paradoxical.

The short answer to “why write a game about Homestuck” is “because I wanted to write a game with classpects and strife specibi and I enjoy inflicting pain on my friends by reminding them of Homestuck’s continued existence”.

Here’s the long answer: whether I like it or not, Homestuck was a really important influence on my life and my work as an artist. I found Homestuck during a very weird time in my life and read it on my school’s computers and at friends’ houses during the start of my junior year of high school. The chaos of the storyline, the double mobius reacharound of the timeline, and the memorable character design stuck with me for some reason. Being a part of Homestuck fandom, as tangentially as I was, was easily the most toxic time in my internet life (and I was a Superwholock for several years). But I also developed as a visual artist in ways I could never have anticipated before. I learned how to draw people— and I enjoyed it!

Ex-Homestucks often joke they’ll never be free of the webcomic and that is true. It’s been however many years. I sat through the bloodiest event in web original history to ever be retconned. I hit the finale and the final snapchats and I have closed that chapter on my life. And yet I wrote a game and published it on 4/13 because I live to make my friends groan at me.

What I really wanted to do was to make a game about fighting back against a prescribed tragic ending; about finding light and joy when it seems all hope is lost; and bonds of friendship that transcend the boundaries between worlds (or the walls of your house). I wasn’t planning on releasing the game mid-pandemic, where players would not be able to join up with each other and play in person for quite some time, but sometimes the world works in ways you don’t expect.

When I play games that involve combat and other actions to be left to random chance, I often hear someone explain a really really great move that makes everyone scream and I wish it could automatically succeed. I have almost never seen a GM allow that, and that’s what gave me the idea for the auto-success mechanic in the game. I want players to go as batshit as possible with their actions to get emotional responses from their fellow players. If you can make someone laugh or cheer with your move, if you land a particularly horrible pun, I want there to be an influence on the narrative.

This also applies to the auto-rez mechanic I wrote. Anyone who’s played any sort of game with me knows that I fully believe that character death is, quite frankly, overused as a cop-out punishment for bad rolls. There are very few instances where I think that a character’s death is the right narrative choice— I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, which is how you know how little I care for the trope. That doesn’t change the fact that sometimes, shit happens. And when you’re dealing with characters or people you care about dying, potentially never to be seen again… Games get high stress. Sometimes you cry about it.

If someone is going to miss you— genuinely miss you— to the point where their actual player gets upset about it, first of all please take care of your friend if you can. Bleed sucks. Second of all if you’re not using your character’s death as the culmination of an important arc for them (which is absolutely a choice that I respect when it’s intentional— I may not like it but I can respect it) or some other reason, take a move from Interstitial’s book and have your character come back when the danger has passed, totally fine! Hey, maybe you have god-like powers now!

The last point I want to make here (because these statements are becoming essays and I may have to figure out how to distill them down if I want them to be true “artist statements”) is building off of Delver while also shedding much of the mechanics of Delver proper. I’m an ardent admirer of Natalie the Knife’s work, and I think Delver and its truly-gmless version Worm Spring are some of the greatest dungeon crawlers to be made. Building it’s going to be a long day off of Delver was a decision I made early in development, back when it was a project I was still collabing on with Ben (shoutouts to Ben and Natalie for helping me with the classpect keywords) and I honestly don’t remember anymore what the original notion was. As development continued I wanted to keep the rotating phases of the game (shifting between waking and dreaming worlds) intact while also not prescribing to the players how they should go about building to the next planet, or talking to denizens, or even dreaming.

This game, much like sburb, really works best when it feels and functions like Calvinball. All I do is provide the guidelines, the worlds, and the contexts; it’s up to you to decide what to do with that infinite font of creativity.

(for more of my artist statements, follow this link)

I’m not the only one who thinks this, but I tend to be a tiny bit of a Spindlewheel purist. I love to fuck around with the formats of the cards as much as the next person, but there’s a magic to the styles of Sasha’s decks. And I’ve never been particularly skilled at putting my own spin on things.

Despite that, writing a new Spindlewheel card every day has really made me break out of my shell in a lot of ways. At the beginning of this project I tried very hard to not repeat words and concepts if at all possible, but at time of publication we’re a hundred and eighty days into the year, and I only know so many words. (That’s been another thing— the forced expansion of my vocabulary.) 

The other big thing has been to really refine my thoughts and my poetry into twelve words a side. You might notice at the top of the year I tend towards trinities on sides; three distinct ideas, offset by commas, reversed to another three distinct ideas. I like the rhythm of threes. There’s something magical about it that I don’t feel with couplets or quartets. But June has shown how I can really blossom with writing only one general idea that contains, within it, separate images. I’ve got a few favorites from prior to June, but I really think the city cards— inspired by wanting to create cities for Caro’s i’m sorry did you say street magic— are some of my best work so far.

The place where I am breaking free from the typical Spindlewheel deck is in how I categorize my cards. At the beginning of the year my cards could typically be traced back to something that happened during that day. As the pandemic turned my life into more of an endless cycle, that got harder, but you can still see relics of gameplay in the Artefacts deck. There’s about seven Doppleganger cards and a couple I’m calling Curses. Kisses are just what they sound like, and Migraines are how I get away with still writing a card when I’m caught up in so much pain. You’ll notice they’re basically gibberish— they’re in ROT ciphers. The key to which ROT cipher is which number they are. They won’t be in ROT on the cards themselves because I don’t expect anyone to try and type things in manually; it’s only on twitter they’re ciphered. (Part of this is also so I don’t have to un-ROT them every time I want to see what I wrote.) And then June, as evidenced by how most of them begin, is the Cities deck. 

Solstice and Equinox are two of my four Engines for this year. Not to give away my entire hand, or Sasha’s, but I can’t stop thinking about machine games.

I’m going to leave it here for now. I can’t say I have “big plans” for the second half of Spindleyear, because it’s still primarily a journaling tool for me and as life gears back up there may be some shifts in thought and execution over the second half of the year. But I have had some ideas, and I do still have a list of seeds for cards on days when I’m stuck. So it’ll be fun to see where it goes from here.

(By the by, though most of these cards are by nature of being journal entries unplayable, there are a few I’d like to put together into expansion decks once the year is over and I can lay them all out. We’ll see.)

(for more of my artist statements, follow this link)

as much as this is a place for fiction writing this is also just a place for my writing to belong. it’s a blog, after all; just a fancy one with a fancy url that i spend way too long customizing so i can use custom fonts for posts.

so this is going to be the post that contains the artist statements i make for my games. i don’t think there’ll be a regular posting schedule for them, it’ll just be as i write them.

you can get the games at citadelofswords.itch.io, find me on twitter for updates on when new posts go up @citadelofswords, and you can subscribe to my patreon for early access to these if that’s something you’d be into.

major releases

memoria | divisions | chronicle | as above so below | it’s going to be a long day | fisticufflinks (beta) | binary stars in an endless sky | if you can’t take the heat get out of the ring

microgames

500 internal server error | ace objections | breadbarians | arson murder and (blue)jaywalking | a dance a duel

other projects

spindleyear: (july 2nd retrospective | end of year retrospective)