Distant Times and Vextro Unplugged

I participated in my fourth Vextro anthology! The 2025 theme was "Vextro Unplugged," which everyone interpreted in different ways. This was a smaller one with just four entries, but I think they're all bangers. 

My entry was Distant Times. It's a collection of flash fiction I've written with my local writing group. At the time I got this together, I had about twenty pieces. I picked eight of them I particularly liked, polished them up, then figured out how to present them as a website, ePub, and PDF. (I also went back and updated Wayward to have proper web and ePub versions.) 

Formatting fiction for web is non-trivial. It took a while to figure out how to make the web page and ePubs look nice to me. There's a lot of overlap thankfully — behind the curtain, ePubs are just zipped up HTML/CSS files with some extra metadata. I generated the PDF with Pandoc. In the future, I'd like to build a pipeline with Pandoc that easily generates a web page, ePub, and PDF from a markdown file. I plan to release more prose fiction online in the future, so I want to make it as straightforward to maintain as possible.

I really like the eight pieces I picked. Many of them have the violent immediacy that I think characterizes a lot of my storytelling. A few go for something different though, in ways I think strengthen the overall collection. My favorite piece is probably A Wake (which I based the thumbnail image off of), but reader reactions have been pleasantly varied in terms of favorites. The total word count of all eight stories is a little under 10,000 words — give 'em a read if you're interested!

War in the Gut Biome by Sunday

Some quick rundowns of the other entries (plagiarizing my own itch comments since it's been a few weeks):

• it's easy and it gets easier by nilson. nilson is a champion at creating warm wet human texture in whatever medium he works in. This one is a short 3d walk-around game; like all his works it pulled me in and didn't let go, I felt something welling in my chest the whole time I played.
• War in the Gut Biome by vitasunday. PDF zine mixing RPGMaker assets and tropes with local LA food culture. Pure joy from start to finish, had a big grin on my face the whole time I read it.
• SIMROT by wasnotwhynot. Wuzzy writes stories that sit in my spine and spiral inward, tightening and tightening the more I read. This one shares some elements in common with Whole Numbers, another recent fave from their output. This one is meaty at 12k words, and I really enjoyed the journey it took me on.

I love my cool brilliant friends and I love participating in these jams. I can't wait to see what everyone makes next!

Sketch Gamedev and Glorious Trainwrecks

Since late 2024, I've shared five little games on Glorious Trainwrecks, a site I've adored for a long time. The intent was to embrace "sketch gamedev," to slam out tiny games in a few hours a-piece. I've enjoyed many games made in this mode by others. I thought posting on the site, which is all about this spirit of playful experimentation, would help me enter it myself. (Glorious Trainwrecks is also a creative crucible that helped forge many of my all-time favorite freeware devs. In my arrogance, I thought contributing to the site would help my own light shine similarly bright.)

I failed miserably at my goal. I did successfully slam out a couple games in a day or two each. Then the third one took a week. Then the fourth and fifth ones took multiple weeks spread out over several months each. Ah well. 

The first game was Broccoli, a tiny RPGMaker 2003 "horror" game. I made it the same way I've continued approaching flash fiction for our local writer's club. I generated ten random words on this site, picked two ("broccoli" and "horror"), then made a game. I got the bulk of it down in 2-3 hours, then polished it up and posted it the next day. I consider this a Success in terms of "embracing sketch dev," and if I'd continued with this approach I'd be writing a different blog post.

A little before Christmas last year, I released Action Sketches on itch. It collects the remaining four games I released on Glorious Trainwrecks, all action games made in Love2d. (My favorite is probably Danse Macabre, made in about a week, but I like all of them.) 

If I really wanted to make sketch games, I needed to use easy tools I'm comfy with like RPGMaker, Bitsy, or Twine. I'm still very much a newbie when it comes to coding games from scratch, and making even simple games in Love takes me a long time. I did learn a lot about how I like organizing and building games on the back-end, and I feel much better equipped to tackle other projects in the future. So, still a win ultimately, even if I didn't turn out a whole feast of games like I wanted.

There's one more "problem" that got in the way of me making sketch games. Every single one of these I put out, friends immediately jumped in, live-posted them, and said nice things to me. I have an intensely supportive peer group of artist friends; I want to reward their care and attention with competent, enriching art. That's an extra bit of self-imposed (and obviously optional!) pressure that makes it harder to just throw something together, to not worry endlessly about whether it "works" or not.

I want to keep experimenting with quicker modes of creation (in addition to longer form works, of course). I might try approaching it like I have my flash fiction, mostly keeping it to myself and a few close peers, then releasing a collection of works I particularly like all at once. Or maybe I'll get over myself and post a bunch of art on Glorious Trainwrecks (or elsewhere) again. My friend sraëka has been doing that on itch for the last few months and they're having a lovely time.

It was a good experiment. I've been at this in earnest for thirteen years; I think I'm finally figuring out what I want my art practice to look like, one teeny tiny step at a time.