Deirdra Kiai Productions

Good news, everyone! My big speaking gig for the year will be happening at the first-ever No Show Conference, all the way over in Boston the weekend of July 14-15. I hope to see some of you fine folks there, particularly those of you I don’t usually get to see at west coast gatherings!

This time around, since this is going to be a particularly awesome conference as it’s being organised by the fantastic Courtney Stanton, I’ve decided to speak about something a little… well, different from what I normally get to get up and talk about, and quite silly, besides. I’m doing a satire of all the ubiquitous “Women in Games” presentations at game dev conferences, called — you guessed it — “Men in Games”. Read on for a longer description!

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Okay, so there’s quite a bit of well-deserved backlash over this piece on “fake geek girls”, including a couple of thoughtful responses. This whole story makes me cringe, in part because I myself used to be one of those people who got annoyed by “fake geek girls”, and I know all too well where the original article-writer is coming from.

Like many of us who hang out on the internet a lot and have been for a while, I wasn’t in any way popular or well-liked growing up. Social awkwardness stemming from a textbook introvert’s sensory issues that leads one to prefer the company of books and computers to humans, plus being brown in a predominantly white community, plus a general lack of awareness and interest in many of the things that little girls are usually supposed to like. [1] Not fitting any kind of beauty standard early on and knowing it, I started identifying with the “tomboy” narratives that were popular in the post-Title IX eighties and nineties, where we had all those underdog stories about the girl who gets on the boys’ [insert sport here] team and kicks all kinds of butt. You know the ones.

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Here’s a brand spanking new game I worked on at my day job: Masters of Constantinople. It’s a web-based Encarta MindMaze-like trivia game, with an underlying story and colourful characters and stuff. I worked on co-designing the gameplay and on implementing it using Undum, the same library that I used to create The Play. Anyway, do give it a whirl; I’m quite proud of the work our team did on it. You might just learn some interesting new things about medieval history…

A couple of weekends ago, I went and got myself a (used) iPad. A little while later, using Flash CS5.5′s handy iOS export features, I managed to get this to happen:

What you can’t see/hear is the old timey animation, music, and singing, but I assure you, it’s working even more smoothly than I’d hoped, Flash’s usual quirks aside. My plan is to have a one-room intro demo ready in time to show people at GDC next month, [1] so if you’ll be around, hopefully we’ll run into each other.

Here’s a current screenshot of the first scene of my stop motion musical point-and-click adventure game-in-progress.

I wasn’t originally planning on making the game black and white, but after doing some art tests, I decided to try it out. I’m pretty happy with the results, and I haven’t used B&W in a game since Cubert Badbone, so the style’s definitely going to stay. Gives it a neat classic movie feel, don’t you think?

Anyway, I’m hoping to get some music and singing into the game soon so I can see how it all fits together. I have some super primitive automatic lipsyncing implemented for characters (ganked from this tutorial) through which I ran some test sound clips, and so far, it’s looking pretty good. For the game engine as a whole, I’ve been taking a little inspiration from Quinn Stephens’s open source ALPACA engine — I was originally thinking of using said engine, but then found there was so much weird custom functionality I wanted, not to mention built-in stuff I didn’t need, that I found it easier just to start over from scratch. Good thing my AS3 skills are half decent, right? [1]

First off, I’ve released a new game! It’s called “The Play”, and it’s a text-based interactive story about a theatre director trying to make sure a dress rehearsal doesn’t go horribly wrong. Except, well, there’s a bit more to it than that. Anyway, go play it if you haven’t already. It’s not very long to get through, and it even plays well with mobile devices! [1]

I also entered this game into the seventeenth annual Interactive Fiction Competition and it managed to win third place! Not bad for a first entry, or so I’m told. Squee!

Anyway, below the jump are some of my assorted spoileriffic thoughts on the game. Hello, sweetie!

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Since my radio silence re: a certain new game of mine in a certain competition still isn’t over yet, I figure I ought to say something about another project I have in the works.

So, the thing is, ever since I played that one scene in Curse of Monkey Island, I’ve always thought it’d be really cool to do a whole game full of interactive musical numbers. I also always figured I’d never actually get around to doing one unless and until I had an AAA-sized budget, because, you know, doing an interactive Disney movie would add up and such. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about ways I could do an interactive musical on a shoestring budget, aiming less for Disney and more for, say, Colma: The Musical. Start small, build a proof of concept of sorts, then maybe pave my way to something bigger. That sort of thing.

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