Stefan Gagne

A selfie of me in my team rocket cosplay. I have a subtle smirk and I'm looking to the right. My hand is behind my neck.

I'm Aenne (they/ them). I'm a narrative designer/writer & I've been in the industry for 15 years. Haven't had a chance to go to GDC (yet).

I make queer visual novels: Arcade Spirits & First Bite. And I do consulting & contract writing (The World Next Door).

I love romance!

#WhatAGameDevLooksLike

The City Unseen: A Storytelling Solo RPG. Text in pink neon on top of a synthwave cityscape.

Coming March 25th, something different from Fiction Factory Games... "The City Unseen," a tabletop roleplaying game book aimed at solo narrative play. Explore a modern urban landscape and live out any story you want, including scenarios based on Arcade Spirits, Penny Larceny, and Laugh Track!

Miserably bad day today. Arthritis really flaring up. I tried to write three paragraphs and had to stop.

I swear I can have better days than this. I just wish I had more of them.

...that's a REALLY long reply chain to plow through...

But yeah, good points.

In the end I guess I don't have a dog in this race because I can't play these competitive multiplayer games anymore, my disability and crap reflexes mean I'm on the outside looking in. I don't know why I keep tracking industry news when I can't really interact with most of the output.

The problem is that by actively encouraging the death of new game ideas, what are we left with? Fortnite and Roblox for eternity? Yes, there's far too many live service games but if we purposefully pray to the gods to smite down every new one, we'll never get any innovation.

I think one of the reasons why the discourse™️ is so eager to see games like Concord and highguard and now marathon fail is a backlash that's been a long time coming against being inundated with live service games. We want to see greedy corporations eat a loss to show them we don't need these games.

It's 1982 and a babysitter is running for her life from a masked killer

#horror #synth #80s

boss the fascism

Hey everyone it's me, the wrong L piece in Tetris. Fuck you

I know the phrase "emotional highs and lows" but is there a pithy little phrase for emotional lows and emotional middles? Where you could never really say it's up, it's just not always crushing? Whatever that is, I'm in there right now. Kind of sucks but it's better than perpetual low.

You can't tell me what to do!

Install VN, can't even start the game without using the mouse, hit a minigame that's mouse only, sigh, uninstall. Happened twice today.

People, if you can support controller, you can support keyboard. And RenPy devs, there's especially no excuse there.

The "hilarious" part are the articles written by AI talking about another site writing their articles with AI.

I once read a sci-fi book where nothing remained of a civilization but AIs constantly buying and selling each other. I guess it wasn't far-fetched.

Anyway, support indie journalism.

I hope everyone that was screaming their heads off about evil video games journalists around the time of the Gates is now dancing in the streets with joy that all of them have been replaced by AI. Good work, buddy! You torpedoed an entire industry because Girl Bad. Thanks so much. Gold star.

ONE. THIRD.
and countless lives destroyed because of it.

Thank you so much! I really appreciate the kind words.

Made the difficult decision to step back a bit for a time from game dev. I'd honestly been stepped-back for weeks, but I'm actually acknowledging it.

My physical and mental health sitch is pure toilets. I need rest in other spaces for a time. I'll come back to dev but I don't want to force this.

70s-style Robot Anime Geppy-X - Announce Trailer (English) YouTube video by Gematsu

Gonna be honest: never heard of this game before but based on this trailer I really vibe with the central conceit of "licensed game for a 70s mecha anime that doesn't exist"

The new Vampire Survivors turn-based RPG is fully keyboard playable and doesn't rely on sharp timing for inputs.

I am beyond thrilled. I'm having so many problems playing games nowadays with my disability ramping to the fucking moon but this is playable and simple and fun. Simple so far, anyway.

Kvetch at will, I say.

Thank you. I do appreciate the sympathy.

Not really. Anything where I need to have my hands out in front of me requires my elbow is in shoulders, and repeating button presses strain them as well. I'm not really looking for a miracle solutions here, I'm just frustrated that this new chronic pain is grinding away my hobbies.

That's why I've been trying to find games with pure keyboard control. I can mostly do that. But even then it wears down. And a lot of my old favorite games are basically not possible now unless my elbow gets better which is not looking likely. I'm really not sure what this means for me.

Getting a little worried that I can't play video games anymore. Ever since the arthritis diagnosis in my elbow, I can't play with my controller because it hurts too much, and I can't sit up at my desk because using the mouse also hurts and sitting itself also hurts. I'm kind of at a loss here.

Tried to do some game writing today, couldn't. Just feels so huge and I'm filled with self-doubt. I at least sketched out what SHOULD happen in the next two scenes, to flesh it out later.

I'm worried this game has nothing to say. Do we need another "techbro capitalism bad" story? Is it exhausted?

Prometheus knew this one weird trick for empowering mankind that gods hate

I'm honestly looking forward to that one because I wanna see what it's like when ChatGPT writes a Disney movie

The wildest thing was watching Moana 1 and 2 back to back, and wondering, "why is this doing the reverent nostalgia legacy sequel approach?" Not realizing they were released 8 years apart. It IS a nostalgia sequel.

I know this is cinematic popcorn, but I'm having a bad week / month. Justified.

Because I'm me and I'm basically incapable of relaxing, I'm not just turning the brain off, I am critiquing and comparing and contrasting each movie I see. I guess if game development flops I can always run a movie blog, like we really need more of that. You don't need my scorching lukewarm takes.