Postmortem

1) Making Shitpost Games is Self-Care

When the Toxic Yuri VN Jam was announced, I felt So Owned. I love fucked up yuri and would have participated in a jam like this without hesitation, but it was coming out right in the middle of a busy period in my life: my family was doing some event thing, and I was about to start studying in Japan for a few months. I didn’t have much time to create a long game.

But while I was stuck with my family, an idea seeped into my brain: What if gay girls were so good at sex that they created nuclear radiation and their fucking melted other people?

The idea amused me enough, but it wasn’t enough to convince me to start working on it. I wanted to rest up and get ready for my Japan school trip. The family event was already a mess, and I had other things I wanted to focus on, so the idea went into the backlog.

But when I finally started taking classes in Japan, I realized something: I wasn’t actually living a queer life, even though I was finally away from my family. This isn’t a critique of my school, but the classes are teaching me how to speak fluently, follow business etiquette, and so on. I just found it constricting in a heteronormative way. It felt like I was learning how to conform to Japanese gender expectations.

Maybe the classes were so effective that I felt like I was losing my voice as a queer person. I needed an outlet, especially since none of my classmates seemed to be queer. That’s when I decided to make a yuri game in two weeks, despite the odds, while going to school.

2) I Got Brainwyrms

For many people who’ve been following my writing and game dev, they must be very surprised by my sudden turn into absurd comedy. Everyone sure loves the Harry Potter joke I sneaked in. However, some people have also noticed that the game exaggerates the paranoia cis people have about queer people and makes it real.

Even fewer people may also have picked up the very blunt reference to Alison Rumfitt, writer of Tell Me I’m Worthless and Brainwyrms.

Rumfitt is a trans body horror writer who often depicts the toxic relationship between two hurting trans people. She also likes to literalize the cishet paranoia about queer people. I was inspired by the way she depicted these relationships, the sexual scenes, and most importantly the comedic horror that transpired. I adore the b-horror vibe in her work and wish to replicate it. I’m not sure if I captured that, since I tried to make the game funnier than scary. However, I wanted to address the anxieties and fears that trans people experience in cishet public spaces. Instead of finding “excuses” to justify the horrific premise, I decided to make it as direct and absurd as possible so that everyone could understand it.

This helped me discover the hidden sense of humor in the game. It’s my first time writing comedy, so it’s satisfying to see people think I’m an experienced writer on comedy when I’m simply drawing from real-life situations, like trans people needing to use cryptocurrency to purchase HRT, and connecting them to more absurd and illogical scenarios.

This also meant that I could push out the script in just a few days. Compared to many other Toxic Yuri VN Jam titles, this game is tiny, like Cookie Blair. However, I wanted the game to be concise and not overstay its welcome. I figured that if I could sprinkle in a few scenes that are very real to the trans experience and include a few jokes that land, people would like the game a lot.

3) The Value of a Shitpost Game

Like many other titles in the jam, this game was affected by the Itch de-listing. Whenever people interview me about the game, I like to mention that Uranium Gays was silly and unimportant, but it made some people laugh and brightened their day.

Isn’t that valuable in and of itself?

I don’t consider it to be as artistically significant as other games in the jam. In fact, it’s as “meaningless” as a random pornographic title on Itch. I find it hard to imagine that many people outside of a few fans would miss the game if it disappeared.

Still, I was annoyed when everything went down. I spent two weeks making a silly shitpost game, and it got delisted a few days later. That’s frustrating. I went from bemusement to becoming a strong advocate for Uranium Gays in a matter of hours.

It made me realize that even the pornographic titles on Itch that I don’t like have a reason to stay on the site. They probably made someone jack off. That’s valuable. Someone was able to relieve themselves and continue their day. That’s better than a lot of works that don’t do anything for players except be a paperweight on their Steam library.

These days, I feel that many people are more invested in creating serious, “meaningful” media than funny, pornographic content. I suppose it makes people take you more seriously. However, I recently had an interesting conversation with a fellow game developer. After playing Uranium Gays, they admitted that it would have been easier, more fun, and less stressful to just make a shitpost game like mine. I’ve also seen a few other developers say that they should have been more relaxed about how they made games after seeing how I used royalty-free media and RPG Maker assets to make a funny ass game.

Like most people, I enjoy “literary” works. They can explore meaningful ideas in interesting ways. However, as I hope to show in Uranium Gays and my upcoming IFComp game, even lighthearted titles can be equally interesting without the pressure of making a game too serious and literary.

As a game developer trying to tell a story, there are a lot of things you can do. Even a “shitpost” requires some craft and thought. I hope to make a few more interesting shitpost titles like this one. It’s fun to get into Videotome and make something that I (and hopefully others) find hilarious.