For nearly three years, I’ve been quietly working on a project for Choice of Games, and now it’s here.
Heart of the House is out now, just in time to be the perfect read for Halloween or dark autumn nights. It’s a game full of horror - not just the spooky, ghostly sort, but of the horrors we inflict on one another, and the horrors of oppressive legacies. Of course, no haunting would be complete without ghosts, nightmares and skittering, tenebrous things.
Heart of the House is also about family, about friendship, about the responsibility we have to the people around us. About the many ways to be trapped, and the many routes to freedom.
So light some candles and settle in for a ghostly time.
Live life as a Victorian-era occult investigator with secrets of your own.
Fall in love over sweet, simple romances or steamier fare (including romance paths specifically crafted for ace characters).
Explore a gothic setting that has room for character of all genders, races and sexualities.
Solve a mystery that has been haunting a family for centuries - or use your investigative skills to serve your own ends.
Play through 360,000 words of branching horror, where your choices drive the narrative.
Credit for the absolutely gorgeous cover art above goes to one of my favorite artists, Abigail Larson.
(Also, my thanks to the testers, readers and editors who made this game what it is, and my ever-patient husband, family and friends. As it turns out, 360,000 words takes a while.)
Get Heart of the House on Steam, iOS, Android or Amazon, or play it in your browser.
people who dont even care about language: how can you just CHANGE grammar??? add new wORds?? unacceptable!!! language must never change!!!!!11 kids these days cant even spell!!
people who study language: ANARCHY!! ANARCHY!!!! LANGUAGE IS FLUID AND WORDS AREN'T REAL!! change! the! grammar! rules!! burn a dictionary!!! NO ONE CARES!!!!!
Have we talked about how Imperator Furiosa was the action movie girl?
You know the one. She’s allowed to hang out with the boys. She doesn’t take shit from anyone. If someone gets fresh, they’ll get hit. There can be only one because hey, we don’t want to make this a chick flick.
Furiosa was that girl. She could drive the truck just as good as any of the men, and she was a member of Joe’s crew. One girl allowed. Doing as she’s told, never taking up too much space-
-until she literally hijacks the narrative, drags five other women into this boy’s club of a series and makes all the men eat her dust and serve her story for the next hour and forty-five minutes.
Not in a bad way, though. I overworked myself a bit, but that’s done - I’m finally confident enough in my various contracts to say goodbye to my day job. That’s a transition I’ve been planning to make for the past 5 years or so. I’m delighted to finally take the plunge.
Also knocked off my five-year plan: selling my apartment and moving. The last two months have been a mess, moving from the one-bedroom apartment where I’ve spent the last 10 years to a brand new three-bedroom townhouse. My husband and I overextended ourselves in both time and money getting this place just right, but it’s almost perfect now. I mean, check out this book wall:
We built that. I’ve always wanted one, and we made it happen. I’m inordinately proud of that!
Other highlights:
That time my brother-in-law got married.
That time my mom got married.
That time we drove to Redmond to see Of Monsters and Men.
That time I watched Amanda Palmer serenade Chris Hadfield.
Fan Expo!
Oh, and making these stickers a thing of the past:
Work’s been great, too. I’m closing in on 100k words for my Choice of Games project, so that should be done in the next few months. I’m joining Take This as Website Editor next week. I’m writing for some awesome outlets. Rezgo’s doing great, which is a big deal for my little family.
And speaking of family, we’re getting a dog in about a month. This wee pup:
She’s still a bit squishy-faced, but she’s only four weeks old - give her a break.
So all of this has been tiring, but rewarding. I’ve even managed to stay relatively healthy through all of that. My anxiety and depression are both firmly in hand, and this year was certainly a test.
Thanks to everything that’s been going on, I’m in no position to put together a top 10 anything this year. (Aside from books. I’ll never neglect you, books.) For my own reference more than anything, I’ll try together to put together a list of my favorite books, games, TV, music and films this year, but some of those are going to be pretty spare.
All in all, a hell of a year. I hope 2016 will be as good. I also hope I learn to manage my time better so that I can enjoy more of it, because goddamn am I ever tired.
Oxford Dictionaries announced its word of the year today:
Yep. That’d be “Face with Tears of Joy.” An emoji.
I’m a word nerd of the new school - I firmly believe that language is fluid, that rules are made to be bent, and that if it gets the point across, it’s often good enough.
But an emoji isn’t exactly a word, is it? It’s a pictograph. That doesn’t make it any less effective at communicating an idea, but those two things aren’t interchangeable. I don’t want to be one of those pedants shaking my fist at these kids at their damned “selfies,” “hashtags” and “GIFs,” but Face with Tears of Joy tests my dedication to the evolution of language.
Even if emojis were words, they wouldn’t be part of the English language. They transcend the English language. They can express complex emotions and ideas that we struggle to get across in words, and they can do so across normal language barriers. That’s wonderful.
Face with Tears of Joy still isn’t a word, though. It’s not a phrase, either, as some words of the year have been.
It would be easy to write this off as clickbait - Oxford Dictionaries picks something controversial, we write a thousand hot takes and angry screeds, and they remain oh-so-relevant for another season. That’s less interesting than the alternative, though: that there is legitimacy in this choice. It isn’t the first time a non-English language has made its way into the English lexicon (hi there, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, and that’s just a start). It might be the first time an entirely new character set has made its way into the English language, though. Am I wrong? Have others come before?
If we want to adopt emoji into English, then Oxford Dictionaries should take it all the way: develop an emoji dictionary. Lay down some standards. As a universal language, emojis are currently lacking. I never meant to say my soul was escaping my body with that :scream:, Samsung-using friends.
And in the meantime, English itself could still use a little attention. Sure, the short list included “on fleek,” and “lumbersexual,” which probably aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. But it also featured the singular “they,” with a nice lecture on how it’s been an accepted usage for centuries.
“The extension of epicene they to refer to specific individuals (as in, “Alex is bringing their laptop”) is a more recent development. Like the gender-neutral honorific Mx, singular they is preferred by some individuals who identify as neither male nor female, and media outlets and other public institutions are increasingly respecting such preferences by referring to people as they wish to be identified.”
We could have shone a light on something that would have made a difference to the non-binary population - instead we got Face with Tears of Joy.
Perhaps that’s to be expected. Oxford Dictionaries sets down the language of the young as quickly as it can, and it should be applauded for that - but we don’t live our lives or restrain our language to the speed of a dictionary entry update. We Millennials will go on with our strange words and our gender fluidity, disrupting the world while traditional institutions try to keep up.
Even marketers have trouble with us, after all:
Millennials' "gender fluidity" will make it harder to sell washing detergent and baked beans, says market researcher pic.twitter.com/llgPodRHQJ
Since the final episode of Life is Strange came out, reactions to the ending have been mixed. That was always going to happen - as a few dozen pun-filled openers have pointed out, that's why it's called Polarized.
The dominant opinion seems increasingly to be this: one ending is the 'right' ending. The official ending. Anything else is practically non-canonical. And that right ending? It has problems. Big problems, if you look at it through a queer lens.
But what if those problems are totally appropriate, and that ending isn’t the only right ending at all? It’s possible I’ve been playing too much We Know the Devil. It’s possible that everything looks a little too much like a metaphor for queerness right now. But isn’t it a lot more fun to think that Life is Strange’s endings might have Meant Something about being queer?
Spoilers, disasters and heavy-handed symbolism ahead.
The Tornado Is a Metaphor
There are a few theories floating around about the big bad tornado that drives the last act of the game. It's Rachel Amber's revenge. It's chaos theory turned physical. It's the consequences of all of Max's actions coming back to haunt her. It's a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey bullshit.
None of those hold up extremely well aside from (maybe) the last. But it doesn’t have to be so inexplicable if there's nothing meteorological or metaphysical about it. So let’s make a declarative statement: the tornado is a metaphor for Max’s sexuality.
(The destruction it causes is, of course, also metaphorical in that case. Gayness hasn't turned into a storm that can literally destroy Arcadia Bay.)
How does that work with our binary selection of endings? Super well! But let’s go through the evidence first.
Damsels in Distress
Max - in this reading, our queer, closeted Max - recently came back to the small town she grew up in. She hasn't made waves, she hasn't made a lot of friends or drawn a lot of attention to herself.
Within two days, she has the chance to save the lives of two other girls. One is Kate Marsh: religious, respectable, wronged. Kate shows us the consequences of even being perceived to step out of line - bullying, shame, possibly even death. If Kate is coded queer (a big if), she's the safe queer girl. The one who doesn't express her sexuality at any cost, who is afraid to disappoint her family, who suffers in silence. Whatever else she is, she's clearly a Good Girl. And when Max tries to help her, Max is lauded for it.
Then there's Chloe.
Chloe is not a good girl. She drives her truck too fast. She gets into fights. She does drugs, steals, smokes, plays with guns. She has blue hair and tattoos. She talks back to her parents. Chloe is a Bad Girl - that couldn't be made clearer. She's a mess. And unlike dear, sweet, Kate, she can be kind of a bitch at her worst.
She's also hella queer. Yeah, she checks out Mark Jefferson. Maybe she's bi. Maybe she just respects a well-groomed beard. However it goes, she loved Rachel Amber, and she loves the hell out of Max Caulfield.
Chloe is the unsafe queer girl. The one who expresses her sexuality, who doesn't want to hide who she is for her family's sake, who suffers loudly and aggressively.
And when Max saves her from getting shot by Nathan, Max isn't lauded for it. No, that's just the start of a series of events that gets worse, and worse, and eventually leads her into serious trouble.
Arcadia Bay has been hard on Chloe: she got kicked out of school. She has no friends. Her girlfriend (?) disappeared and no one takes her seriously when she tries to do something about it. Her stepdad hits her. As soon as Max comes into her orbit, Max gets pulled into trouble too.
Keeping score, Life is Strange has two (potentially) queer girls in Kate and Chloe. Both of them are driven steadily toward self-destruction.
For our uncertain, closeted Max, that can't look like a great set of options.
Going Ape with Warren
Warren, Warren, Warren. Here's our safe option at last. Good kid, good grades. Doesn't get in a lot of trouble, even if he beats the ever-loving shit out of Nathan Prescott. White knight, willing to accept Max no matter what - though he'd sure prefer that she was into him too. He's even totally chill with her making out with girls.
The worst consequence of going for Warren? Another girl who's into him is kind of unhappy about it. But she gets over that.
Warren is a nice, safe bet.
Look, it's Super Max
So what about time travel? If the tornado is a metaphor, time travel must be one too.
And of course it is. The game makes it pretty textually explicit: it’s the closet, both in its safety and its isolation.
It lets her see the immediate consequences of anything she chooses to do, while the future ones get worse and worse. It lets her walk the safest path in every circumstance, and avoid harsh judgements she's not prepared to handle. It lets her make friends without ever having to be herself.
Other-Max berates Max for some of these exact things in her nightmare.
Time travel literally lets her explore her sexuality without committing to it, if that's how you choose to play it. This is not subtle.
A Perfect Future
So Max goes along her merry way, trying to have everything: safety with Warren, excitement with Chloe, fun without danger, a modicum of popularity…
And it all falls apart. Doing her best to walk the fence does her no good, and she almost ends up dead for her trouble.
She goes back and fixes it all. Saves Kate, saves Chloe, gets Jefferson arrested. She wins the contest, has her work exhibited, and has the perfect future all lined up.
And then the tornado rears its ugly head. Chloe's back in Arcadia Bay, and she's in trouble, and Max can't just forget about her and go on with her perfect life…
No matter what Max does, she can't avoid that damn tornado. It just keeps dragging her back.
May The Best Ship Win?
Now, this might be a little controversial, but I’m just going to say it: however you play, Warren isn't (yet) the love of Max's life. Warren and Max might be cute together. They might have fun. But over and over, the game shows us that it's Max and Chloe. Half of Polarized is Max coming to terms with that in her nightmares. Even if you don't make any moves on Chloe, her importance to Max is paramount. You're never given a choice in that.
But maybe Warren could be the love of Max's life. She could give him a chance. He's cute enough, he likes her… so even when she's just risked her life to go save Chloe, even when she's about to throw this whole reality away, she can kiss him. "For luck."
It's sweet, but not exactly impassioned. Still, this time, she says, she's going to make all the right choices. Save everything, be Super Max… and choose the safe path, where she ends up with the safe, sweet guy, and the world doesn't end in chaos and destruction?
Polarized
Now we come to the end: two girls standing on a cliff, trying to figure out how to save each other and hang on to their world. But of course, they can’t have it both ways. Max has tried everything. It always ends in pain.
So Max has a choice to make, and as she tells Chloe, she can't make it. But as Chloe tells Max, she's the only one who can.
In this reading, that choice and those buttons may as well say “be yourself” vs. “bury the things that matter to you.” Or “come out” vs. “go so deep into the closet that you never see daylight.”
Chloe loves Max, no matter what. She loves her so much that she's willing to sacrifice herself to keep Max from having to embrace that metaphorical tornado if she doesn't want to. She’s not going to force Max into the self-destructive path she sees herself on, that Kate Marsh wound up on through no fault of her own.
With Chloe out of the way, Max can be with (safe, understanding) Warren. Chloe's mom and step-dad can be happy together. Chloe, who so obviously thinks she brings nothing but pain to the world, can make the world a better place through her absence. Arcadia Bay - the town that has tried time and time again to destroy Chloe - wins. Chloe embraces her sad, queer-girl destiny, and Max helps her meet it.
And Max… Max gets one last kiss to carry with her, then makes the choice to give up all her own choices. To commit to the path that makes everyone else happy - and hope that maybe she'll be happy again one day too. All it costs her is Chloe, and the chance to step out of the closet. She has to shove her sexuality and her time travel deep down inside and forget they were ever there lest she cause another disaster. The player and Max choose to bury the gays so the straights may live.
Or they say "fuck it."
If two girls being in love is going to make the world burn, then let it burn. If Arcadia Bay only wants them if they're good girls, if they toe the line, if they fall in love with nice boys and never do anything that good girls shouldn't do? Let it die. It's built on rotten foundations - the whole town knows it.
And where does that lead…?
Who knows? It might not be a good ending. Embracing freedom can be terrifying. We don't get to find out who gets hurt by Max's choice to be herself, but some people certainly get hurt. We don't get to see if Chloe and Max will be together forever - love can't always make it through such extreme pressure.
But Chloe is the fulcrum of Max's decision. Right or left. The bae or the Bay. Live with the consequences of your actions, or deny yourself the right to act in the first place. Choose the tornado, and all that comes with it, or take the certain path and take the damage into yourself. Let the gay girls live and give it their best shot, or bury them.
Choose love, and once again this song plays for two girls holding hands on a cliff, facing the future with honesty and fear:
Let's say sunshine for everyone
But as far as I … can remember
We've been migratory animals
Living under changing weather
Someday we will foresee obstacles
Through the blizzard, through the blizzard
Today we will sell our uniform
Live together
Sunshine for everyone might be nice, but the cost is way too damn high.
How to work seamlessly in ChoiceScript between PC, Mac and iPad
This weekend, I gave myself what sounded like a simple project: to find a way to work on my ChoiceScript game on my iPad.
Easier said than done.
The problem is that I’m accustomed to the niceties of working on a desktop system. I use Notepad++ on my Windows PC so that I can use the custom ChoiceScript syntax highlighting module available here. I use TextWrangler on Mac so I can use another ChoiceScript syntax highlighting module. Both apps are free, by the way. And the community members who made the modules are awesome people.
I was also syncing my files through Dropbox to keep everything nice and up to date. All very nice, clean, and easy to work with.
So iPad poses a problem, because custom syntax highlighting isn’t much of a thing in iOS apps. I found one that has it, though: Textastic. It’s 7.99 USD, available separately on iPhone and iPad. I’ve only tried this with the iPad version, but as far as I know it should work on iPhone as well.
Second problem: there isn’t a Textastic-compatible ChoiceScript module available. No one has made one. Someone has, however, made a Sublime 2 module, and it’s their hard work that made this possible. It was a lot more complicated than just plunking that module into Textastic, but I recruited my husband’s assistance with the trickier parts and now we have something that works. Without further ado, my tried-and-tested method, seen working beautifully right here:
Set Up ChoiceScript Syntax Definitions
1. Get Textastic. (7.99 USD on iPad)
2. Download the ChoiceScript TextMate Bundle I’ve put together from aetheria’s syntax definitions. Unzip it and save it somewhere you can connect to via either FTP, WebDav or your own Dropbox. (If things seem weird, it’s probably because both Windows and Dropbox think a .tmbundle is a folder and treat it as such. It’ll be fine on iPad, though.)
3. In Textastic, select Local Files.
4. Tap the + icon at the bottom of the screen.
5. Create a new folder, and name it #Textastic - no other name will work. You can confirm that it’s correct by looking at the folder’s icon - if it’s a gear, you’re good.
6. Tap the #Textastic folder.
7. Tap the globe icon at the bottom of the screen.
8. Tap the + in the upper right to add a connection. If you already have Dropbox set up on your iPad this is super easy, just follow the steps on screen. If you’re using FTP or WebDAV, hopefully you already know what you’re doing.
9. Navigate to wherever you saved the .tmbundle file in step 2.
10. Tap the file and then tap Download to move it into your #Textastic folder.
11. Close the app - double click your home button to bring up multitasking and swipe Textastic up to close it completely.
Set up Syncing
Textastic has support for a bunch of services, but I recommend iCloud for this purpose. You can set up iCloud Drive on Windows and Mac, so it’s fully cross-platform, but more importantly, it’s the service Textastic syncs with most easily. It’s very much fire-and-forget.
Note that if you test your game *online* using Dropbox’s public links, you probably can’t do so with iCloud. You can use Dropbox with Textastic, it just takes a little more effort because you have to download and upload the files. Alternately, you can use iCloud to work on your files, and copy them to Dropbox when you’re ready to test them more publicly. You can preview your game in Textastic, (or in Firefox on desktop as usual) so you don’t need Dropbox for local testing.
For this, we’re using iCloud. If you don’t have it, install iCloud Drive on your main system to get started, then follow these instructions in Textastic on your iPad:
1. Tap iCloud.
2. Tap the plus icon at the bottom of the screen to create a new file. It doesn’t matter what you make - we’re just getting iCloud to create a Textastic folder.
3. Go to your computer. Copy your game’s files into the Textastic folder in iCloud Drive.
4. Back on your iPad, tap iCloud to browse your files. Look, there’s your game! Any changes you make here will be reflected on your other systems almost instantly (try not to have the files open on multiple systems at once to avoid overwriting your changes).
Once you’ve done this, you’ll also need to edit the files from iCloud drive on your other systems - but like Dropbox, it behaves like a normal part of the file system, so this shouldn’t be a big change.
Enable Syntax Highlighting
1. Open any of your scene .txt files in Textastic.
2. Tap the page icon in the upper right to bring up File Properties.
3. Tap Syntax Definition
4. Click ChoiceScript - once you’ve set it in one file, all your scenes should have proper highlighting. Yay!
Bonus: Change Editor Themes
The default Textastic theme isn’t great for ChoiceScript, in my opinion - it’s all a little dark. You can change it to one of the other built in themes by going back into the app’s settings (gear icon) and tapping Editor Theme. You can see how each of them changes the look of your script.
I liked IDLE, myself, but I wanted something a little closer to what I use in Notepad++. It’s not possible to make it identical, as far as I can tell - the themes don’t seem to support coloring normal brackets, and *label is the same color as other functions. Anyhow, I created a slight alteration of IDLE called IDLE-Choices that you can download here. It’s the one in use in all the screenshots. To install it in Textastic, follow the same steps you took to install the syntax definitions (dump it in dropbox, pull it into the #Textastic folder, kill and re-open the app).
Here’s a commission I did for Nissa. This is her OC Mira, and I must admit, it was nice to get back at drawing like this after a whole week of intense gaming rest.
If you guys are interested in getting a commission from me, you can click here!
This has temporarily become my blog for commissions of my D&D character, apparently, but I couldn't not share this. Decided to commission a more casual take on Mira done, and it turned out beautifully, don't you think?
Uppik was an absolute delight to work with, for the record.
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