2003-2012/2012-2016/2016-2020/2020-2026
Emerging from the Pandemic and Surveying the Damage (2020-2021)
The Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality and Alexandra Higgins' Personal Website
Cardinger
The Summer of 2020 saw, despite the lockdown, large, global protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. Organizers proposed a $5 games bundle on itch.io, with all of the proceeds going to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Community Bail Fund. There was an open call on itch for developers to contribute games of all sorts, freeware and commercial. I heard about it pretty early on – I don't think there were more than 100-ish contributions to the bundle at the time - so I figured I'd throw a little bit of weight behind the bundle and submit Danger Zone Friends to it. Thought I'd help inflate the value of the bundle and nothing would come of it.
By the end of the submission period, over 1700 games and other works were contributed, making the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality the largest sold bundle of games to date. While some big triple-I indie games were part of the bundle, for the first time in a long time, mainstream games press had focused a spotlight on the lowercase-i indie scene. While others would follow in the footsteps of the 2020 Racial Justice bundle in the years to follow, the original bundle was a cultural event in indie games that hasn't been replicated since. There are still entire websites that exist solely to help you search through its massive library.
Since then, Danger Zone Friends has been downloaded over 3000 times on itch.io, leaving Monster Truck Power Fantasy in the dust and making it the most popular game I've ever made, and I attribute that popularity mostly to the bundle. Since DZF was normally freeware, while the bundle was live, I put a $5 price tag on it to encourage people to buy the bundle instead, helping me feel better about all of the attention I was getting from a piece of activism that I otherwise was benefiting from far more than I had put effort into. Nobody had any idea that the bundle would take off the way it did.
Danger Zone Friends was already one of my more popular games – I had gotten the Indie Games Plus coverage, at least one Let's Play, a critical RPGMaker.net review, and a lot of warm feedback from Mid-Atlantic game devs from events – but I was now getting a whole second wave of attention – a blog post here, some more Let's Play videos there. I did a search for the game on Twitter and found someone tweet that “Agnes was their waifu,” which remains the greatest thing a stranger has ever said about one of my characters. The game has had a long lifespan – someone new downloads the game about once a day. It's not much of a following in the greater scheme of the internet, but it's profound to me that strangers are still continuously engaging with a piece of my work seven years later.
(Before March of 2021, Andrew “Pizzapranks” went out of his way to pin me down after I had (unbeknownst to me) been waitlisted after applying to his indie game anthology zine Indiepocalypse and asked if I was still interested. I was, so Danger Zone Friends found itself in issue #14, and I made a couple of appearances on his podcast in March and December of that year. I'm glad that the anthology is still going strong, 78 issues in.)
In any case, as early as 2019, I had been toying with ideas for a Danger Zone Friends sequel. I had a notepad doc on my computer with a story outline and spell list in it. The original game, as good as it was, was made for a deadline, was a little rough around the edges, and felt like it wasn't given enough room to breathe. I wanted to take the narrative and mechanical concepts I explored in the game and prod them further. I remember telling John D Moore at Colorspace labs in November 2019 my ideas for a (since scrapped) scene where the party would come under attack, the player would have to choose the order in which they helped the other party members, and the last party member would die.
I was on the fence as to whether I actually wanted to commit to the project, but the new wave of enthusiasm for DZF following the bundle warmed me up to the idea. Someone then posted a comment on the Youtube page for the DZF trailer that they wanted to see a sequel. That was the moment my mind was made up. Development on the Danger Zone Friends sequel began in October of 2020.
I already wrote a massive postmortem on the game that became Jailbird Nocturne, so I won't go any further into the details of its early development history here.
Jailbird Nocturne, crica June 2021. Less than a year in, the first couple of chapters were mostly done
In December of 2020, I made my final blog post at Sassy Echidna Software and created a new website: this one. I wanted to move my online presence away from social media and onto a blog again, and my writing on Sassy Echidna had slowed enough that it had become more of a portfolio site than a proper blog. However, I opted not to revive Sassy Echidna itself: I was 27, coming on 28, and wanted some distance from the writings I made as a still-maturing college student and some independence from Google tech (the old site was made and hosted on Google's Blogger platform).
In November of 2021, as lockdown restrictions were relaxing, I returned to the Colorspace Labs' First Friday Arcade for the third and final time. I reached out to Stephen and John to gauge their interest in showcasing as Underground Arcade Collective again. Unfortunately, in the intervening pandemic years, much had changed. While Stephen continues to make tabletop games to this day, his video game making days were now behind him. He'd eventually leave Baltimore and move out to the Montana wilderness to live an incredibly cool life out there. As for John, he had already returned to his home state of Utah. He still makes games and showcases them live at events, so I'm so glad that one of us is still going strong.
So I exhibited Underground Arcade alone, with just five of my best short games: Gewgawlicious, American Wallrunner (which I was unable to showcase at previous family-friendly events given the f-bombs littered throughout), the Danger Zone Friends demo, Bloodjak II, and Clark Stanley's Van Racer, which was the only post-pandemic game I could add to the roster. As always, it was a blast. While I'd bust out the old game setup for a neighborhood block party in 2025 (some middle schoolers were entertained for 20 minutes), this would otherwise be my final time showcasing my games live.
The return of First Friday Arcade was an anomaly - the rest of the event circuit I had been running before the pandemic did not come back so quickly, if at all. Gamescape would be part of Artscape again by 2024, but I don't think it's been part of it since, and if applications were open for other years, I didn't find them. Cecil Con was over, and I wasn't interested in returning to Comic Con for Kids.
Sometime after that, I attended the first post-pandemic Philly Game Mechanics meeting, and I felt out of place. I recognized very few faces from before the pandemic, and the more vocal people there seemed to be pie-in-the-sky “I'm starting my first game and I'm going to spend years making an indie masterwork and it's going to sell” types, and while I used to be more like them, those weren't the peers I was looking for at this stage of my life. A semi-legendary Game Maker developer whose games I played as a child was there, and when I told him I enjoyed his past work, he immediately asked me if I wishlisted his current game on Steam, which was off-putting. I've no idea what the community's like now (I know there are wonderful folks from before who are still involved, and some cool devs I know from online who are involved), but at the time I felt like PGM wasn't for my scene anymore, even less punk than it was before. From time to time, I'll consider rejoining, check the Discord server, see six channels dedicated to “professionalization,” and change my mind.
Cardinger
As far as actual game releases went, the early 2020's have been my least prolific era since 2012. While I had released a print-on-demand (and later print-and-play) version of Card Games vs Literary Characters in January, called Cardinger, I otherwise would not release a single actual video game in 2021, breaking my streak of at least releasing one game every year since 2013. I even skipped the winter 2020-21 Sekret Santa jam, the first one I'd skip since 2016. The pandemic, the end of Underground Arcade Collective, and my withdrawal from game jams all marked the end of what was the most exciting and prolific creative period of my life. While I was hard at work on Jailbird Nocturne, grad school, and tying up my legal gender transition, I otherwise was starting to feel like I was failing, like I had lost some essential part of myself. Am I still am game dev if I'm not releasing games?
Beyond feeling like I hit my lowest point creatively, 2021 was the most creatively isolated I'd been in a long time. The regular face-to-face interactions at festivals and most of the friendships I had built were gone. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and prompted a gradual exodus off that platform, many of the online connections I had built would be lost as well. Almost the entirety of the online and offline social network in indie games I had spent years of my life building had disappeared in a very short period of time.
These 20's are (not) Roaring (2021-2025)
The End of Grad School
Vaudeville & Sword, Jailbird Nocturne, and Bug Mystery? The Explosion Speaks!
Early development screenshots of Vaudeville & Sword using placeholder assets
While I had skipped the 2020 Sekret Santa jam, the new host for the jam, TheCakeFlavor, messaged me and encouraged me to join again. So I participated in the 2021 jam. The game that came out of it (in January of 2022) was Vaudeville & Sword, my second complete RPG Maker game, and the first one I made in RPG Maker 2003, a classic version of the software that was used to make some of my favorite RM games: Space Funeral, OFF, Facets, and Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle. Lisa's sister Claire made music again. I like this one. I wrote pretty extensively about making it when it came out, so I won't repeat myself too much here.
Vaudeville & Sword
It was a fine game, but the download count for Vaudeville & Sword was lower than almost anything else I made in the past decade. My newfound lack of connection to the greater community was now quantifiable. I had hoped that Danger Zone Friends' success in 2020 would transfer to interest in my other games, but there was not such luck.
Jailbird Nocturne, September 2022
By September of 2022, I was roughly halfway through Jailbird Nocturne's development. 6 of the 7 planned chapters were playable, though little did I know that the final chapter would go on for longer than I anticipated and split into two. As long as the game took, and as emotionally challenging as my life was becoming as I entered the dissertation stage of my PhD, I never felt like I got stuck in an inescapable swamp with Nocturne the way I did with my other (doomed) multiyear projects like Waker and Monsterpunk. After 15 years of finishing games, I learned how to keep things focused, how to work efficiently, and how to determine what parts of the game to spend time on, and which planned elements to cut. As I wrote in my postmortem, building off the code and assets I made for Danger Zone Friends (a “test run” of Jailbird Nocturne I knew I liked making and playing) kept development feasible throughout. While I grew a lot over the course of making Nocturne, I never felt like I outgrew the project and was shackled by it, and when it came to the imperfections that younger me left in the game, I was now experienced and mature enough to accept that those early bits I made were still good enough and could remain as they were. My best in 2020 may not have been my best in 2022 or 24, but it was good enough. I think years of watching people play and enjoy my older games at events, and years of making games for Glorious Trainwrecks, had eroded some of my perfectionistic tendencies, and I think I was finally in the right headspace to make the sort of massive magnum opus I had been trying to make since 2011 and see it through.
In hindsight, whether it was because I was in right headspace, or whether it kept me in the right headspace, the biggest difference between completing Jailbird Nocturne versus failing to finish Station to Station, Waker, or Monsterpunk, was that I didn't feel a need to participate in every major game jam that came my way, nor a need to produce for the sole purpose of maintaining audience interest. This was partially because I was disconnected from broader communities (bad), but also because I had become increasingly skeptical of the need to chug out regular content to increase site traffic for the benefit of corporate social media websites (good).
Everything surrounding my creative work felt like it had gone downhill, but at least Jailbird Nocturne was turning out to be a very good game.
2023 came and went, and I went another year without releasing a game. That was the year I dropped out of grad school. The first two years went swimmingly: I was awarded fellowship funding, got straights A's in my coursework, passed my comprehensive exams on the first try, and got above average ratings as a statistics instructor, having only served one semester as a teaching assistant before being “promoted” early to teaching the class solo. But I would proceed to spend the next two years banging my head against the wall, trying to write a dissertation prospectus that was incoherent and contrived. I tried to draw a line between my genuine passions in trans identity and online underground art through capital-P politics, and… I couldn't. At least, not well. I spent hours in libraries and coffee shops, staring at the manuscript, writing nothing, going home, and assuming the fetal position in my room.
Maybe I chose the wrong field of study - communications, media studies, gender studies, or philosophy would have been better fits. Maybe it would have worked out if my original advisor hadn't left for a better job after my second year - nobody else in the department was as available or as good a fit. In any case, The hard deadline for submitting a prospectus was coming up that fall, and I knew I wasn't going to make it. I submitted my exit letter in the summer, claimed a conciliatory Master's degree, and dropped out. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. I found myself a job in a workshop in the fall, making trinkets out of used vinyl records. I was frustrated that I hadn't gotten myself any closer to a middle-class income coming out of grad school than going into it, but I was happier, and I was surrounded by a cohort of creative and queer coworkers that helped me get back in touch with myself. I was an intellectual, sure, but while academia was now closed to me, creative expression was as readily available to me as it always had been.
In February of 2024, researchers from Miguel Hernández University contacted me to include footage of the Morphine Western Revenge as part of the Game[in]g Problems: Drugstore exhibition at the Cigarreras Cultural Center in Alicante, Spain, in April. It didn't translate into any new plays or downloads, but I appreciated the recognition.
Also in April, after three and a half years, Jailbird Nocturne was playable from start to finish and in a presentable enough state for playtesting. I recruited my friends and watched them play. When I wasn't, I was playing through the game repeatedly, trying every playstyle, checking to see if the game was beatable with the minimum amount of experience points obtainable, and so on. I must have completed the game a half dozen times that year.
Jailbird Nocturne, May 2024
At the start of the year, I looked at the remaining work I had to do, set myself a release date of August 2024, and I kept to it. 3 years and 10 months later, Jailbird Nocturne was out! College me's dream of releasing a massive indie masterwork was accomplished.
Jailbird Nocturne
I'm prouder of this game than anything else I've made. It features some of my best music, art, writing, and design. I am especially proud of the bosses. Most significantly, Jailbird Nocturne felt like I had a breakthrough in how I told stories. While I usually fall back on humor and whimsy in my work at the expense of drama, thematic exploration, and character development, Nocturne felt like a deeper, better-rounded story than anything else I had written.
Shortly after the digital release, I asked Pizza Pranks to add a physical version of Jailbird Nocturne to his game tape market
It accidentally turned into the most personal game I ever made. Moreso than usual, every major character was some facet of myself. Bleucifer's issues with self-imposed social isolation, Grace's issues with her identity, and Agnes' issues with seeing a self-destructive task to the end all mirrored struggles I had worked through (or was working through) over the course of my life. The game's development period largely coincided with my time in grad school, and a lot of the game's themes about work, responsibility, coercion, desire, and freedom came out of the torment I was feeling about my PhD. For the second time now, Agnes (who transitioned between the events of the two games) knew what was best for me all along: just as I was processing my feelings about gender through her in DZF, I was processing my feelings about grad school through her in Nocturne.
I was hoping that the popularity of Danger Zone Friends would translate into downloads for its sequel. My hopes were misplaced; I released my magnum opus to near-total silence. During the first year, the game got as few downloads as my least popular jam games did. When I published my postmortem of Jailbird Nocturne in November of 2025, over a year later, I noted as much. I was proud of my work, but I continued to feel defeated. In 2013, I still had the fleeting luxury of having a near-guaranteed audience for a game just by putting it on the internet. In 2019, I had built a modest following and felt enmeshed in online and offline communities. In 2024, post-pandemic, the reality continued to sink in that I had no longer had either of those things.
I had a tough time motivating myself to work on games in the year that followed Jailbird Nocturne's release – I was feeling burnt out and needed a break, and I struggled to find joy in the games I was making. I participated in the 2024 Sekret Santa jam and would release Bug Mystery? The Explosion Speaks! in January of 2025, but that was it. I think Bug Mystery still managed to be cute, funny, and poignant, but that was despite myself. When I was making it, I mostly felt like I was going through the motions.
Bug Mystery? The Explosion Speaks!
Starting in 2025, there'd be a consistent theme in my writings that I felt like I was nearing the end of my creative career. I used to have dozens of ideas of games I wanted to make bouncing around in my head, and the energy to act on those ideas. Now, I had consistently felt like I maybe had just one or two more games I wanted to see through, and not much energy to act on them.
Things Get Better (2025-present)
Socks Make People Sexy
Monsterpunk, Villain Sword II, and Motor Oil and Sword
We're now close enough to the present day that anything I write about my current projects feels more like self-promotion than historical recordkeeping, but the previous section ending on a downer, and I want to offer some reassurance that I'm doing much better now.
Nearly six years after I last touched it, I replayed the last build of Monsterpunk, played it, and found I had a good time. I finally had enough distance from it that I could take it on its own terms as a standalone work, divorced from its fraught development. I decided to mostly leave the game as is, but I made a few necessary changes to make it playable – I added a character select screen at the start, adjusted some experience curves to pace the game better for the missing mid-game content, and fix a couple of bugs. I uploaded it to itch in March of 2025, and after 11 years, Monsterpunk was finally done.
As early as 2023, I'd been thinking about my follow-up RPG to Jailbird Nocturne. In the same way that Nocturne felt like a necessary iteration on DZF, there were further iterations I wanted to make to Nocturne's combat system, and I wanted to explore the more dramatic style of storytelling I had stumbled across in that game. I feel like I still hadn't said my “final word” on the RPG genre.
I was interested in a western-inspired setting where the characters were all escaping from authoritarian, patriarchal regimes to a lawless frontier, but once I fleshed out the map and history of the world, I realized it was too much for me to take on. The story was too grounded in realism and took place in too many places: the quality and quantity of background art I'd have to make was too much. So I shelved it.
When I finished Jailbird Nocturne, it unclogged a blockage that had been holding me back ever since around the time I deleted all my games in 2009. Ever since then, I had a hard time letting myself just… make games with things in them that I liked and was interested in, and if I did, it was often in spite of myself. There was an unconscious, unfettered joy in creation that I had lost back then, and I think, when Jailbird Nocturne ended up being as unintentionally personal as it was, I began to accept that exploring things that I found interesting through my art, and making art about my lived experience, wasn't self-indulgent - that was just self-expression, honey. That's what all the other good artists were doing all along.
So I rethought what I wanted to make, and I really just wanted to make a game about gender, queerness, and motor scooters that was inspired by the subversion of gendered fairy tale tropes in my favorite anime, Revolutionary Girl Utena. Despite my attempts to keep the world-building and magic systems soft, many of the ideas from my scrapped “fantasy western” setting bled back in, and before I knew it, the story was taking place in a lawless realm surrounded by totalitarian, warring countries. I was drawing a fictional map, I was charting historical events, the worldbuilding became much firmer than I intended, but this time the “anything goes” fairytale framing and more geographically narrow narrative made the story feel approachable as a solo project.
I technically started work on Motor Oil and Sword (working title) in the summer of 2025, but I was barely pecking away at it. It took me three months to finish drawing the sprites for the first of my party members, who would ride around in a fairly barren tilemap. I hadn't quite recovered from Jailbird Nocturne, and my motivation for actually working on games was still pretty low.
After I had published my Jailbird Nocturne postmortem in November, online game dev friend John Thyer had noted my frustrations about my lack of community, and kindly invited me to the server for games community Socks Make People Sexy. It was a better fit than most of the online communities I had joined in the past – there were a lot of fellow queers here, and the game devs shared a sense of skepticism about the commercial indie game development that I found refreshing. It's impossible for any online community to replace Underground Arcade Collective, but for the first time in a long time, I had creative peers who were making exciting work who were also excited about my work, and I rediscovered my spark.
My work on MOaS accelerated in November after joining Socks, having now found the motivation to actually work on the game on a regular basis with enthusiasm. I had people that my games mattered to again. Thank you John.
My Jailbird Nocturne postmortem also turned out to be better marketing for the game than anything I had done prior. In the following months, a number of friends and strangers had come out of the woodwork to play the game and talk to me about their experiences, which was meaningful.
Finally, I had submitted Nocturne to the 2025 Queer Games Bundle that summer, which not only got me some plays, but also got me a few hundred dollars in revenue, which was amazing. Today, the game has over 200 downloads on itch, which was small potatoes compared to the 3,000 downloads that Danger Zone Friends got, and microscopic potatoes in the context of internet notoriety, but that was enough plays that I felt the project was worth spending four years on. I'm grateful that people are enjoying it.
Villain Sword II: Ash Returns
John Thyer hosted the Cookie Cutter game jam in the early months of 2026, which many Socks members participated in, including myself. The game I made was Villain Sword II: Ash Returns, a sequel to Vaudevilla & Sword (Vaudville and... ville and... villain...). I shatter that game's fourth wall pretty thoroughly – I am a character in it - and through that game, I processed a lot of my feelings about community and the state of my creative career through blog excerpts and my stand-in's dialogue. Maybe it helped.
2003-2012/2012-2016/2016-2020/2020-2026