Making Beautifully Personal Games With Nina Freeman - GDC Podcast Ep. 3

this is GDC podcast episode 3 are you mixing the radio host voice a little bit I should see breath this is GDC podcast episode 3 [Music] [Music] hey everybody we are back I am Chris Kraft editor-in-chief of Gamasutra I'm here with my co-host Alisa McAloon you are you're also the associate publisher yeah yeah you explained it my job is to stare at the website all day yeah yeah that is actually the only requirement on the job description must be willing to stare at a came industry website for refrigerator in control you just got to make sure nothing bad happens oh yeah oh

I haven't gone to the refrigerator in in control yeah well spoilers yeah there's a refrigerator in control it's it's been it's been spoiled you fight a refrigerator and everybody hates it welcome welcome back so yeah this is episode 3 we haven't been canceled yet by the bigwigs at Game Developers Conference we have managed to stagger way through to and hopefully we can make it through three without any major you know yeah no I feel like that's the way to jinx it like knock on wood or whatever superstition you subscribe to right there we are doing so good this is gonna be the longest lasting podcast ever created so before we get to our next guest our next guest is is huge by the way she's just basically I mean she's Forbes 30 under 30 I never got that it's too late for me you still you

still have two years to do something impressive so we'll see if that yeah clocks tickin yeah and yeah and she's also she was you know I'm not gonna spoil anything yet but she was also the IGF host you know the Indian independent Games Festival host in I'm not gonna even tell you the year because you know that's gonna give it away but it was pretty recent and and she's even a multiple times GDC speaker so yeah but we're not gonna quite bring her in yet what have you been up to us they won't even plan I got my PC back up and running after it was out of commission I killed my motherboard somehow don't you yeah I don't know I hope it doesn't happen again cuz I got a new one that I spent a lot of money at yeah you know you're not supposed to just pour water on your computer yeah yeah I know I'm learning that you like oysters what I said things on top of my computer from now on I think yeah that's good that's

that's how I do it now - I no one told me that you're not supposed to pour water directly I know I just uh pro gamer tips here at the GDC podcast yeah yeah this is for game developers and you know just if you want random tips no I was talking to someone on Twitter calm the other day and they reminded me that disco Elysium comes out so I like stayed up until 11:00 putting the pile of parts I'd compiled into my computer and getting everything working just so I can play this game today yeah Wow and that's that's made by I don't know how to pronounce it it's za um but there's also like a slash and right in the middle it's very stylish just the game yeah the game is very stylish what do you find stylish about disco Elysium from za oh it's got that good art so I've I think we've both only managed to play like 1520 of minutes of it on our lunch breaks today yeah but yeah it's got really stylish look at our the writing is like it's like being at a cool little poetry night that a friend of yours invited you to and just let it kind of

like jazzy feel to it and the voice acting is great and the first 15 minutes of that game super fun yeah yeah it is kind of poetic it's it's also got its got prose for days and yeah so far I've had a a tie speak to me it like lets you get in your own head and you know you have this inner voice that's that's talking to you and you talk to it and apparently inanimate objects talk to you as well and I like the unexpected weirdness of it ya know it's really weird how like conversations come out of nowhere and like because it's RPG depending on how you build your character at the beginning it's got that kind of like fallout to ask where if you just like have zero and you will just try to hit things with a rock instead of like opening doors it's like got that kind of writing but I'm this really like really really poetic and it's just good yeah I'm looking forward to putting some more time into that yeah so big GDC news

this week registration is open you can actually go buy some tickets and go now well not you can't go now you could plan ahead a little bit just incredibly early punctuality is important yeah yeah yeah try not to show of five months early yeah it's yeah shooting for March so that stuff is all alive on the website now at Judy conf calm and speaking of other GDC things which we kind of like to do here on the morning announcements or we're on YouTube now right yeah so far yeah the part of the fat gas will us also but uh so far the first two episodes are live up there and this one will be once it's live probably as well two Episode one is talking to grant shank Wyler about game production and

Episode two is talking to Matthew Burns about designing and eatin compelling at choices so you should give them both a listen they're really insightful give them a listen and then give them a thumbs up like subscribe another bill icon is YouTube's thing right yeah I don't you two baton but oh you're not a professional youtuber no no only the GDC YouTube channel yeah cool you know what else happened as far as GDC stuff GDC stuff happened we we closed out the IGF submissions we ended up getting 550 entries so that is off to the judging process that's a lot of it that's a lot of times yeah no I I know a few people I think IGF judges that we're talking about it just kind of like cracking their knuckles to sit down at the keyboard that's a lot of games to go through yeah do you think they crack the knuckles I mean you you have to flex it right you do the little like flex then

you start like hackers I would start every workday typing your keyboard yeah yeah and you know there's like submissions of clothes like I've seen you know the talks that I I can't talk about any of this but there's just gonna be a lot of really cool talks at GDC 2020 was not paid to say that specifically I'm literally part you know I literally get paid from by the company that runs GDC so I guess but but I really believe that yeah GDC 2020 has some really cool stuff coming up and I frankly cannot wait GDC kicks off on March 16th of 2020 right yeah yeah March 16th to 20th it's practically here oh yeah well I do like that but like the concept of time moving too quickly yeah yeah I can't yeah well speaking of moving I think that we

should get our next guest on listen I are kind of excited about this one right yeah yeah this is kind of just does indie game dev have royalty it's the kind of system political system does he use I would say that if there was some kind of royalty or monarchy our next guest would qualify I'm a plebe okay our next guests were very excited for this scrubb she is known for making these brilliant and intensely personal games she is currently a game designer at Tacoma developer fulbright while also doing these these other really great personal games known for the IGF nuovo award winning civil which is a game

about falling in love in an online game how do you do it where you like take dolls and you try to figure out how they do it sexually and also recently released the really great vignette formatted game called we met in May so here we go welcome to the podcast Nina Freeman happy to be here so for people who aren't you know familiar with you and you know they should be can you talk a little bit about your backgrounds in game development sure I so yeah like you said though right now I'm a game designer at fulbright in Portland Oregon and before that I was based in New York City so that's kind of where I got my start my way back background is in English literature I did like a lot of

poetry stuff back when I was in school and then I got kind of into the New York City game development scene through some friends who were doing like indie game stuff at the time and through them I like got super involved with going to like game jams in New York and different events like baby castles stuff and whatnot and that's kind of how I got started was just going to these things with my friends and making tiny games with them and participating in local events and stuff and yeah even like a lot of the early stuff I was working on was still like personal stuff not all that was because you know I'm doing game jams with my friends but I was really into like personal writing and poetry so I since that's what I was doing and that's how I learned to write I sort of instantly brought that over into into my game development life and during that

time that's when I worked on how do you do it with a bunch of my friends in New York and a bunch of other games Cybil sort of came out of that as well although I ended up working on that pretty heavily when I was in grad school at NYU and their integrated digital media program and then shortly after I got a job that Fulbright and worked on Tacoma as a level designer and still worked on my own personal project on the side again with lots of different friends I always work with sort of different teams on each side project but yeah so I've been doing Fulbright stuff and otherwise keeping up with my smaller games work on the side so that's that's sort of my background right yeah so all of you aspiring game developers listening right now that's exactly how you get into the game industry guaranteed success solved it's always interesting to hear how many like people in games I'm in a former English major I graduated with an English burning media

degree and I think like two other people at gamasutra are too and a bunch of like people in games that's always interesting to see how that like spirals out into different careers in game development yeah I mean what else I mean I also have an English degree and then I end up doing I'm doing a podcast now you know this is also how you get into podcast so English degrees gamedev or podcasting yeah so it's interesting also just academia leading into this career there are lots of young people there's there's always that question you know do I need to get a like a game design degree or game development degree to does that improve my chances of becoming a game developer or does it matter I think it it really depends on the situation I mean school in general is like always gonna be good right like you know getting an education

is good but it can be super expensive so like the only reason I was able to do undergrad and then grad school was cuz of like them and some out of financial aid I got because I did not come from a rich family so I was really lucky in that sense but I think like go to school if you can afford it and you're not gonna completely be like in debt for the rest of your life and if you you know can't really afford it there's a lot of other ways to build up what you would get from school I think the best thing you can get out of school for games portfolio and a body of work and also like being a part of a social space where developers are giving each other feedback I think those are the two most important things that you can get out of school but you can find that just in the real world too like I had that when I was getting into the game scene in New

York just because there was so many like community events not like that weren't academia related and I really got my start making games in that environment where I was like just with friends people in school and people not in school at local stuff so I think it really depends on your situation but I wouldn't put yourself in debt for school personally just make stuff like ship stuff put it online meet people get feedback actively seek that stuff out and just like build a portfolio if you're in school or not for some people the school makes that a lot easier and if you need that that's totally fine but yeah don't don't uh don't go into too much tricky yeah so let's talk about your games a little bit I I had played symbol in the past but I hadn't played all the way through it because I just I

don't know I just get of the attention span of a caterpillar but yeah so I did actually play through it recently again and it's you know it's completely brilliant can you kind of can you explain the the background of that game for people who aren't familiar with it and what you were trying to do with it yeah so Sybil sort of the beginning of it actually hilariously happened when I was in school I was at NYU and grad school and I was in Bennett fadis prototype studio class which was the class where we made a game a week for a whole semester like it was like a game jam a week basically each week and a theme one of the weeks my friend Francesca and I were like let's have the theme be sex we just decided we want it to be because we make games about that so we forced that theme on the class which was funny and so out of that theme came the idea for

Sybil and I made like a little prototype for it which was really cool and I was into it and wanted to work on it more and then it encouraged me to work on it more and I had a bunch of friends so I'd been jamming with so Emmet Butler and deckie costs who had both done how do you do it with me Emmet doing a lot of code with me and Deki was the musician sound designer and I did design stuff so I took the prototype to them and was like hey and even work with me again and then Rebecca Dunlap came on she's an illustrator in New York really talented and I knew her so I invited her to work in it too so started out as like a small project that came out of a class I decided to do it for my thesis it's based on my real experience playing final fantasy xi as a like teenager and falling in love with this guy and him and I met up and had sex and that was the first time either of us had sex and and then yeah the game

is about how he kind of just like bounces after that and it it's hard it's a hard game to spoil because it's more about the details I think the mechanics and design of it are kind of inspired by games like gone home which our game is where you experience the story through the things you find in the space it's a combination of that with a lot of sort of voiceover stuff so that's kind of how that game got started what did the what are the prototype for civil because it's like simulating you know it's your desktop you know Corner quote what did what did that game in its early stages look like so the prototype was like a little pixel art 2d game that was basically the same as what ended up being like the game in a game of Sybil so if people haven't played an instable

it's like you're playing as this girl who's playing an online game and you have access to her desktop and then you also play the online game she's playing with this guy she likes so the prototype was the online game part of that and in the prototype it was all I didn't really have time for voice there's like a little voice those like some voiceover of her talking and then text from him in the chin the chat like you know the fictional chat in the game and there was just like a little conversation of them flirting and you just walk around and like kill enemies and his NPC didn't really do anything cause I didn't have time in a week to like make an AI or like even a scripted character so yeah it was just a really simple expression of that that online game aspect of of what Sibyl ended up being so it's so interesting because you feel like you're playing with this person you know and and you know the way they describe it you know it's you know

kind of a simple idea it captures a lot of like if you I've played like I've had partners that I've bought like communicated with normally through just playing on my games go there playing destiny together for like hours and hours and hours and like it captures the thing where the game's kind of becomes background noise to the actual like conversations and relationships developing through that like I was captured very well in your game thank you yeah I wanted to I always I think MMOs are funny because I think there were like super it's easy to forget how simple they are like if you strip back all the layers of like different leveling systems different job classes different whatever like in the end a lot of them are just like you click on stuff to kill it so I also kind of wanted to make a parody of how that's really what a lot of those old mmo's are so yeah I was you called it out on the writing to it it's like what are we doing right now yes smashing stuff I mean after I played Final Fantasy 11 from like age 14 to 19 like a lot so I I was fully prepared to

like get down and make fun of it even though it's a game I adore but you know what do you think I've got a lot of games like that it's like a lot of it really is a lot of the interesting parts of it come out of the social interactions you have and the fact that they're really simple games actually makes so shall I sing a lot easier I think and that's like an interesting thing about those games that comes out of the simplicity of the mechanics and I was like excited about that one working on simple for sure yeah Alyssa are you an MMO person I've tried to be unveiled several I played Final Fantasy 11 when I was like an early teen with no money to afford the monthly subscription fee and my mom wasn't very receptive to your you want to pay this money every month to play video games so that one didn't last very long yeah yeah it's definitely destiny though and like how more and more live games are kind of becoming the modern MMO in a way where you're those communities now

form around these games that I don't know can be played single-player but you can just kind of like tune them out and play the multiplayer and just go in these loops forever without having to commit like 80 hours to beating the primary story of Final Fantasy 14 or something and I don't know how I don't know why I can't either well I kind of know I I haven't gotten into I have a friend who's like has been really on and off into World of Warcraft since it first came out and every time I try to play with them like I'll skip a day playing with them the next thing I know you know I play with him he's like level like a million unlike a flaming awesome horse mount with all that sounds like what like yeah I played it for 24 hours straight since last it's like well no there's nothing for me to down it's gonna be like a little wimpy wimpy guy and I just I just feel like I missed out yeah it's interesting too speaking of being old like being a 30 39 year old

dad playing civil and you're kind of I don't know it's like you end up you empathize with it in a different way than you would if I was you know a young woman where we talked about this a little bit ahead of Indians where you're like my dad like instincts we're just going crazy and I'm like no that the tone of this I have talked to these guys online before I have had this guy viewed like you want to send me a picture and I'm like it's too real and I didn't like it that way so to kind of talk about that the the personal nature of your games you know people people are making more of them like what is your what do you feel like is your process for making a game that is just so incredibly personal and autobiographical I am the type of game designer that really likes sort of

a research driven process so first Sybil for example I'm like a notorious archiver of everything in my life and so I have this flash drive with like everything from all my computer since I was a teenager so I was able to like go back and read a lot of like actual conversations I had back then like with my online friends and with the guy that the game is like based on so I had a lot of like you know source material to draw on and then I also like went on the Wayback Machine and dug up some of my old blogs and stuff from even earlier than the game just to like give myself some context to like get in the characters head to like write that voice accurately and I even actually found on YouTube a video of my old Final Fantasy 11 linkshell doing this like big fight so I could hear that guy's voice again and so I found that so I like gather

when I do a personally game I gather as much like real stuff as I can especially if it's something that happened a long time ago although with something like more new like we met in May which is about myself and like my current partner Jake like the research for that is a little different it's mostly like conversations between us about like whatever the dates we've been on because it's not as much of like a digital trail left by that game because it's like about real physical dates we went on we have like pictures from them and stuff so that helps but yeah I try to like research in whatever way is appropriate for like the kind of game I'm making but when you're like using yourself as a character like feeling like writing something autobiographical about events been through it would be really easy to just kind of be like here's my recognizer here's my recollection of that and that's how it is but like things are so much more multifaceted than that like when you're using your past self as a character how do you kind of like detach from your current self in

order to make that as accurate or true as possible it depends on the topic but for something more serious like Sybil or like you know an emotionally painful memory I have to like give it a lot of time so I like didn't even consider writing that until I think it was like it had been like eight years since I had had that experience and then maybe a little me like seven and then I'm like I think I have enough critical distance from it to like look back and be able to like look at myself in like third person and like not like it's me and not have any like emotional investment in it so the timing depends on the specific situation or memory I'm drawing on but I try to like or I make sure I have like the critical distance from it to like look at it for what it was and also the source material helps a lot with that because if I have real text to draw on I

just use that and like I'll edit it so it makes more sense but like a lot of Sybil is just literally things I said or the things that that guy said so yeah I I have that kind of like I don't even talk about myself in the first person when I make games like that it's always like I talk about Nina like I said she's someone else so that helps yeah well so so you just basically can't be faced all the chat logs and actually pretty much copy-pasted not all of them most of it was pretty edited because like with something like that there's like a lot that happens and it said between two people that can kind of like distract from the point of the story or like the emotional tones I'm trying to hit so there's a lot of like filtering out of like things that were really said but really didn't matter in the end that I can recognize now that I'm like so far out of it whereas when you're in the moment you're like picking on every single little detail and trying to read into everything or at least that's kind of how I was at that age

but now I can take that story and like distill it into something more straightforward so I guess that's like another element of the process it's also interesting because you're like now a couple times removed from the original experience is it weird for you to talk about the about these personal games that are about a specific period in your life about a specific thing mm-hmm I'm so used to talking about them that it doesn't really faze me anymore I don't I mean when I'm working on them I don't like I don't know it sounds weird but I have a very like distant approach like I don't I'm not like emotionally involved in it at all really like I'm doing it for the art of it and that's not true for everything I've made like Sybil is one example but like I think when I made freshman year which is a story about like a sort of like sexual assault situation Allison that was like a little more emotional and I couldn't remove myself from it as easily but even

then I can still like talk about it I think a lot of it just comes with experience too just like getting used to talking about this kind of thing yeah yeah I was I was gonna ask but now the question you know doesn't make as much sense but you know I was gonna ask you know was it ever difficult for you to put yourself out there and the way that you do through your games but I guess it just depends on the subject matter yeah it definitely depends on the subject and also I benefited a lot from my English took me actually well cuz I took a lot of I did poetry like was my focus those in a lot of like poetry writing like creative writing classes and in those you know you're like sharing your work face to face with people and are my professor charles north he like was having us write a lot of personal work so at a really like pretty young age I was already talking about like pretty like personal and like sometimes dark stuff

like to classmates that wasn't even close with and I think that experience made it a lot easier for me to do and that was like the practice that I got that yeah do it where ever was anyone ever like geez I mean everyone was writing like intense stuff you know English majors yeah yeah you know well what what is it about you know relationships and sexuality that lend themselves to again game mechanics I mean I can imagine some answers to this but you know would it be like a taboo topic to like talking about sexuality and romance just as they are and the goods and the bads but also like based on real situations is like oh my gosh well I mean again I think I got used to it in the poetry time actually

remember we like had this whole like erotic poetry thing that we were doing at this at school and like so that got me a more you sit but anyway regardless I had the experience coming into it which helped but more related to like game design I my biggest interest as a game designer is games that like help you embody a character and I think player character embodiment is like a very perform it's a performative thing so it's almost like theater like you're playing as the character almost like you're on a stage and that's that was kind of the motivation behind the design of Sybil for example where you know it's like first person you're supposed to be like at her computer as her doing all these things like it's like role-playing but more in a theatrical center behind it's like so Zero's person it's your desktop and a part of that process for me is always like I think the memories I

like to draw on the best for like personal games especially are things that have a very like physical element that I think could translate well into game mechanics so I like to have the story first and find a game mechanic in the story so in Sybil it's the act of like sitting at the computer looking through your files and playing the game that is like a physical experience and and that's how those mechanics came out of that or in how do you do it the physical of like playing with your dolls and moving them around in silly an awkward ways and the physical experience of that and I haven't done that kind of design for like literally everything I've done but it's one of my big interests and I think you know sex and relationships and sexuality like there's lots of sort of stories within that space that are so physical so I think there's a lot of territory to be explored there mechanically I think one thing I noticed when I did like a quick brush up on like

as many of your games as I could find this morning just to make sure it's all fresh and going through we met in May and how each of the different thing yets has their own kind of mechanic that goes with it but the mechanics feel very tied to kind of the absurdity or the romance or the intimacy of the situation and that just all comes across as like the mechanics as the vehicle for narrative versus kind of like a game where it would distract you from the narrative or something like mmhmm yeah for sure and I've gone both directions like Kimi is the game I worked on that's more like a visual novel style game which is another genre I really like so it just depends on what you're going for but I think it's exciting to like look for the the mechanics in the story like how can you have the player like step into the character's shoes and like actually perform as them in a physical way so yeah yeah I I play I play through we met in May this morning it's just yeah I mean it's already like kind of you know

on on game blogs and game sites so no spoilers but you do tweak those boyfriends nipples in it one try to make it make a meal yeah it's just so just so funny like how how evocative it is like with emotions like it's it's so playful can you talk about incorporating this playfulness and how you zero in on that I so first we Ben may yeah Jake and I made it together and we we had all these fun dates and like one of our first dates was this one that where we were at the beach and we discovered we both really and and like rolling around in the sand and stuff which a lot of people think is weird apparently it was but I grew up like right next to a beach so I'm like I don't know it's just like what I said and he did too so we like bonded over that and then we were like talking about that experience with some friends they were making fun of us for liking sand and we were like oh yeah like that would

make a pretty interesting game and then we could like show people that liking sand isn't weird like the idea came from like kind of a playful place for us and like we we especially someone like me I've made a lot of like kind of darker games for romance and stuff I wanted to really try getting back into like the comedic and lighter side of things like what we had done with how do you do it back in the day for example that's like a much more lighthearted game even though it tackles something kind of serious in a way so yeah Jake and I were like yeah let's like pick find some dates we've been on but we thought were really funny or memorable in some way and like see what was funny and memorable about those and translate them into a game and find the game mechanics and in those moments so we came into it with like romantic comedy as a goal so we're glad it comes across yeah it definitely does so the in your games

there is always this like visually it just fits everything is so cohesive what are you what are your thoughts on you know the aesthetics and how that plays into the storytelling aspects I mean you can talk about specific games like like how like how do you do it mm-hmm you know anything yeah so for all the different games have worked on it's usually a lot of them have been with like many different artists like I haven't worked with the same artists multiple times just just because of like these being like side projects and all of us many of them being done when I was a student and stuff you know it's I wasn't like building a company or like anything like that yet so it's just like which my friends wants to make a game today anything uh but I like I always would reach out to artists whose work I really liked and I'm not I try not to be the

type of designer that like micromanage as an artist I kind of just like you know if I am into someone's style I'm working with them for that reason and we usually relate over that so yeah my collaborative process with artists is always like I just like what you do do that with me please but out of that comes a lot of really cool stuff so like how do you do it as a good example marina kataka did the art for that game and she actually did work with her a couple times she released anodyne two recently with Sean um they they're a pair of game developers that have been working on stuff we're like old friends it's funny we all like I know marina through Sean who's a friend from New York so anyway small world of game developers Mina's great anodyne - super good she is a super talented artist with a really good eye for design stuff to game design stuff and writing so when we were

working on that game I would I liked storyboarded what I had envisioned for how do you do it and actually originally it was more focused on the hands and the dolls and in her hands but marina came back to me with reverse view that included her face because she was like I really want to draw her expressions because I think that that is super evocative for this concept and I was like great yes that's perfect like I'm so glad that you thought of that because that really makes the game what it is so yeah my process with artists has always been really collaborative in that way for the design too because the visual design of the games matters a lot to me oh yeah yeah it's it's funny - how in your games there you add like a point system that doesn't really like it's unclear of how exactly it works they all have a logic behind them but it's not like it doesn't really matter it's really ever poking

fun at the gamification of things sometimes and yeah yeah I like I don't know I think to me as a game designer it's important to not take traditional game mechanic expectations too seriously cuz I think it's more interesting if you try and like poke fun at them or use them in a weird way so yeah I try I do my best to like try doing that where it makes sense and yeah I've done that a lot with like scores cuz I think they're silly yeah I was pretty proud of my my high score on we met in May when I was in close Arwen you were ya come out then just then Jake just goes ragdoll so that yes this is how it works like apparently Nina and Jake went on a date where she's trying clothes on at a clothes shop and then she comes out of the dressing room and then depending on how you come out of the dressing room which you can choose you'll just literally blow her boyfriend off of his feet just yeah damaged

numbers come up and he just goes ragdoll so like a hidden leaderboard somewhere for whoever he's tweaked the nips the most times or I would have loved to do that I mean some of this stuff actually also comes down to like scope or like time yeah so we there's actually like a ton of other stuff I wanted to do and we met in May but we just like literally didn't have time for because it's like we're both so busy actually Jake also started working at fulbright recently so it's like hilarious how I hope we both like started having really like you know working a day job and making a game on the side is pretty hard though there the silliness of the scoring also sometimes comes out of like well I don't have too much time to think about this so what's like the funniest thing that comes to mind first and yeah so sometimes the smaller the smaller the scope the sillier your game might end up both uh we met in May and what was the other one I wrote it down game jam games both

started as game chasuble right similarly yeah yeah yeah what well I guess how many Game Jam games have you put together all together and like what's the the secret sauce for taking the concept of a jam game and making it a full its own thing um oh gosh how many sham games have I made like so many I think honestly almost all of the games have worked on started at jams just because I like working that way so probably done like 14 or 15 game jams at this point and God actually way more than that because that prototype studio class was like a whole semester of game jam oh my god actually I don't even know and like most of those aren't released yeah Cybil came out of that and also bum-rush which was a game I did for no quarter a long time ago so I would say like game jams are really good because I think people can get

caught up too much in the details of implementation when working on a game when sometimes like the best game design can come out of like spontaneity and just like hacking something together and like taking the you know the shortest road something playable so I've always tried to have that approach where I like don't worry too much about the technicalities and just try to make something that people like either enjoy or like understand the story I'm trying to tell or whatever my goal is what matters most to me is that I can put it in front of someone and have them like come away with whatever I intend and I think game jams are a really good way to like be quickly iterative because iterate iteration I think is one of the most important things to game design it's like main something putting in front of a player seeing how they react and then tailoring the game further based on that feedback you get and doing that over and over and over until your game works so basically the game jam is usually like the first iteration of that

and gives me at least a base to work with then maybe sometimes I refactor it and no not always but regardless like building it out after the jam just ends up being like more iteration like that it's just maybe not as not all in one weekend like spread out in a more reasonable way so it was like starting a project in like a game jam where you are in a time a fixed time window keeps you from like lingering to well on making one thing work just right or falling into those kind of yeah yeah or like trying too many things cuz a lot of games fall apart from being just like too much stuff too many mechanics or whatever and I think jams can like force you to be focused so that that's something that helps me a lot and this someone who like has always had full-time jobs where like I'm doing other stuff it also gives me deliberate time to like work on something outside of work and sometimes like you know as a

busy adult or whatever having that like time where I'm like explicitly just doing that one thing really helps me get it done yeah I care first and foremost really about finishing things I tend to like even if I'm not happy with the jam game at the end I'll just release it anyway as long as my teammates are okay with it just cuz like I care a lot about like just like putting it out there and being like it's done no like leaving things hanging are you somebody who is constantly like in the back of mind oh this could be a game I do have like a bunch of notes on my phone and in various google docs about different game ideas I come up with while I'm just like walking around or whatever but actually you know it's kind of a bummer like I used to have more of that when I was living in New York and walking around all the time and ever since I moved to Portland I'm not it's not it's a still a walking City but I find myself like having less ambient time just traveling and so I've

like had less of that over the years and have had to like more deliberately like sit down and brainstorm occasionally I think leisure time is really important coming up with like good ideas so I have to but I have to kind of put a point in my life where I have to like schedule that in the game scheduler time it's spreadsheet secretly yeah yeah well we're kind of winding down here so before you go I'm just I just wanted to ask - for for people listening and people familiar with your work or would like to you know do similar stuff you know that's that's personal you know what what should people who want to make you know these kind of really intensely personal games keep in mind I think familiarizing oneself with like other you know

personal games that have been done like dysphoria for example was really a big inspiration to me when I was getting started looking playing a lot of other games and like keeping up with that stuff can really help and just like seeing what's been done and making sure to not only do that but also look to other mediums because you know like poetry for example has a long history of personal writing and you could say the same about film or painting or anything else but has that kind of history like people do personal work all the time and I think it's important to engage with that work just to like give yourself ideas and find inspiration and when you do have those ideas write them down and try to act on them try to make something really small and finish it and like actually like release it and show its people I think that that those two things like the act of like engaging with other mediums and also being like

looking at other games and making something small and finishing it and releasing it are like two of the most important things at least in my in my experience and of course get an English degree but I'm always like I don't know it's interesting I like a lot of my friends like don't have any college degree and like I think you can do games with or without it really doesn't matter all that matters is that you make stuff and don't let anyone like look down on you if you don't have a degree or if you don't have a degree from an Ivy League or whatever like what matters in the end is your work and like your create creative output and like that that stuff so that that's my belief especially like having been doing games for a while now I never asked about people's academic history I just look at

what they've made and play their games and that's what I react to so yeah well there you have it well thanks so much for taking time out of your day and best of luck with I'm sure you have multiple projects in the works and keep an eye out for them so thank you so much thank you [Music] all right we're back and yeah that's Nina's super interesting right even though she considers herself plebs scrub in D royalty a high-ranking please PLEASE scrub yeah no I think that's to aspire to yeah she's absolutely royalty yeah what what did you what did you think about that where were some of the things you you uh they're just like just your mind is still reeling over right now I just I

like games that like the narrative just like knocks you off their feet and like all of Nina's games seem to like accomplish that where it feels like real people and real stories and like I guess that's because they are based on real people and real stories but like even when you do that it's incredibly easy to lean into the idea of somebody or the idea of a situation and not haven't feel authentic but like all of hers do have that like authentic feel to them maybe because she's able to kind of like look back and detach a little bit and go through her archives of teenage poetry and everything like that that's the secret to writing two characters maybe a teenage forgery but yeah it's it's like total honesty and then turning it into a story that other people can experience and her ability to compartmentalize things you know even what was a what kind of surprised me and maybe it shouldn't have for Sybil that she

basically went back and internet stocks herself said she could remember this experience from several years ago the phrase a Wayback Machine to find foreign pose like sent a shiver through my spine yeah like Oh Mike I yeah seriously as you know people who work on the Internet there's just this crap that we've made written just in all kinds of places probably archived in certain places and just to think that you know actively going out and trying to find that the like the current like I guess my generation like right where right where I'm at I think Nina and I are about the same age somewhere in there where like I feel like exposure - the internet started in about like the teenage years when like all those hormones and drama was running high so like that kind of like weird artifact of your entire like teenage frozen in time for you to look back on for

inspiration later like I've mentioned this before but I have like my childhood computer because my dad works in IT so I got like a hand-me-down computer that I had in my bedroom as a teen and like there's still all these MSN chat logs on there just all these embarrassing conversations I had with my my animated group friends and like all of that but like especially going into like the next generation who's like always online having all of this potential research material to turn around and maybe their personal games will blow us out of the water someday I think that's over yeah yeah I think all of our listeners should know that the next GDC podcast is just gonna be Alyssa it'll be me talking about all the fanfiction I wrote with friends that I will never get your names for under penalty of death yeah yeah it's gonna be if we're gonna take Nina's advice and B we're just gonna really you know get personal here all of those things I'm just doing I'm like all the

embarrassing like ne-yo fanfiction I like Nathan The Sims one back in the day and like ah oh no I think that I think that it would I think it would be good actually yeah yeah like we met in may is just like and stuff like Sybil and and and how do you do it there they drill down so deep into a certain emotion that yeah it's just it's just pure focus and pure honesty and pure authenticity and yeah I just I really admire that you just don't even it's really interesting to like hear how both those two games in particular involved from jam games because it was a memory and a concept that started as a small thing and then once the weekend session was done was able to like expand and evolve and I feel like it's the reason I asked about how many game jams she done today is because like you can do a Millie

you can have a million ideas and try a million prototypes and stuff like that they're not always gonna work out but then the ones that stick and the ones that you focus on in the land on kind of all when these really evocative and cool things like a lot of her games have yeah and the the autobiographical nature of these it just kind of it you know it blows my mind because I was talking to you earlier for prep on this just for me I just bury all of my autobiographical things or all of the viewpoints that I might have or feelings I might have in like robot metaphors I'm also a coward who hides behind metaphors yeah so then we're just kind of like well when I was a kid I used to Jam plastic dolls together try to figure out how how sex work which is relatable because late I also had that memory as a kid with like Barbies in the base man lady I'm like oh this is what I saw on the TV show and

then I would also have them like ride dinosaurs so like it was all this exploration of possibilities of life I don't know where I was going with that no I mean but but you're right though the things that we as human beings you know we're kind of ashamed to talk about or too shy to talk about it that's what's good I think about Nina's games like like how we met in May like talking about like the the awkward cute fun absurdity of a new relationship things like that because everything you like we're not as individual people as unique as we think we are you know we all have these experiences that are that each of us can relate to yeah even if it's not something that people are prone to talking about using it like creating a game on that concept is makes it easier to discuss that like in the light-hearted way with a

what's the howdy how do you do it yeah yeah yeah in a light-hearted way with that one but then I also played a her freshman year game which is the game she was talking about us about sexual assault where your character goes out to a club trying to meet up with a friend the friends not replying to a text messages and then the bouncers starts hitting on her and the situation spirals but like even that one was like evocative of like really experiences that can be tough to talk about but using a game to kind of like share that and be like no other people go through that it's just it's really I don't know it's interesting and it's kind of like freeing in a way to just see these experiences play out on this mass stage that everyone can discuss yeah and and it helps people it helps people you know feel less alone mm-hmm no that's a good thing she's doing the Lord's work okay well I think that I think that's it yeah yeah for it for number three yeah we're still pretty new at this I think oh I

feel that we should have asked you know to plug her games where you can find them yeah oh we should do that we should do that you can Nina says so Nina says that so maybe she would say yeah working at Tacoma developer Fulbright currently so yeah she has so many games and so many of them you know you can you can you can download for you know for free or like a small to a small donation to or a large donation yeah yeah listeners give Nina large donation thanks everybody for listening I'm Chris Kraft I'm Alisa McAloon and don't forget to subscribe and to rate our review if you love us if isset gives to them five stars that helps a lot and say something nice about us so thanks everyone and we will see you next time bye [Music]

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