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Also, also: Here is some music to relax and smash patriarchy to:

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I made a little game for the trans rep game jam ’25. It’s called “Zwei Club Mate” and can be played for free on itch.io (atm only windows—I still have export issues with linux and osx).

The game revolves around two trans women meeting at a lovely summer evening to get to know each other and talk about life as trans woman (from a German perspective).

The whole game is voice acted in German (by @sixleggedboar, @harsh-noise-scalies, and me) but there are English subtitles.

Now, do me a favour and play this cute little game, in which I overshare way too much.

[rie-kay]

[gamedev: part 15]

Sometimes it’s hard to remember what progress I made during a week. Since we are ever closer to the deadline, there is certainly more than one thing I get done. But, a lot of it are small changes. So, let’s see what kind of small or larger changes I remember.

The last thing I added is the part of the logic for the credits as well as styling for it. For the typography detail enjoyers out there: Yes, there is an uppercase ligature for the gender «*». During the credits I want to show some pictures of my neighborhood that I used as reference in the game. I hope people will enjoy these images. I also hope they give an idea of the space. I mean … the district I live in is not representative for all German cities, nor for Cologne. But, I think offering a sense of space is neat.

I wanted to make a third house asset for a while, because I wanted to show the architectural «mismatch» that can be seen in Cologne. So here is a Gründerzeit-style building. It was quite timeconsuming to add all the ornaments, but unfortunately the probably won’t be visible in game. Well, maybe I need to add a close-up somewhere …

Another small thing that still took quite some time was getting the animations for Merle to trigger in game. I’m not done yet. But, she now sits down at the end of the opening. Yey!

Another—not so important but again very time-consuming—feature is the option to swap the color pallete. For now there are only two. But the logic is set up, so that I can add more variations down the line. I shouldn’t do this for now—mind you. Because, there is so much more important stuff that needs to be done. But, I kinda wanted to have this feature …

[rie-kay]

my second of three entry to this years typodarium. it’s the ~3 iteration of this typeface. «gimpel» is its name. it was the first typeface i made and it changed a lot conpared to its first iteration. it’s quite quirky as a font. i think it works best for logos or if you want to toy around with the super extended uppercase letters. you can get the font here:

[rie-kay]

[gamedev: part 14]

The end of the game jam is drawing closer. Which means maintaining a regular posting schedule on this dev log is getting more difficult. But I made good progress over the last two weeks.

Last week I finished writing the dialog. This was a huge milestone for me. I wanted to finish writing early to get some feedback. I also have the ludicrous idea to voice record this with a friend …

I also got around to animating my character. So she now walks down the street in the opening — which is kinda cool. It is the third iteration of the walk cycle I did for her, and it still looks unnatural. 3D animation is hard >.<

I finished the title font. It is based on the Falke title in signalis. I created this font a while ago. I refined the letters this time around.

[rie-kay]

The youtuber that cracked my egg published a new video. It gave me a new appreciation for the shops I go to and the staff that work there. It is also really cool to hear her new voice. Cool and smart lady.

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it’s raining and the temperature has dropped to 15°c. i generally dislike this kind of weather as it makes my mood drop.

but this morning i made pancakes, read an article and listened to this album:

it fits so well today and made me change my perspective on the weather—if even just for a moment i thought: “hm, this is nice. it feels relaxing and starting slow is a nice thing.” (i often get stressed out if i start work late, because i think i won’t have enough time left for my personal work.)

so i guess slow is also fine with vaporwave and pancakes.

[rie-kay]

I really love what this image stands for (at least to me): Finding male rolemodels that are approachable, vulnerable (not the first word you would associate with Superman), flawed, but willing to work on themselves—also honestly willing to help others.

Never thought I’d say this… but I guess I like Superman now.

[rie-kay]

[gamedev: part 13]

’T was a productive week. But unfortunately not so much in the visual department. So, I can’t share much exciting screenshot content.

But here are are two screenies of the new main menu und the save function in the pause menu. I fixed a number of bugs, and saving works now properly. I also added my own function to play FMOD sounds triggered by Dialogic. The built in one is cool and all, but I wanted to place the voices in 3D space and use FMOD’s post-processing. This can now be done and I’m really happy with it. You can also turn down the volume of the voices and the ambience.

Oh, yes. There is now ambience. I was planning to do this for quite a while, and this week I finally managed to record some ambience at night. I’m determined to keep the audio recording simple-tech. Meaning: I will use only recordings done on phone. (Obviously this doesn’t extend to the music—the music will be prestine) At the start of this project I wanted to either borrow a zoom device or buy one. But, the few feeble attempts I made didn’t lead anywhere, and buying one was too exhausting (comparing and deciding on a device or combination of device and microphone) and too expensive. So, I decided at some point I’m gonna use the equipment I have at hand.

I like the outcome. I did three recordings of about 1.5mins each, looped one as a base, and added the remaining ones via a scatter instrument in FMOD. It’s a really cool tool for ambience. It basically does something similar to the multi instrument: It plays audio files at random with the ability to tweak in what intervals it fires. What the scatter instrument does differently is to randomly simulate the distance the sound is coming from. So, sometimes a sound will be close and left-panned, another time it will be far and right-panned. So it makes it really cool for creating some variation in the ambience.

I also finally got some writing done. I was struggling the whole week to get into a writing flow, but I tried to sit down for some time several times. This slowly got me somewhere. And today I kinda wrote 1.500 – 2.000 additional words—bringing me to around 3.500. Still far from @harsh-noise-scalies 46.000 words. But I’m getting somewhere. As we sometimes say: Mühsam ernährt sich das Eichhörnchen (~Laborious the squirrle feeds itself??). I think I found a nice way to end my story. And I was really enjoying writing today. It felt like an engaged conversation I had with friends. I even became a bit rant-y, and noticed a few issues I should work through. Ye, it was a lot of fun. Still a lot to do. But I want to finish the writing soon, so there is enough time for us to record voice-overs.

Wow. I’m feeling really excited about the process today. I’m looking forward to sharing this piece of media. It feels like a cool mixture of personal and imperfect / polished and flashy. I’m even started to get some ideas for a silly trailer. But—hold your horses girl—there is a lot to do, before you should sidetrack into trailer territory.

[rie-kay]

Unused Bonus Track as a treat

@harsh-noise-scalies released the OST for “Loner Dog.” It contains not one, not two, not even three, but four songs if mine!

It was very cool doing music for her game. I created music in collab before, but up to this point I was normally involved with the rest of the game as well. Apart from that it was something new to write music for a game that is so far outside of my comfort zone. But for one, she left me so much freedom to write what I want. And I was really looking forward to write some moody, dissonant tracks.

I’m really happy with the outcome. And still pleasantly surprised by some of the music I created here. Some of the songs are in a style that I never wrote before.

Btw: The game is also really good. I found a lot to ponder and relate to. You have to follow the link provided in the OST, because she was hit by the recent itch banning.

[rie-kay]

@harsh-noise-scalies released the OST for “Loner Dog.” It contains not one, not two, not even three, but four songs if mine!

It was very cool doing music for her game. I created music in collab before, but up to this point I was normally involved with the rest of the game as well. Apart from that it was something new to write music for a game that is so far outside of my comfort zone. But for one, she left me so much freedom to write what I want. And I was really looking forward to write some moody, dissonant tracks.

I’m really happy with the outcome. And still pleasantly surprised by some of the music I created here. Some of the songs are in a style that I never wrote before.

Btw: The game is also really good. I found a lot to ponder and relate to. You have to follow the link provided in the OST, because she was hit by the recent itch banning.

[rie-kay]

A few years ago while trying to find ways to commit suicide as painlessly as possible, I came across a PDF of Dr. Paul Quinnett's The Forever Decision. Thinking it might go into actual methods of suicide (I read an article once that actually did that and was trying to find it again) I started to read it, and I think I only got about two pages in before I was crying too much to actually see the words.

I downloaded the PDF to my hard drive and I open it again whenever I'm feeling too suicidal to do much else, but not enough to start booking a ride to the hospital. And every time without fail I only go up to a few pages before backing off and choosing to live another day just because suicide suddenly seems even more unbearable than whatever the hell upset me in the first place.

All the book really does is [I'm pulling a summary from GoodReads here as, again, I've read no more than 5 pages] "discusses the social aspects of suicide, the right to die, anger, loneliness, depression, stress, hopelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, the consequences of a suicide attempt, and how to get help."

But it also starts with the author kindly asking the reader to complete the book before going through with anything, and for some reason I'm compelled to really just try to read it all before finalizing everything. Despite not yet completing it (hopefully never will) I think I can safely say it's saved my life at least a few times now.

It's intentionally legal to copy and redistribute this book to keep it as accessible as possible, and it's very easy to find, but here's a link for it anyways.

[rie-kay]

Within discussion of I Saw The TV Glow, I hear a lot of people frame the plot as a kind of "darkest timeline" or "bad future" for a trans person, but I think this misses the truth of it.

For a huge amount of trans people in our society, this is just how it goes (in an emotional sense). Spending years of your life denying yourself your true identity isn't a worst case scenario or an alternative bad future so much as a commonplace occurrence.

Jane set out to rewrite the often simplistic and white-washed stories of trans people's transition, not because they have no interest in trans joy or something, but just because treating transition as a binary process, where you start out as one thing and inevitably become this other thing, just isn't how it is for most people.

I know for myself that I spent years living in limbo with seemingly no direction or hope for myself, and the only thing that kept me going was the vague hope that I would figure myself out at some point, that being a man would make sense eventually, that I would discover my perfect career, perfect degree, etc. But it never happened.

Simultaneously, understanding why Isabel's story is just a rather commonplace occurrence for trans people is key to understanding why so many people see hope in the ending. If the intention really was to basically do a "Don't Do Repression" PSA about what happens if you don't transition, then there would be no hope by default, because the intention would be just to show the worst possible outcome.

But seeing as this is just a realistic story for many trans people at some point in their lives, then the ending is truly meant to leave you with a sense of ambiguity, where the ending is completely up to the viewer to decide. Many do spend years in that hole of dissociation and grief for lost time before they eventually escape. Or maybe they don't, but the point is that this isn't actually a permanent failure state for most trans people.

It feels like death, it feels like the end, it feels like you're never going to be happy or hopeful again. Then one day you are, and who you were back then suddenly ceases to matter.

And then you are beginning another season.

[rie-kay]

also eigentlich müsste man die Sprüche schon auswendig lernen, um sie in angemessenen situation parat zu haben.

[rie-kay]

i got reminded that being mid is actually good. as a guitarist i should know, as we thrive in the mid range.