Take The Dubs When They Come

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A friend of mine had his wedding the weekend after the election. A few days before, he joked nervously about how the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Celebrate good times, come on! That’s the vibe right now in California, U.S.A.!

I texted him back saying maybe what we all needed was a good excuse to bring people together. These next few weeks might be our best chance for carefree partying. As my grandfather would say, “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why they call it the present.” He didn’t coin the phrase, but he acted like he did. He would preface it with, “As I always say…,” which implied ownership, Bompa. (All his grandchildren called him “Bompa,” a nickname he hated.)

Anyway, the wedding was wonderful. Amanda and I had a great time dancing the night away with friends and celebrating good times. Come on!

In the spirit of celebrating wins, I have two recently for my “family sim” visual novel Fix Your Mother’s Printer. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how it was difficult to look at that game as a success, because it underperformed (by my expectations) in last year’s IFComp. Earlier in the year, I decided to send the game to a few festivals to see if I could turn that perception around in my head. I wanted a second opinion on whether or not I should be disappointed. To my surprise and delight, I got into two festivals!

Aesthetica Short Film Festival, which takes place annually in York, UK, accepted Fix Your Mother’s Printer as part of its Games Lab! The festival is “one of the UK’s largest and most revered events in the screen industries” and its films are BAFTA-qualifying. They gave me one of those little wreath thingies and everything!

The organizers asked the nominees to create a video about their project by answering a few interview questions. I decided it would be fun to make the video with my real life mom, who inspired the game. Also, I forgot that British people say “mum,” so when I read their tweet I chuckled a little. Mum. Heh.

Super FESTival is an annual indie games festival based in Toronto. I’m very excited FYMP is a selection at this year’s show! I love the organization that runs the fest, Hand Eye Society. They used to have a mini-game exhibition inside TCAF, my favorite comic convention, which brings in amazing cartoonists from around the world to the Toronto Reference Library. Back in 2020, the Hand Eye Society selected my 2-XL cassette game Facts About the Robot Uprising for their TCAF exhibit, but then there was a lil’ pandemic and I never got to properly show it off.

Since then, Hand Eye Society launched their own event, Super FESTival, and though I’ve given talks at the show (including one about how to make a web-based visual novel like FYMP), I’ve never made a game selected by the fest before. Super FESTival puts some of their games into a custom arcade cabinet, so it’s possible FYMP is playable on a custom cabinet in Toronto, which would be the coolest thing ever? Makes me think I should add some homebrew titles to my arcade cabinet at home… 🤔

So, have these wins changed my self-perception of FYMP? Yeah, a bit! I’m thrilled the game has found a few champions and a tiny international player base. That’s very cool and I’m grateful. However, admittedly, there was a time in the development of FYMP when I considered porting the game to Switch, after adding more content and polish. That’s how highly I thought of the project, until I got the IFComp results and my excitement dissipated. These wins haven’t reenergized me on the project, but they have invalidated my negativity. Yay for negativity invalidation!

This is why I want to make more games for myself, rather than for others. If I make a game for myself, and I like the results, then I win, no matter what else happens. But I didn’t make FYMP for myself. I made it for competition, and thus, I gave up the power to determine whether the project was a success. It’s a power I’m not sure how to reclaim. Maybe I should ask my mum about it.

🎲 Your Turn: This is now an official Celebrate Your Wins Zone. Personal or professional. Big or small. Launched a project or finally got out of bed. It’s all fair game. Reply to this email or tell the whole world by clicking the orange button below.

📨 Next Week: The first three episodes of The Phenomenals gets to the finish line, but not in a healthy way.

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Geoffrey Golden is a narrative designer, game creator, and interactive fiction author from Los Angeles. He’s written for Ubisoft, Disney, Gearbox, and indie studios around the world.

2 responses to “Take The Dubs When They Come”

  1. Sightless Scholar

    Okay, it’s a small thing, but I’ve recently been experimenting with using a cheap clothes iron to home recycle trash plastic. Turns out plastic shopping bags, bubble wrap, milk jugs, zip lock bags, etc. are most often made of the same kind of plastic as Perler beads(those colorful, hollow cylinder beads you arrange on pegboards and then use an iron to fuse the beads together if the name doesn’t ring bells)… my earliest experiments used salvaged packing paper to keep the plastic from sticking to the iron, but I found the paper would often tear and stay stuck to the plastic, but then I realized I could us the metal lids from things like pickles and salsa in place of hte paper, which would also limithow much a bulk object would flatten under the iron and how much it would spread out and that I could use a sheet of aluminium made from a soda can for making plastic sheets and that using metal would give the ironed plastic a shiny finish instead of a matte one, at least if the difference in surface texture are any indicator. So far, I’ve found that flating out a shopping bag or plastic wrap and laering(either with multiple pieces or folding) is a good base for making sheets, and a ball build up from balling up a shopping bag, stuffing it in another, wrapping the second bag around the seed ball and repeating and ironing under the jar lid makes for a good proto coaster. Still in the experimenting phase and haven’t figured out any real recycled crafts yet, but I feel like I’m making progress and finally have a use for all those little zip lock bags things come packaged in and the shopping bags that accumulate faster than one can find a second hand use for them and an excuse to save bubble wrap, shrink wrap, etc. from the trash. My only experiment that’s gone poorly so far has been iron an egg carton that was probably polystyrene as the iron seemed to burn it in spots and it became very brittle.

    Also recently recieved a piece of art equipment I backed on Kickstarter that is essentially a table saw for cardboard and other thin sheet craft material and just doing some initial messing around with it, I got myself enough cardboard petals to craft a pair of poinsettias. naturally, seeing how well it cuts my home recycled plastic sheets is on my to do list, as is seeing if I can do anything with the “sawdust” it produces(experiments 1 and 2, try to pulp the cardboard dust and fuse the plastic dust via ironing).

    Reply
  2. Pam Ellen

    Way cool Geoffrey!!!
    Awesome news!
    ….and so Glad that your negativity has been invalidated!!
    ♥️👍😸

    Reply

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