to do for myself was to get my tongue pierced. I talked myself out of it again (well, ok, credit where credit’s due: I had help getting talked out of...

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The story of my first A MAZE (and why I wish we had an event dedicated to solo-devs)

It was an incredible surprise when I got the news that BlueSuburbia was nominated for A MAZE. When I started the project it was a secret dream to have it in A MAZE so I could finally go as a nominee. Attending in person, after so many years of being nominated, then juding, giving a virtual talk… just actually trying to go, lol… was an incredible experience. BlueSuburbia was shown on this big projector on the wall. It was tremendous to see it. After so much hard work and self-doubt, people were actually playing it in this context. Even the...

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Solo-Devs and Risk-Takers (An Artistic Exploration of Experimental Tools)

Digital toys let us explore a possibility space where art can pulsate, move, degrade, and do strange things with each brush stroke.
I often talk about what a missed opportunity it is that mainstream digital art tools are so caught up in making the perfect pencil line, or imitating exactly how chalk or water colors work, when there’s other types of lines we can invent that would never be able to exist in the real world.

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Goodbye, America

I’m writing this from an Airbnb on my new laptop in the new country that I moved to. I’m a European gamedev now. I finally put America behind me! I have a lot of thoughts and feelings that I wanted to encapsulate at some point, about having lived there for seventeen or so years. How I feel about it. Will I miss it? Can I miss it? I’m not sure if I will, or if I have the energy, to talk about all that… at least to the extent that I would like. Bouncing around Airbnb’s, while renovations are being...

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Backrooms, Liminal Spaces, And The Subliminal Menace Of Loneliness in Indie Horror Games

This is about the horror of liminal spaces, and the intrinsic surrealism of our digital world… That beautiful awful loneliness of existing in the electric void of shared virtual fantasies that video games are.
Video games are the closest thing that we have to existing in someone else’s dream. Carefully constructed fantasies that we share with players. These are our fever dreams, both pleasant and awful.

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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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How To Download and Run the Flash Version of BlueSuburbia

BlueSuburbia was a Flash website comprised of a collection of interactive poetry. Each poem was animated in a surrealist, often metaphoric, way to bring the writing to life. The poetry would live in these dreamy worlds, one transitioning to the next. It was presented as a dark neighborhood that you came across in a dream… and there you found a large abandoned home. The home was a living world where you could discover books that were like doorways into poetic realms. The animation style was like Disney’s Fantasia meets late 90’s goth. The poems were often about war, refugees, poverty,...

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BlueSuburbia is an IndieCade 2023 Nominee!

?*:.?.o So this is amazing! ?.:?*:?’ When I submitted BlueSuburbia to IndieCade I had little expectations for anything happening. Submitting to IndieCade is just a thing you do! I was hoping it would be eligible for one of the exhibits or just get into Night Games. IndieCade announced that Night Games would be an in person event, making that the first since the pandemic hit. It seemed like an exciting time to submit to them. I was floored when I received an email from them saying that it was nominated! Personally I really needed this. BlueSuburbia is a project that...

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The Generous Space of Alternative Game Engines (A Curation)

This post is a response to Unity’s heartbreaking announcement that they will… charge developers relentlessly for distributing their games? I struggle to frame exactly what they are doing because Unity’s decision is so bizzarely resentful toward their huge developer base that trusted them. You can read this for context… I’ve done a lot of writing curating and covering tools, and showcasing alternatives to popular ones. I even have a collection on itch.io keeping track of things that are on that platform: https://itch.io/c/235488/cool-tools For myself, it is an imperative to always be aware of alternatives! The biggest lesson I learned from...

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Real Talk: Games About Trauma (art caught between “everything is horrible”, “everything is survivable”, and “this is too hard to talk about”)

CW: Trauma “Trauma” sometimes seems like an unfortunately reductive word to describe what these games are… The games that are easy to ignore because they come with lots of trigger warnings so they are “ugh another one of those”, the brave games that are hard to make and even harder to play, the ones that seem to be in abundance but still don’t get talked about enough… There is a bravely pioneering aspect to them that is hard to ignore. Some might brush them off as losers “being high on their own supply”, or one might understand why they will...

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You scream into the void but the rate limit has been exceeded. Nobody can hear you scream.

On Mastodon I was joking that I want to create a social media simulator app that takes you through the exhausting process of setting up an account (avatar, enticing follow-able description of yourself, a unique name, a solid unrememberable password…) and then it gives you a space to say things into the void. Whatever you say rewards you with that unending gratification of juicy feedback we associate with social media. This particular void rewards you generously. You could say the dumbest things and get a ridiculous amount of simulated engagement. Nothing you say is actually posted anywhere. It’s just for...

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BlueSuburbia demo is out! (more about the project, vision, and things coming…)

It has been well over a year that I decided to learn Unreal so that I can bring my vision of “reviving” BlueSuburbia to life. This was a crash course in Blender, 3D animation, modeling, Unreal, scripting, textures, volumetrics… what any of these things even mean and how to do them right. I still have a long way to go, but I’m proud to be able to finally share an early look at this new BlueSuburbia. The demo was posted on itch.io the other day: https://alienmelon.itch.io/bluesuburbia I already payed for the Steam store listing and will be working on getting...

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Indie Games and the promise of better spaces

Idyll is a small social world designed around kinder forms of online conversation. That description alone couldn’t come at a more meaningful time. I’ve been eagerly watching the development of it over Twitter, and have been looking forward to writing about it when it releases. I think it is a profound thing to put into the world in the shadow of “losing” Twitter… with friend groups scurrying to other social media spaces, and overall how things like this tiny game-thing contrast against the more popular online social spaces that we must inhabit. I think it goes without saying that each...

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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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“Death Stranding Meets Net-Art” in a poetry world (devlog update)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the creative (mostly narrative) direction of my current 3D game, BlueSuburbia. How do you approach building a large thing, without disappearing into the development void forever? These long projects can eat a lot of time, life, energy… and even relevance because it’s all you do for the next few years… how do you manage that? Sometimes I feel like I’m banking everything on a gamble, because it’s such a beast of an endeavor. When you’re a solo-developer, you have to constantly think about scale. If I make this too big then it might never...

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