Deirdra Kiai Productions

Fun with Satire at the No Show Conf

Deirdra — Tue, 01 May 2012 22:18:45 +0000

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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My take on “fake geek girls”

Deirdra — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:37:44 +0000

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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Footnotes:

My favourite colour when I was little was yellow; says it all, really. ↩

Masters of Constantinople

Deirdra — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:40:28 +0000

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…

Ooh, look, I’m an iOS developer now!

Deirdra — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:38:47 +0000

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.

Footnotes:

Yes, it’s official: I’m returning to GDC as a Conference Associate again this year! ↩

Deliberately Monochrome

Deirdra — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 06:40:00 +0000

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]

Footnotes:

Yes, that’s right, I’m doing this project in Flash. Don’t laugh at me. They say Flash is dying, but really, they only mean for web browsers, and let’s face it, HTML5 audio just isn’t where I want it to be right now. And did you know that Flash can now export to iOS and other mobile/tablet devices? Will this mean I’m finally going to have a game in the App Store? We shall see! ↩

Some notes on “The Play”

Deirdra — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 06:21:42 +0000

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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Footnotes:

Provided that said mobile devices are Javascript-enabled, that is. ↩

A musical adventure game… in stop motion?

Deirdra — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:32:29 +0000

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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Signal Boosting: Bhaloidam

Deirdra — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 02:53:19 +0000

My good friend Corvus Elrod has a project on Kickstarter at the moment, seeking funding for his fabulous tabletop roleplaying system. Called “Bhaloidam”, which aptly derives from the Proto-Indo-European words for “story”, “play”, and “community” (and is just a damn cool name), its goal in a nutshell is to help people tell stories together. Plus, the handbook is being written as a comic book — how awesome is that? Anyway, you can find out more at the official website, and back the project here. [1]

As for my personal experiences with Bhaloidam, in the 2-3ish years I’ve known Corvus, I’ve played a handful of games in various iterations of the system, and had lots of fun every time. I’ve even co-designed a variant of the rules specifically for running dialogue-based games, as depicted in this here gameplay sample where you play as siblings at a funeral. Since Bhaloidam isn’t tied to a specific story, you can basically pick whatever subject matter you want; the rules are there to give your storytelling some structure and encourage an egalitarian mindset among players. Fierce advocate for social change that I am, this is a design philosophy I’m happy to get behind. I’m already thinking of some ideas for games of my own to run using the system, and look forward to playing them both in person and online.

Anyway, the funding deadline’s in exactly one week, so back the project now and help Corvus hit his funding goal. $9 gets you a digital version of the handbook, while larger amounts of money get you hard copies, game boards/pieces, guest appearances in the handbook, and even opportunities to get copies of the game out to kids’ charities. Definitely a good cause all around, I say.

Footnotes:

Corvus is even running online demos conducted via Google Plus hangouts, which I highly recommend checking out if you’re interested in seeing how it all comes together. ↩

I made a game for work!

Deirdra — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:34:42 +0000

In what appears to be somewhat of a departure from the narrative-heavy stuff I normally do, here’s a Flash game I worked on about… sieging castles! It was made for a neat-looking upcoming documentary TV series called Battle Castle, so quite a bit of historical accuracy and research went into the game — you can say it’s one of those “edutainment” thingies, in a sense. Anyway, check it out. I did the bulk of the game design and some of the programming, and now know way more about siege warfare than I’ll probably ever need to.

In other news, a more narrative-heavy project of mine has been entered in a certain annual competition, which, as an entrant, I have to keep mum about until next month or thereabouts. Another personal project, for which there is no reason not to talk about freely save for the fact that I’m a lazy blogger, is currently being poked away at, and I’ll be writing a separate post about it soon. Finally, GeekGirlCon‘s coming up in a week, and I’ll be doing some speaking there, so if you’re near Seattle on the 8th/9th, come see me and say hi!

Bird’s Eye View, Part Deux

Deirdra — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 05:28:01 +0000

Following last month’s post, here is the (tentatively) complete structure of my current work in progress, which has grown a bit longer and a bit more convoluted. [1]

Meanwhile, here’s a sneak peek at a completely different upcoming project, to further pique your interest.

Footnotes:

As with before, the text is deliberately shrunk down to an illegible size. ↩