Vivid Foundry

Tanya Kan & friends creating artistic, human stories about social trust through video games and interactive media.

[vividfoundry]

One of Rebecka's in-game character art from the game Solace State: a 3D cyberpunk visual novel about becoming an activist during the biotech revolution!

This is designed by our Lead Artist @courtneyhowlett and rendered by our incredible Lead Artist @reillymackay! I (Tanya Kan, Director) asked Courtney to design Rebecka based on these flairing military-styled fashion that was trending on runways in the early 2010s. Part of this was because I have a jacket of this nature, part of it is because of Rebecka's very functional dress and to emphasize her stoic nature to make do with what she has.

[vividfoundry]

The personal coming-of-age game that I've been working forever on has been released, and it's part of Gayming LIVE Indie Festival this week! I totally came out during the game's development because that's what happens when you're introspective with your art. I drew from my omnidemi identity while writing the game scenes.

[vividfoundry]

Happy bi day of visibility to each one of you, to me, and to Solace State's protagonist Chloe! #bisexual🏳️‍🌈 #lgbtartist #bisexual #solacestate #visualnovel #gamedev #arttok #indiegames #booktok

Happy bi day of visibility to each one of you, to me, and to my indie game Solace State's protagonist Chloe!

Solace State's is a progressive cyberpunk hackivism game that's been 8 years in the making, and in the midst of it all, I came out! Writing the game really let me explore so much about myself, and my own place in the world, and learn so much about governance and activism.

[vividfoundry]

Happy Bi Visibility Day! I bring you video clips from Solace State, a queer hackivism game that I've been working on for over 8 years! It just recently launched on Steam PC and Xbox!

[solacestate]

Get to know Solace State’s characters!! @reillymackay made this lil’ comic featuring our game’s protagonist, Chloe. One thing you need to know about her? She won’t let anyone tell her what she can or can’t do.

[vividfoundry]

Toronto-made Solace State aims to bring unique voices to cyberpunk

Vivid Foundry's Tanya Kan unpacks the inspirations and goals behind her ambitious cyberpunk visual novel game.

I'm delighted that I was interviewed by Bradly from Mobile Syrup about my gamedev journey. The award-winning choice-driven cyberpunk visual novel started as a small creation of an experimental, atmospheric game about the Asian experience of alienation amid hypercapitalistic growth in a biotech revolution. Through fundraising and learning on the fly, it turned into a full-blown game with 31 fully illustrated, diverse characters on these cyberpunk and hopepunk themes! I also talk about some of the challenges we've faced with our small team in scoping up our production!

What are some game dev challenges that you've taken on, or other stories of development that inspire you?

[vividfoundry]

Year of 2023: Solace State is featured on Kotaku!

30 Indie Games You Should Know About Releasing In 2023

Whether you’re looking for high-speed action or contemplative narrative games, 2023 has something for you

Happy New Year! Wow, it's been a while!

Excitingly, our video game Solace State is featured on Kotaku's 30 Indie Games You Should Know About Releasing In 2023! "Do you like to get introspective with narrative adventure games that ask you big, life-changing questions...?" asks the article.

By the way, I took some time off during the holidays and into the New Year because early December was incredibly rough on my health. It was sorely needed! I feel like only this weekend do I find myself tackling my gamedev work with smiles & good energy again

[vividfoundry]

Newest in-game footage from our indie game Solace State, which started off years ago as my self-funded project and then got some excitement! Now we're a team of many talented specialists. I've put a lot of my own passions and experiences into the story! There will be a new trailer coming in early 2023!

[broadsandbroadswords]

Broads and Broadswords Zine a celebration of swords, girls with swords, nonbinary people with swords, and any combination therein. all proceeds will be donated to the The Transgender Law Center.

[all-or-nothing-baby]

sending love to trans dudes who can't/don't want to transition. love to trans dudes who don't want to wear binders, and to those who can't. love to those trans dudes who don't pass, and to those who don't actually care to pass. love to trans dudes who aren't all angles and androgynous looking. love to fat trans dudes. love to trans dudes who don't want to change their name, or who can't for whatever reasons. love to closet trans dudes. love to trans dudes of colour, trans dudes of any and all other minorities. love to all trans dudes, however you present, whoever you want to be, or whoever you can't be. love to all those trans dudes who can't be all look at me! and celebrate being trans! and just. yeah. so, so much love to all of those quiet trans dudes out there living their lives <333

[vividfoundry]

Solace State's a game that I'm making with a team of friends and very talented folks! At first it was just me working on it as a portfolio piece, and over time I put in my savings and later learned how to raise funds for it! Lots of stories to tell about how to gain confidence as a game project scales up! As the game nears launch, how does it run on the new Steam Deck? Very good so far! Since we are simultaneously releasing on Xbox and PC, our Lead Programmer Gabi Kim Passos has painstakingly set up controller support, and some of that translates to the Steam Deck well. This week, Developer @seamus-ly is working on recommended resolutions. The Steam Deck has a resolution of 16:10, but our game with diegetic text in placed into the 3D world has complete level design for over 150,000+ words that are fitted for 16:9. This is a new challenge, so I'm seeing what sort of changes might need addressing!

Meanwhile, I'm still sorting out where to connect with others and I've been trying Mastodon, which is super nice because they loathe ads and corporate attitudes of Twitter with a resounding ferocity.

I am also doing bookkeeping, upgrading libraries, coordinating programming, art, music, and Achievement assets, and building different versions of the game for testing. Before our weekly team meeting next week, I wanna do some in-game narrative writing too! That's on the lower end of the amount of chaos that I get up to in a week haha.

Feel free to ask me any questions about game development! Have a delightful weekend!

[svipvl]

I needed to say something. To commemorate those we have lost to hate in my own way. I'm just an artist. I don't have answers.

🖼️ 4K PNG https://i.imgur.com/kZqTE4x.png

Incidentally if you recognize the character, cool. Out of respect, I just couldn't brand this one.

[reillymackay]

what better way to start posting here than with my bb periwinkle✨

[vividfoundry]

I love Reilly’s art so much. 

[vividfoundry]

Today’s breakfast of apples while setting up my indie game in development on the Steam Deck! This is a never-before-seen screenshot! It’s testing nicely on the handheld device. What do you enjoy playing on the Steam Deck?

[vaspider]

Listen, if you are on Twitter and you haven't recently downloaded your data, you really need to. Like, now.

With the recent layoffs, I am willing to bet money that Twitter is going to implode very soon. Maybe not permanently, but dramatically, and very, very soon. Like "Liz Truss vs a head of lettuce" soon.

I base this quite simply on knowing the kind of shit my wife deals with every day, and listening to people on the news who have talked to Twitter employees about the site at all. Not only do I think there's some Thing that will cause Twitter to puke all over itself like a 19yo who just discovered wine coolers, but I think there are multiple Things, and they are not in the future. They are occurring right now.

They fired the people who know which software licenses are up for renewal next. They fired the people who know that this cache needs to be manually emptied, and yeah they should have written a script for it but there were so many other projects that it was easier for Bob to just manually do it on Friday mornings while on his 2nd cup of coffee. They fired the people who know to not poke this thing in that way bc this thing works in a non-standard fashion, but it works, so even though the software manual says "poke it," don't do that. They fired the people that know that this queue getting up over X number of tickets means it starts eating tickets and erasing half the data you need to fix issues, so you have to compress the ticket numbers at least every 2 days with an ad hoc utility script that Jane wrote after your team discovered this issue. Not all of the institutional knowledge is gone, but a lot of it is, and once that knowledge is gone, it's not coming back. Once that knowledge is gone, things unravel quickly at an institution that size.

Whatever happens on the social end of things - and that's a fucking mess - make your contingency plans for not losing touch with people now, and get downloads of your shit. Now. Not later. This will not fizzle out like LiveJournal. I'm willing to bet that it will simply cease to be one day soon. It might come back once it disappears.

I'm just not counting on it, and neither should you.

[megpie71]

Fun thing: downloading an archive of your data from Twitter requires... Twitter to be working, and they say it’s going to take at least 24 hours for the zip file to become available (and I have NO doubt that this specification was made back when they had the full staffing load, rather than Jason the Intern, Eric the Crawler and Timmy the (actual) Dog who are probably all that remains of the previous staff... because all the good people who didn’t get sacked have almost certainly expedited their resignations). 

Get your data early, folks.  It will almost certainly take longer than advertised.

[oldest-man-alive-blog]

How to access and download your Twitter data | Twitter Help

Learn about your Twitter data, what types of information you can access, and how to download it.

In case you're like me and didn't know how to download your Twitter data.

[musingsofaraven]

SREs and Ops people are the ones who keep sites up and running (naming convention for the job depends on the company and time period).

I worked in Ops for a company years ago that laid off about 1/2 the staff. Our team was the only one to only lose 1 person. Out of a team of about 15.

Because we kept the site running.

We were the ones who got woken up in the middle of the night when stuff went wrong. Not even for stuff that directly impacted users - at least right away. If it didn’t get fixed, it would impact users at some point, depending on the severity.

But we were protected from that layoff because we were essential to the site continuing to operate.

And Twitter just gutted the team that does that for them.

[bunnyshowwhytho]

This is such a typical "the capitalist who bought the company doesn't understand how the product works, so he cut costs in a way that's going to destroy the product and therefore the company" fatality.

Thank God I got off Twitter when it first looked like he was gonna buy it. Enjoy your imploding empire you sack of shit

[vividfoundry]

r/Cyberpunk - We are a group of game designers from 3 very different cyberpunk games, getting ready for the third annual Cyberpunk Day! Ask us anything about our games, creating unique dystopian worlds for players to experience, and more.

43 votes and 82 comments so far on Reddit

Did you know that Solace State’s on Reddit doing an AMA with fellow cyberpunk indie studios of LOW-FI and Cyber Knights? Join us! Ask us game dev questions!

[vividfoundry]

We’ve done so much development on Solace State! What is it? It’s an award-winning cyberpunk visual novel about a young hacker, Chloe, working with activists to fight for their voices to be heard in a militarized biotech city. Will you inspire hope despite the dystopic political landscape?

Features

Your choices matter to impact both personal relationships and political outcomes of a city

31 fully illustrated characters with dialogue lines, with characters of different cultural backgrounds and from all walks of life, with many LGBTQIA+ couples!

You can romance Torrent, Sueli, or Alden. Or you can chose asexual intimacy with them, and you can still learn their character arcs! In this game, Chloe's personal is political, and romance is one potential facet in her personal life

A 3D cinematic approach to visual novels

A gorgeous electronica and K-pop inspired soundtrack

Release date? Just several months to go! 

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/928000/

Discord: https://discord.gg/vividfoundry

We'll also be on Xbox!