It's About Futility

The original working title for this project was simply 'mech girl game'. That was the spark: I wanted to do something with girls and mechs. 

I'm a big fan of mecha anime, and I also spend a lot of time thinking about the gender politics of mecha anime. It is a genre overwhelmingly marketed at men, and so the protagonists of mecha anime are almost all men, too. Never mind the fact that women were the first ones to get into Mobile Suit Gundam and engage with it on a level beyond 'cool robots are cool' and 'I just care about the models'. Because boys like their toys, capitalism says that mecha shows must be for boys.

So I've been a big advocate for putting women front and centre in the genre, and wanted to make something that did that myself. But what could I do with my skillset? A Twine game? Sure, okay. It's a bit tough to make engaging mech combat with Twine, though. It's better suited for either plot-based decisions or conversational decisions.

What if the characters are having a conversation during battle? Mecha anime does this a lot, too. It feels like the protagonist and antagonist are always arguing their beliefs while they fight. They debate as desperately as they try to kill each other. So, maybe I could do both. Maybe commands can refer to both battle and conversation simultaneously.

But isn't that kind of absurd? There's no point in arguing with someone who wants you dead. But maybe that's the point.

...and so, we have a game about the futility of arguing with fascists. When someone wants you dead, they're not going to debate in good faith.

. . .

I still don't make much money off of my games, and so I continue to experiment with different payment models, to see what works, what might actually convince people to toss me a couple bucks. To be clear, I don't make games for the money, but it might be nice to pay off my student loans someday.

I know from TIME PASSED and A VAST AND LONELY DESERT that it is unlikely at best for anyone to donate after playing a game that is free. I also know that it is unlikely for anyone to be willing to pay to play a Twine game, especially a short one. So, I made POLEMIC free, so that people would actually play it, and then I offered a bonus short story available for those who really liked the game and were willing to toss me a couple bucks. This did hook a couple of people, so I've made more off of POLEMIC now than the much older TIME PASSED. Still, it's not much. Even so, I think I have to think of it as a successful experiment, if only for my own ego. The real question is, what will I try next? And will that work better than this? As I, ever so slowly, grow an audience and gain experience, I hope to do better and better, and maybe one day make enough off of my writing to pay off those damned student loans.