Interview with Indie Games of Cohost
This is a mirror of the original interview I did with Kyle Labriola over at cohost. The original link can be found here.
With INDIE INTERVIEWS, I talk to the game developers hanging here on Cohost to learn more about new games you might love.
Today, a chat with @ninecoffees (Madeline Wu) about writing, exposing yourself to different literary cultures, and resisting "commercial brain."
You can find The Good Weapon on itch.io
Introduce yourself for everyone here on Cohost! Who are you?
Hi hi, I’m a Madeline Wu, an Asian writer who dabbles on game dev on the side. I spend most of my free time drinking coffee, complaining about it, and baking pastries and cakes. I’m also the weird person at the party complaining about the lack of public transport and infrastructure in the city.
Is there a project you're working on currently? Tell us about it!
This question catches me just as I’m winding up on something new. I think the joy of indie games (at least, those who do it as a hobby) is that you don’t feel a massive pressure to chase trends or make every piece something to slot into your portfolio. My particular writing niche tends to be mysteries and drama because I enjoy breaking people’s hearts or making them cry. That being said, I was in the middle of brainstorming before I stopped myself and remembered that unlike writing, game dev isn’t a solitary discipline. So I threw it away and went back to the drawing board.
The Good Weapon was designed from a top-down perspective i.e. I finished the writing, layouts, and used stand-in art until everything was playable start to finish and then went looking for artists. That caused some problems because it turns out that X or Y asset I wanted wasn’t doable since it wasn’t their particular skillset. We spent a while working around the issues and learned a lot.
This time, I started by talking to some artists instead. I approached a bunch of people and asked them what they’d like to work on. Amongst the spread of these one-worded responses, every single one of them was centred around ‘cosy’.
Alright, so cosy it is.
Cosy isn’t my domain. And yet, I’m a big subscriber to the idea that restrictions breed creativity. Sure, I do love writing me a good ol’ lesbian murder mystery, but I’m seizing every opportunity to break out of that. ‘Cosy’ doesn’t actually predispose me to anything. I can still write a murder. I can still write sci-fi and fantasy. That word only informs the way I approach it. The aesthetic my artist is proficient in drawing alters the tone and mood and it’s my responsibility to work with that. I don’t feel constrained, nor do I feel like I’m compromising. Already, I’m bursting with ideas—ideas that only arose because of collaboration and working with something I haven’t done before.
Currently the premise we’re at is: “You are at the Pearly Gates. An angel is serving you cheesecake, insisting that you must eat it before you enter. You hate cheesecake.”
How did you find yourself first getting into game development?
I’m a novel writer first and foremost. Novels (at least, the way I write mine) take so long to push out. But the desire to try game dev really was a false impression that working on one would be faster than writing a novel. Also, you just publish it! There’s not a lot of gatekeeping, if at all! That being said, I would be lying if I said I didn’t play a bunch of games and felt, “actually, I can do that better.” From that point forward, it became, “I want to challenge myself, I want to diversify.”
The other reason was because game dev felt so clean and pure at first glance. The art and the UI and the placement and the music does so much heavy lifting that a good writer knows when to pull back and let everything else say what they have to say before you even hit the reader with a single word. That’s narrative design and I felt that if I could start to get a foothold on this skill, it would help me immensely in every other part. As they say—short story writers aren’t necessarily good novel writers and vice versa, but the skills cross-pollinate. Learning both fills many deficiencies.
I suppose, the idea of indie dev is appealing because it affords (in a rather idealistic way) a great degree of control over your own work. But the reality is constant compromise. We can’t do that asset. We could try and spend a week to learn and code that particular effect, but it’s something your sanity has to be able to handle. Also, I find the tendency to hyper fixate on a particular part of your vision causes problems long term. It affects your perspective. We don’t, in fact, need to copy another visual novel’s method of delivery. We don’t necessarily need romance or an open world with radio towers to climb. The strength of indie dev is coming up with creative solutions of common problems plastered over by AAA budgets or exploring new or bringing back old ideas. If we pull away from the designer’s ego and that checklist of must-have features, I think you’ll end up with a vastly superior product so long as you focus on fun and emotion first.
It's the same in writing. In the fantasy genre, there’s an inherent desire to indulge. It mostly falls down to “Brandon Sanderson did a 200k word book with a super long prologue and a videogame magic system, why can’t I do that?” And that reminds me of a very funny proverb growing up where Mao Zedong said, “Tigers don’t brush their teeth, why should I have to brush my teeth?” Whether he actually said that doesn’t matter, you get the point. You are not a tiger. You are also not Brandon Sanderson. You’ve got to get rid of that mindset.
I'm curious what inspired you to come up with the story for The Good Weapon. Do you find yourself usually gravitating towards "villains", and the circumstances that bring about those types of characters?
To be honest, the blurb was written that way for marketing reasons. I think there is a genuine love for ‘villainy’ nowadays. With circumstances turned oppressive and a growing distrust towards the institutions that are meant to serve and protect us, the identification towards punk and anarchy roars even louder. The fantasy of murdering billionaires is everywhere now even if the cult that worships them grows fatter still.
The framing of villainy is the point. You can have a lot of absolutely detestable characters but gamers tend to lap it up the moment you introduce those legitimately evil characters as the player character. Suddenly, all the bad actions are justifiable. So when I started the game with the line, “Are we the bad guys?” I was trying to empower the player and shift their starting point. I’m saying, hey kids, would you like some free nukes? Just a little taste, hehe, don’t be shy.
Okay, I’m talking out of my ass. The real reason is I write villain stories is because I like hot evil women. Blame it on Shego.
You had a great write-up on Cohost about your post-launch thoughts. Link here In it, you discuss the push and pull of being tempted by "Commercial Brain", the urge to make your art more marketable and sacrificing your vision for clicks. It can have a hand both in the creation itself and in the presentation of the store page. How do you navigate that when you want to make something? Even when "making money" is removed from the equation, I feel like it's hard to post work online without hoping desperately "please, please, click my thing! don't tab away, i just want someone to see the thing i made and tell me what resonated with them!" I wouldn't even know how to begin with turning that feeling off.
Here's my advice: push your work out. Multiple works. You need to keep going instead of spend 10 years worldbuilding your own derivative version of Game of Thrones. Nobody will care as much as you do. The sooner you publish, the quicker you broaden your mind, the faster you let go of your ego. Let go. Trust me, there is nothing to bruise. The biggest culture shock that I got when entering the game dev scene was noticing how everyone was scared to give feedback—like, actual feedback. Multiple people kept messaging me privately and saying, “actually, it’s refreshing hearing your mindset approaching this.” But like, if someone left a scathing review on my game right now, my response would be, “it’s funny how you think that hurts me.” It doesn’t! They don’t like it, and it’s okay! The trick is learning how to process feedback. I know so many people who laugh at Hollywood focus testing but they fall into the exact same traps when given feedback themselves. Suddenly, it’s about pleasing everyone. They want to mass market and so they change their writing styles, their characters into bland tabula rasas, they force a happy ending, they throw in action scenes that don’t need to be there because of a deep insecurity that their work won’t sell and they end up with just that—a focus tested item with no identity at all.
Everyone I’ve met has that one idea they place on a pedestal. It’s their golden goose. But all they do is lock it away in the back of their head. They lie to themselves that they need to get better at doing X and Y before they can start work on it. And the best advice I ever got for writing was: just straight up start work on your masterpiece. Because then, you’ll either produce a masterpiece or realize it wasn’t anything to begin with. Either way, you’ll learn a lot.
You’ll think up another masterpiece idea right after. And you know what to do, don’t you? It’s time to start work on that masterpiece too. You’ve heard it before: ideas are cheap. So are your masterpieces. How you approach it is what matters.
Any advice for aspiring indie devs out there? Or for aspiring writers?
Build your media literacy. Stop thinking in three-act/five-act formulas. Experience foreign medium. And when you’re watching something new and end up confused, when that frustration and annoyance jumps into your chest, realize that it’s normal. That’s part of growth. People like me (who didn’t grow up in the western world) all felt this way when we watched jingoistic American war movies, Seinfield derivatives, our first exposure to British humour, the weird jaunt in French movies where everything suddenly has to be tragic for no damn reason. I watched Simpsons as a kid and I just flat out didn’t understand the humour. How could Bart be so cruel? I turned it off immediately and to this day, my only other exposure of Simpsons is the Aurora Borealis meme.
Nowadays, I revel in the confusion. I indulge, much like Bollywood/Tollywood movies do, in the language of drama. By eschewing hyper-realism (e.g. a Nolan movie), I let myself fall in love with whatever the director wants to do. So go out there and love modern art. Look at the weird suspended chairs and the haphazard configuration of wires and glue. I look at the display in the Tate Modern—a tower of sponges stuffed inside a dishwasher and I scoff, then I laugh, then I fall in love. When I walk away, I’ve broken up with the art. But then I look back, I get drunk, I call my ex, this tower of sponges drenched in dishwashing liquid and spent tide pods and think back on the sex. I am awash with a torrent of feelings. I wish the wash cycle had been set to gentle. In the end, I am ridden roughshod, leaving me cracked and chipped but squeaky clean.
So yeah, that’s what games lack. Sex sponges.
Lastly, are there any indie games out there you've been playing recently? Any favorites to shout-out?
I think everyone should give Necrobarista (written by damon a try because it hands-down has one of the best mood-setting openings I’ve ever read. It’s great. It’s charming from the get go. You won’t regret it.
Gutless and The Devil’s Imago by haraiva and isyourguy are both amazing games. Highly recommended.
One small-time dev I love is Mike Klubnika. In particular, I enjoyed Tartarus Engine in the Unsorted Horror collection. The execution and the mood of that game is insane.
This isn’t an indie game, but the design and writing principles shown are so clean and overt I try to recommend it to everyone, and that’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon. I was playing Yakuza: Like a Dragon (aka Yakuza 7) and I was ten minutes in before I muttered to myself: this is the best game I’ve ever played. Thirty minutes in, I whispered that again. Three hours in, I was just shaking my head and going, this game loves itself and I love it. Yakuza 7 doesn’t take itself seriously. It knows what it wants to do, and it just goes for it. It loves people. It loves drama. It loves. Period. You’ll play about twenty minutes of Yakuza 7 and realize this is what most triple A games aspire to do in terms of emotional resonance and Yakuza 7 pulls it all off effortlessly in a single side quest. It doesn’t miss.
Lastly, a gamedev you should follow is docsquiddy on twitter, part of Mischief Games who did Adios (available on Steam, Epic Games Store, Xbox, and Switch). Play it, notice the way it’s constructed start to finish, and then read the writeups by Doc Burford. Legitimately, his writing made me a better person. His love and kindness is infectious. So go out and buy Adios. It’s charming, bittersweet, and full of love, and I can’t think of anyone better to support.
Thanks for chatting, @ninecoffees! Sincerely I feel like I'm walking away from this as a better writer myself, I really appreciate you sharing all of that insight. For everyone else...go play The Good Weapon on itch.io! And if you're an indie dev yourself and would like to be considered for an interview slot, please introduce yourself in the comments section of this post! See you next time.