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The Knife Sisters tarot cards is one of the rewards in our current Kickstarter campaign. I hope we’ll get the chance to make them because I’d love to see them come to life! ^^
Celebrating five years!
On this magical date – 2024.04.24 – Knife Sisters turns five years old. To celebrate, the game is free for 24 hours. Get it on itch-io!
It both feels much longer and much shorter since it was released.
We started conceptualizing it in late 2015, originally it was intented as either a novel or a web tv series (!), but it didn’t take long until it turned into a game – something we’re very pleased about.
Making and releasing it was a ride, though – afterwards I’ve understood that it actually was kind of a quick process. Knife Sisters was in development for two years and four months. It felt long, at that point, but really, it wasn’t.
Standing onstage at the Game Developers Meetup on the release date itself is a very fond memory! (Not being able to find any pictures from the event I suppose goes to show how busy those times were!)
The hurdles of marketing a game with adult content
So, the Kickstarter campaign is soon coming to an end! During this campaign I’ve learned so much that will be invaluable when the game launches this spring, and for that I am very grateful. But some of the things I’ve learned are a bit bitter to swallow ...
When I started this project, I didn’t think that much about how it would be received. That is a necessary starting point for me to be able to create things straight from my heart, saying exactly what I want to say, not thinking about how people will react. So I’ve been telling the story I wanted to tell, in the way I wanted to - and that means it has explicit sexual content in written form, it has some strong themes, and a little nudity here and there. The players who have tested the game have not had any complaints about that though! :) I wasn’t totally naïve - I knew from the start that I might not be able to sell the game on the biggest platforms such as the App Store and Steam. But I didn’t want those kinds of things to stop me from doing what I wanted.
I’ve always been interested in challenging norms, but maybe my being from Sweden (which is a pretty progressive country when it comes to how sexuality is viewed), made me not fully understand how different the view on sex is in other parts of the world. I’ve published four fiction novels, some of which are targeted towards young adults and include sexual content and no one have had any complaints. I’ve written erotic short stories aimed at teens and young adults, that will be published in an anthology by RFSU Malmö (an organization that engage in sexual politics) and those stories are just as explicit as anything in Knife Sisters. In Sweden it’s totally fine to write serious stories about sex. I’ve now understood how privileged we are to be able to do this.
Since the development process of Knife Sisters is coming to a close in a couple of months, I’ve since autumn started to reach out a bit more with the project. About that time, Steam changed their policy to allow for adult content, which I of course think is a good thing - but they’ve made it very hard for people to actually find that content. If users haven’t checked the box for wanting to see adult content, the game doesn’t show up in search results - even if the users themselves were looking for it. It’s as if the game doesn’t exist. (Don’t get me wrong - I’m glad that I can sell it on Steam at all.)
Friends of mine who’ve tested the game and who I’ve told about this get rather surprised. They don’t view the game as porn. But right now it feels like everyone else does. No, there’s one exception: Kickstarter doesn’t! They’re allowing me to do this campaign and I’m very happy about that. The problems arise when trying to market it. Facebook and Instagram doesn’t allow for marketing posts that refer to the game, since it includes adult content. It doesn’t matter if the post itself is super clean. Twitter takes it even further, not allowing my account to market any posts at all, since the account is associated with content that goes against their marketing policies. Anyone who’s seen my Twitter account I think can verify that there’s not much porn going on there … but that doesn’t seem to matter.
After trying to market posts on Instagram a few times, to see where the limits are, they’ve now blocked me from following people. I don’t know if that block will last, but if it does, I think I can see that Instagram account as pretty much dead. It doesn’t matter that much, because I haven’t got many followers, but I’ve been posting there since I started the project, so it has some sentimental value to me.
I understand that platforms want to have rules, I understand that they don’t want their users to get explicit sexual content and porn shoved in their faces ... but this is far from that.
In a way all of this makes me feel that what I’m trying to do is more important than I originally thought, and that this is much more of a political thing than I thought - and that’s spurring me in a way. But in another way, I just want the people who might like my game to be able to find it. And that seems like a big challenge right now.
On ethical dilemmas in games
Yesterday we we’re at SpilBar in Copenhagen, showcasing the game and listening to great talks about moral choices in games. I of course support the idea that games can be much more than entertainment (not saying that entertainment is anything wrong, though).
Jordan Erica Webber presented ideas from the book “Ten things Video Games can teach us about Life, Philosophy and Everything”, by herself and Daniel Griliopoulos, and Miguel Sicart talked on the topic “Choices That Matter: Games Through the Lens of Ethics”. Tomasz Kisilewicz gave us his thoughts on the processes of making This War of Mine and Frostpunk.
In Knife Sisters I’m also dealing with ethical dilemmas and the question of how far you are willing to go to be accepted by someone you love. Most of us want to make the right choices - but how do you actually know what’s right? That’s up to you to decide, while playing the game.
Presenting - Your dates! #3: Mo’s active and endlessly curious. They’re always up for adventure: climbing, playing, wrestling, dancing … but also easily become restless. They will do their best to surprise you, and you’ll never know who’ll be bottom or top. They’re seldom at home - at least not alone. If you need someone to cheer you up, Mo will be there for you.
Presenting - Your dates! #2: Vicki is shy. Very, very shy. She smiles and blushes easily. She watches anime and plays video games. She is submissive and has a soft spot for pain. Vicki stays home a lot, but if you ask her out, she’ll probably say yes. And if you take her to anything japanese she will be as happy as a kid in a candy shop.
Yay! A preview demo of the game is now up at Itch. Find it here!! 💣💥⛓
Presenting - Your dates! #1: Naomi is a beauty, as sharp as her bangs, who loves to be in charge. One of her favorite kinks is plastic. She loves going to the kind of clubs where you have to bang a metal door in a deserted alley to get in, and she’ll gladly bring you along. She listens to industrial techno and wears black - exclusively. But she is much softer than you think.
