11/11/23

My friend Charles has been writing a really neat series of posts on Substack, full of musing about games, life, vulnerability and inspirational good stuff. Reading the latest one today helped get me out of a funk--I'll write more about the funk and the horrors below, but first, here's the link to the post that made me feel a little better and figure out what to do with myself:

https://muditaheart.substack.com/p/how-to-be-remarkable-when-the-worlds

There's a lot of great links at the bottom of the post. Let's start with this one, then take a sharp turn:

I only really have 2 platforms I use to communicate on social media--this devlog/the FLIES FLIES FLIES Patreon page, and my personal Instagram which also posts to Facebook. I believe everyone should be using every platform they have, to speak in solidarity with Palestine and denounce the many world leaders who are complicit in Israel's campaign of non-stop bombing Palestinians in the Gaza strip, depriving them of food, water, and electricity, in an ongoing attempt to erase the entire people of Gaza, steal more Palestinian land, and profit off of the natural gas underneath it to the tune of 5 hundred billion dollars.

Ever since October 7, I've been using my personal Instagram (only 1 of my 2 platforms) to pretty much non-stop share information about the atrocities and the global resistance. This has taken an emotional toll every day for the last 34 days, but was pretty much a no-brainer decision (I have no career, full-time job, partners or dependents, who could stand to be threatened by retribution for me speaking out). And I don't really advertise or monetize my Instagram, so I have little to lose if I get shadow-banned on there.

But I wasn't sure how to use *this* platform to speak out--I honestly had thought that in the time it would take to develop season 1, the world would stay relatively calm aside from the natural disasters, and all the activist thought I put into the writing of the story, would speak for itself. But in this case, nothing in FFF has anything to do with Palestine or Israel, so, whether it's appropriate or not to say so in this devlog, I just have to come out and say it. Free Palestine!

(I speak only for myself, not for anyone else who contributes their money or labor to this project).

One option if you are moved to give your support, is to donate to the PCRF as recommended by People Make Games on that video. Though it seems at the moment those donations can't make it into Gaza because of how utterly horrific the situation is... So I don't know. Maybe raising awareness and breaking the silence is the biggest thing to do right now.

As far as this project goes, Valve has left me hanging in the review queue for almost 2 weeks at this point--I don't know why, other than this response in their first build review:

Which I responded to with a full write-up of where the assets come from, how they're licensed and why my usage of them is legally justified. Maybe their lawyers are too busy with the class-action lawsuit (which I myself have signed onto, ha).

This brings me to another point: If I hate Steam and their monopoly so much, why am I still trying to release my project on there?

Well... my original reason was, that I thought it was the best and only place to make a buck and find an audience for my thing. That still does factor into it, but I've started having legitimate thoughts of pivoting somewhere else where I can release without the go-ahead of a megacorp. The hangup is that, I'm publicly committed to releasing on Steam now, and by the distributor agreement with Valve, I've agreed not to release commercially anywhere else until I release on Steam. Would be pretty rough to back out of all this (if that's even possible) -- but maybe I just release the first 2 episodes as a free demo on Itch and that doesn't violate the Valve agreement. Who knows?

With everything going on, it might also be better to delay release so people aren't experiencing this story with a pall over it from the aforementioned Horrors. It's pretty crass to be worried about how genocide affects my VN release, but here we are.