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I've got news for you - one finished jam game, one big game in the works, and a lot of changes made to the site!

Villain Sword II: Ash Returns

For reasons explained further down, I wasn’t planning on releasing a game this year, but last month, John Thyer hosted the RM2k3 Cookie Cutter game jam, in which all the participants had to make a game in RPG Maker 2003 using the exact same pre-made maps. I got drawn into it.

The game that I made was Villain Sword II: Ash Returns, a sequel to Vaudeville & Sword… and also a sequel to American Wallrunner and Bug Mystery? The Explosion Speaks!, a prequel to Card Games vs Literary Characters at the End of the World, and a game of indeterminant chronological relationship to Digital Toilet World. You don’t need to have played any of these other games to enjoy Villain Sword II.

After the events of Vaudeville & Sword, Ash finds herself in the uncanny and unpleasant “Johnworld,” and she wants to leave. With the help of other allies from other dimensions (and screen resolutions), she prepares her escape, but along the way, she discovers writings from a struggling game developer and begins to question the nature of her existence.

Playtime is about an hour, there’s a little humor sprinkled here and there, and you get to assemble a party of characters from my previous games. RM2k3 has a reputation for having the worst underlying combat system of any entry, so while the combat isn’t as deep as it is in the Danger Zone Friends duology, I at least got it to feel pretty good.

This time, I’m not gonna write too much about what it was like making the game, because that would spoil the metanarrative! Thanks John for hosting the jam, and thanks to everyone whose played it for the warm feedback. Making a game for the jam that I liked stumped me, but I had a lot of fun adding the animations, and it was fun to make a game with Ash, Moby Dick, and the Cleaner again after 3, 6, and 13 years respectively!

I want to give a quick shoutout to the following other games from the jam: Tessa's RPG Nightmare, Demon's Keep, Keep it Aubergine, GRGHHL Quest, Split Chip, Dragon Seeker, kingspection day, Wish/Cutter, and Hawk's Judgment were all wonderful in their own ways. I'm still making progress through the 60 entries, and I look forward to playing more!

You can play Villain Sword II here.

Motor Oil and Sword (working title)

As for my primary project - this is old news to Bluesky friends, but for the rest of you, I began work on a new game last year! Its working title is Motor Oil and Sword.

It’d taken me a year after releasing Jailbird Nocturne to find my creative spark again, but it’s back! Getting in touch with creative communities again and finding a small audience for Jailbird Nocturne last fall has helped heal my relationship with making games. So while I started working on Motor Oil and Sword last summer, it wasn’t until November when my motivation multiplied tenfold and my progress accelerated.

Motor Oil and Sword is an RPG set in a world of warring autocratic factions about princes (and a runaway princess) on motor scooters who are in an obligatory competition to claim a sleeping princess from a tower for their country, but each of our protagonists has a complicated relationship with the ritual on account of their complicated relationships with family, nationality, sexuality, and gender. It’s like Revolutionary Girl Utena mixed with We Know the Devil (but there are also motorbikes).

Most of my design goals with this game (regarding its scale, tone, themes, and gameplay) are a direct response to Jailbird Nocturne, building on or reacting to some aspect of it.

Scale and style

Jailbird Nocturne gave me a taste for long-form storytelling. I love short stories, but spending a long time writing original characters, getting to know them, and giving them room to breathe and grow was uniquely rewarding. It wasn’t my first attempt at making a full-length narrative game (see the corpses of Station to Station and Waker), but it was the first one (besides Danger Zone Friends, if it counts as full-length) where I scaled it appropriately for my skill level. However, 4 years of development was a heavy price to pay, and I can’t do that again. It isn’t a sustainable way to make art.

My goal this time around is to make a 4-5 hour game in 2 years. Given that Danger Zone Friends was a 2-4 hour game made in 1 year and Nocturne was an 8-10 hour game made in 4, this seems realistic at first. However, Jailbird Nocturne had the advantage of being a sequel using preexisting assets from DZF, whereas I wanted to start from scratch with Motor Oil. So I need to find ways to streamline Motor Oil and Sword’s development.

My main experiment with Motor Oil and Sword is to make it a novel/RPG hybrid. If I want to make more long-form stories solo, instead of looking to games for inspiration, shouldn’t I look to novels? It is faster to just describe a city in a paragraph than it is to draw background tiles, map out a city, populate it with NPCs, and act out all of the cutscenes. The written word is powerful and just gives you a lot more bang for your buck.

Save for one location, the entire game is essentially an overworld map with designated landmarks. Interacting with a landmark will present the player with prose and the occasional piece of background art to complement smaller text boxes and character portraits for dialogue. I’m already finding this approach to world construction to allow me to convey settings of scales and complexities previously impossible as a solo dev working in RPG Maker. Again, the written word is powerful.

Making this as a cutscene would have sucked. My deepest thanks to the English language

As for the overworld map itself – I’m taking inspiration from watercolor painting and fairy tale illustrations rather than conventional game pixel art like I did for the DZF duology. Instead of making individual tiles detailed, I’m instead mapping out the world with simple, solid colors, and then “painting” on top of them with other simple tiles to emulate pen lines and paint smears. As tempting as it is to draw buildings and machines with pixel-perfect lines, I’m trying to give the game a more organic, hand-drawn feel than Jailbird Nocturne, so I’m deliberately embracing unsteady line art as I manually drag my mouse across the screen.

While I am drawing, animating, and writing music for Motor Oil and Sword from scratch, I am reusing sound effects from my continuously growing original sound library from the past decade. I’m less finicky about SFX than I am about visual style and musical identity, and I’ve been having fun remastering and improving 7 year old recordings from DZF now that I understand audio a little better.

Tone and themes

Most of my games are comedic or at least whimsical. I’ve come to feel very confident in my ability to tell jokes in games. I’d dabbled a little bit in more “serious” storytelling in games before, but I wasn’t as satisfied with most of those attempts. The storytelling in The Void Hero Blues is functional, and the storytelling in Empty Chambers largely fails. The Morphine Western Revenge is a successful attempt at a self-destructive revenge story, but it is the type of story it is because I was asked to make an adaptation, not because I had set out to make something dark.

So while there is a little bit of drama in the middle of Danger Zone Friends, Jailbird Nocturne was the first time I stumbled into a more personal, emotional, dramatic sort of story. It features my usual whimsy, but it takes the plights of its characters seriously, and it gets a little dark before the end.

My experience with Nocturne emboldened me to tell a more serious sort of story this time around. The hybrid novel format lends itself to more psychological narratives, for starters, but I am also taking the violence that occurs within the game more seriously (whereas the DZF duology featured implied cartoon violence, we’re moving on up to implied fantasy violence with actual swords, baby!). Don’t worry, the game won’t be dry – I’m still me, writing fun dialogue has become a habit, and it’s already coming through in the writing – but this game feels like the next step in my transition from writing straight-up whimsy into unexplored, more complex territory.

I’m also going out of my way to deliberately write a more personal story this time around. Jailbird Nocturne accidentally became a metaphor for coming out and escaping grad school – if my art is going to be a window into my personality anyway, why not be more deliberate about it? Among my RPG Maker games, DZF and Vaudeville & Sword were both games made for other people – a birthday present for my partner and a Secret Santa gift for a Glorious Trainwrecks member respectively. I went into Jailbird Nocturne wanting to instead make a game for “everyone,” an accessible story for a general audience with fewer inside jokes than DZF. So I went into both Motor Oil and Sword and later Villain Sword II making a game for myself, although Villain Sword and Motor Oil do it in different ways – Villain Sword is explicit about its autobiographical elements, while Motor Oil simply focuses on ideas and things that I unashamedly find interesting.

When I submitted Nocturne to the 2025 Queer Games Bundle, I was a little self-conscious about how it was a game with queer characters and queer subtext but not a game that was explicitly about queerness in the way that a lot of other queer creators make art. Ever since I came out, I’d toyed with the idea of making capital-Q Queer Art, but it's taken years of lived experience before I found something persistent I wanted to say about trans or lesbian identity that wasn't just "baby gay" thoughts. So, finally, with Motor Oil, I've sat down and decided to make a deliberately, explicitly, unapologetically gay game.

The motor scooters were originally just an addition because I like motor scooters, but having reliable access to a vehicle also suited the game’s focus on overworld exploration. I rode a scooter to work and back through the city almost every day, 35 minutes each way, for nearly two years, through summer and winter, and it was a transformative experience. It changed how I thought about physical space, traffic, transit in America, weather, warm clothes, danger, and joy. Many of the men in my family have a passion for motor vehicles that I never understood, but after developing a relationship with my fussy two-stroke (it has a mind of its own!), I get it now. I’m enjoying exploring each of my character’s personalities through their relationship to their motorbikes.

Gameplay

In many ways, Motor Oil and Sword is the inverse of Jailbird Nocturne. It places more emphasis on overworld exploration and long-distance travel than on condensed areas and dungeons, partly for narrative reasons, and partly to accommodate the motorbikes. It also places more emphasis on story over combat. Players who wander off the road will be subjected to random encounters, but those who stick to the road and only walk off it when necessary may only experience a few fixed fights in a chapter. I expect the game will become more combat-heavy as the story progresses, (there will be at least one conventional dungeon filled with fixed encounters akin to Nocturne), but at the moment, the reading-to-fighting ratio is the reverse of that of any other RPG I’ve made, and it’s kind of exciting! It gives the game a unique identity and hopefully makes the more battle-heavy moments stand out. And for those of you who enjoy reading – this one’s for you!

In addition to reading a shitton of books in the past year, I've been playing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, and it's influenced Motor Oil and Sword's design. Information gathering is a bigger feature in this game than in Nocturne.

One of my regrets with Jailbird Nocturne is that while the story is well-paced and the encounters are thoughtfully designed, there is a lot of fighting, almost every encounter is unique, and the player can’t turn off their brain for most of them. Even as the designer, I feel a little fatigue as I wade through the middle chapters of Nocturne. While it isn’t necessarily a bad thing (I’ve gotten a lot of praise for the combat!), the game isn’t bingeable the way many RPGs are. I think there’s something to be said for short, repeated, simple encounters that most RPGs employ. I’m hoping that the mix of simple random encounters with a sprinkling of tougher, mandatory fixed encounters provides enough thoughtful combat that people enjoy in the DZF duology while making the whole game go down more smoothly.

Instead of just managing a single resource in battle as you do in Jailbird Nocturne (MP), you manage two in Motor Oil and Sword – skill points and tempo. SP functions the way it does in most RPGs – you start with a set amount, spend it to use skills in battle, and replenish it when you take a rest. Tempo, on the other hand, functions similarly to MP in Jailbird Nocturne – you start with 1 every battle, gain 1 per turn (up to 5), and spend them on skills. While I do enjoy how regenerative resources in RPGs stop the player from spamming their best attacks every turn and give them short-term goals to work towards, I eventually felt I was missing the long-term resource management typical to the genre. While Jailbird Nocturne is a game about setting out on shorter missions from a home base, Motor Oil and Sword is a game about travel and survival over longer distances, so it made sense to reflect long-term resource management in the game’s combat. I’m enjoying the system so far – the mixed resources add a fair amount of depth to even basic early game encounters.

While every party member in the DZF duology fills two or three distinct roles, they are otherwise mechanically identical. In Motor Oil, I want to mix it up and give each party member a more distinct feel in addition to distinct functions. Spellcasters manage their tempo in fairly vanilla ways – they can cast weak spells on demand but can chant incantations to build tempo faster and unleash stronger spells. Swordfighter skills tend to have higher tempo costs, so a fighter must rely on normal attacks when tempo is low, but they can use “combo strike” skills to build tempo while dealing damage. Gunners, unlike other classes, start battles with SP equal to the number of bullets in their gun, and spend an SP for every bullet expended. Reloading with ammo from the inventory takes a turn.

I'm still in the middle of drawing the sprites for Rosalind, the second party member, so this menu screenshot is the best I have of our playable swordfighter, for now.

While most of the game consists of an overworld with random encounters, fret not! Battles only trigger when you dismount your bike, walk off the road, and explore the wilderness. The player will have to wander off the beaten path to overcome literal roadblocks and find secret landmarks and treasure, but otherwise, if they need to backtrack to a motel or shop, they can travel without triggering combat so long as they stick to the road. Given the game’s fairytale influence, I like that straying from the path leads to danger.

But yeah, that’s the deal with Motor Oil and Sword! Please look forward to it, whatever its final title is, when it’s complete in 2027! It’s only spent a few months in the oven, but I’ve tasted the batter and it’s delicious. I’m not always excited about every game I make this early in development, but I’m persistently ecstatic about this one.

Site Updates

I’ve gone through the site and made some changes! A lot has changed over the past 5 years, so things needed an overhaul. In no particular order:

Blog comments are no more. Commento, the service this site used for comments, went offline during the past year, and while it seems to have recently returned, it’s shaken my confidence in them. As nice as it was to have comments on the site itself, most of y’all are engaging with my posts through Bluesky, Facebook, and Discord anyway, and I think at most 5 comments were ever posted to the blog, so I have no plans to replace comment functionality. RIP!

I updated the About Me page so that any and all formal recognition I’ve received for my work – press, exhibitions, and anthologies – is now all in one place.

I’ve rewritten the page for Underground Arcade with the understanding that my hiatus from showcasing games is becoming less accidental and more intentional. If I were still making shorter, family-friendly jam games, I’d be looking at returning to events, but longer RPGs are harder to showcase. Adapting Danger Zone Friend’s opening into a self-contained demo was a good bit of extra work, and I think it’d be even harder to do that for a more slowly paced game like Jailbird Nocturne or Motor Oil and Sword. Furthermore, as fun as it was to work within the confines of a PG rating, I really just want to freedom to do whatever I want now.

That said, I could still be persuaded to come out of hiatus to showcase the old catalogue if any events want me… ;)

I’ve expanded the list of Game Making Tools. Special shoutout to Peb’s nswengine, a neat tool for text-and-emoji based games that apparently came to Peb in a dream! I also added a special section for audio tools, since I’ve been asked about what I do for music.

The Links page has been greatly expanded! I’ve met a ton of new game developer friends over the past five years, especially in the last several months, and wanted to update my list accordingly. If you’re looking for some cool indie games to play, or perhaps even some music to listen to or a book to read, consult the list!

If you’re someone I know who has a website or online portfolio of any sort and you’re not on the list, let me know, and I’ll add you. If you want off the list or you want to change how you’re referred to or what site(s) are linked to, reach out to me as well.

Finally, thanks to everyone who read my reviews of 84 RPGs! It prompted more fun conversation than anything else I've written. I intend for the RPG list to become a continuously updated permanent feature of the site, and I’ll update it annually. I have a review of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 already typed up and ready to post when the time comes, and I’ve decided to revisit Pokemon Crystal as well. Over the coming year, there’s a bunch of RPGs I’d like to give a second look – from highest to least interest, those games are Chrono Trigger, Planescape Torment, Final Fantasy XIII, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy VI, and Deep-Sea Prisoner’s games. I also want to play Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 for the first time. If there’s any game missing from my list that you think is top 20 RPG of all time material, or there’s something I would especially like based on my taste, let me know!

Thanks for reading! Stay safe out there.