After an accidentally-long, near-decade of development, my debut video game, Alcyone: The Last City, is out now on desktop as well as Android and iOS.

I've worked as a professional writer for almost a quarter of a century at this point — a shocking milestone now that I actually put it down into words — and while I have worked on things that I can categorically tell you that you've heard of if not experienced, the exploitive nature of most creative industries means that this is the first bit of intellectual property that's getting released under my own name.

Back in 2016 or so, I had a dream which became a short story that would, in turn, form the basis for the game's initial prototype once I realised that the narrative I was envisioning was bigger than just writing a book. I have remarked often that my dreams are often the basis and inspiration for many creative projects I have and I'm grateful that my weirdo brain provides them.

My dreams very regularly influence and contribute to my creative ideas, and this one involved a person living in a city that was surrounded by a dangerous nothing. As I wrote the short story I could see the glimmers of a society existing within those constraints, and I knew I wanted to write something bigger than one linear narrative alone.

My original intention was to make a game with my own idea, which wasn't beholden to a studio or auteur taking credit for things I had created, to showcase who I was as a writer — for once. When it became clear to me that my idea was bigger than "portfolio," I expanded it outward into a bigger project.

I ran a successful Kickstarter in 2017. By this point, I had already done three others for GX Australia, but I was nervous about launching a campaign just for my own project. When I hit the goal a week or so in, I assumed it was just because people knew me from GX and the project had piggybacked off that awareness. When I nearly doubled my funding objective a week and a bit later, I assumed it was because of the other names attached to my project.

The imposter syndrome does still rear its head from time to time, but by this point and with the extent of what I have been able to accomplish, I'm better at ignoring it. I'm very proud of what I have done here.

Whilst I had launched the Kickstarter with the intention of a proper release less than a year later, I'm glad that life didn't work out that way — though delayed far beyond my intention (people who know me already know the story here so I'm not going to get into it again), it's a much, much better game because of the long gestation, and it's become so much more than my original vision as a result of being able to take a lot longer than planned.

Anyway, onward to the thanks: I'm very, very grateful to many people who helped make this release possible.

First and foremost, my wonderful partners Ryan and Vlas have been tremendously instrumental in making sure the game came out. Without their advice, support, cheerleading, and patience, this day would not be here. They've both done so much for this and been so supportive and without them I doubt it would have gotten launched.

Logistically speaking, VicScreen seeing value in what I had made and providing funding for it allowed me freedom and flexibility to finish it full-time. Without that foundation it would have taken ages and ages, if ever, for the game to come out.

I have to thank Peak and Michał, tremendously talented people who lent their creativity to the world I was trying to convert from a dream I'd had into a universe I wanted others to experience. Their contributions from the very beginning helped shape this final product in materially tangible ways and I'm forever going to be awed at their ability to take half-formed concepts in my head and present it to me as art that completely fit my terrible briefs.

Carlos, Ben, and Michael took those seeds and helped me iterate it into something bigger and better than I was able to make on my own. And again kudos here to Vlas for helping pull the engine work past the finish line and Ryan to give guidance and advice as a human being whose perspective was less technical but all the more vital for his vantage point as a gamer.

I am extremely grateful to the backers who supported my weird idea at the start. Without that initial foundation it never would have gotten off the ground at all or given me the confidence to take my weird niche game through to the finish line. The positive check-ins and emails over the years, to say nothing of how many excited people saying that they've been looking forward to this for years, really makes it feel worth doing. It's a weird niche game in an existing niche genre, so people genuinely being interested in it really is a relief. The initial coverage from journalists has also been really positive, which is a relief too as this is getting comparison against "normal" mainstream games.

And, finally, I'm grateful to everyone else who played it along the way and indulged me even without knowing the other projects I have been responsible for work on, who still encouraged me to make something on my own and stayed interested and engaged all this time.

I'm almost certain I'm missing people. There's an exhaustive list of credits in the game, because as someone who has had credits weaponised against them I wanted to make sure that anyone who had a substantive role in my game's development got a shout out for it. If I haven't given one here it's not because I don't value you or your contributions — I'm just overwhelmed and 40 years old.

So, about eight years or so after I planned it, Alcyone: The Last City is out. It wouldn't be accurate to say it was in development for all of that near-decade — much of that time was occupied by the fallout of an abusive ex-boyfriend, capitalism, a pandemic, and the constant struggle to make art when art isn't appreciated. I worked on it when I could with the frequency available to me, but it's all the better for the unexpectedly long journey.

I'm glad to be able to share it with you all. I'm deeply proud of it, it's the biggest thing I have ever made and it's very personal to me. I hope you like it.

But I'm also very, very glad to be able to move on to something else now, as well. Now that this is finished, I have other ideas I want to make which I couldn't while completing Alcyone was hanging over everything else I did. "Release" is doing double-lifting in that sense — I have released it into the ether for you to all experience, and in doing so it has released me from its responsibility.

It's yours now: go have fun with it.

iOS 18.3 is now out, but I am blessedly spared the "Apple Intelligence" bullshit because Apple still can't envision a scenario where a user — say, an immigrant living in another country — may wish to use the system in one location and have Siri speak in a different one. What a concept.

It's just as well since I was only going in to turn it off, anyway, but glad to know that my particular use-case results in me not needing to!

Both of my partners have gone off to do their own separate travels and taken an extended bit of time off this week; I'm on my own at home for the first time in quite some time and getting my own work done.

One of my partners is doing a massive solo roadtrip up and around nearby rural Australia (he's driving nearly twenty hours all up, spread across about five days or so).

His first language isn't english, which leads to adorable interactions like when he couldn't remember the word for "jellyfish" and asked what the proper word for "spicy sea snots" are and then sent the above photo.

It's 40C (over 100F) here at the moment and I am camped out next to the air conditioner writing; do something gentle and kind for yourselves today.

(PS, as an FYI: I've been asked about email alerts — I'm not really going to send them out for every little post I make, I don't want to spam people's inboxes. I'll generally post something every day, usually, but I'll save the alerts for when I write something more substantial that I think is worth sharing.)

As a survivor of an abusive, violent, chaotic childhood, it's taken a lot of effort, therapy, and willpower (which I'm still not always great at) to pull myself out of interpreting every conflict I find myself in through the lens of a powerless child who was being treated poorly by the adults who were supposed to protect him.

For much of my adult life, my reaction to those situations was a dramatic and decisive overcompensation where I certainly made it clear that I wouldn't be bullied, but usually at the cost of freaking out or scaring people who didn't intend to.

So, seeing news coverage of some of the worst people in the United States parading around in a smug victory lap triggers some of the deepest and intense feelings of moral injustice that I'm capable of feeling. I had to stop looking at the news after a short amount of time.

As I wrote a couple days ago, it's easy — and, quite fair, I would say — to feel despondent in this moment. I feel deep sadness that this is where we now are. I feel deep fear for those who are more disadvantaged and less privileged than I am, still stuck in the US when I am thousands of kilometres away watching the shit-show from a distance.

It's very hard not to feel bitter that enough people hate those who look different, live different, or believe different than they do that they'd put a narcissistic abuser into the most powerful position in the US government, aided and abetted by sycophants and psychopaths who gleefully get to unleash their worst impulses on the country and the world.

And while I wouldn't say that everyone who voted for Trump is a bigot, enough of them certainly are, and did so in excited anticipation of him remaking the country on those terms. I don't know if I have more contempt for those than I do the poorly-informed and politically-disengaged who ridiculously think Republicans (and Trump, one of the least successful businessmen to ever fail upwards) are going to bring the cost of living down for the average person. At least the bigots are honest in their hate.

History always feels like an abstract, distant thing — something that happened then, not something you're constantly in the stream of as it happens now. It's only with hindsight that you see how it mattered and the ramifications of things that seemed less ramifying in the moment.

I write stories for a living. I'm lucky enough that I get to do it as a career. When the bad guys win, it's just a temporary setup for a later triumph in pursuit of fairness, empathy, truth, and love.

But real life doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes, the bad guys win, and win in traumatic, evil, and unfair ways. This present moment in history has the potential to mirror other harrowing points in our timeline. Only time will tell if it does, or if people stepped up and stopped the worst of it from taking place — as has also happened throughout history, too.

So, while right now feels like a loss, I've never been one to let bullies get away with it. And giving in is exactly what they want from all of us.

I imagine I'll have a lot more to say in the coming days, weeks, months, et cetera, as this fascist clusterfuck revs up into full and we get shocked-and-awed by each new horror. At the moment I just feel quite sad that this is where we're now all at, collectively, in ways that matter and impact far beyond one US election. The values that I hold close to my heart matter less to others than I would have thought and that's always a painful realisation to come to.

But the despondency is the objective, giving up is the objective, feeling like there's no point in fighting anymore is the objective.

And not giving into those dark feelings is needed now more than ever.

I've already touched on this in the past in a few places scattered across the internet (like both the Kickstarter comms page for Alcyone: The Last City, my upcoming interactive novel, as well as on my own personal social media) but recently reading this interview with Gareth Damian Martin of Citizen Sleeper/Citizen Sleeper 2 (and the excellent In Other Waters, which I was also an OG Kickstarter backer for) has gotten me thinking about this topic again.

"[I’m] thinking a little more about how do we continue to build a future when we know that it’s going to fall apart. We know that there’s an inevitable entropy to everything, not just political systems and structures, but our lives and our physical bodies. We know it’s going to fall apart, and yet each day, we keep getting up and we keep doing things."
- Gareth Damian Martin

The development cycle for Alcyone has been quite long if we're being fully accurate about it. I had a very, very rough prototype some time back in 2015, and development of the game has gone along at varying degrees of intensity in the near-decade since then. Whilst I think it's an extreme exaggeration to say I've been "developing the game for ten years" (especially since it's only been my full-time job for the last ~two), it's still been a project that's existed while my life has gone through some pretty transformative stuff.

When I first started writing Alcyone, I was in the middle of an abusive relationship even if I wouldn't realise it until some time later. But my headspace was quite dark, and what I was writing reflected that. I was not connecting with hopefulness, because I didn't feel hopeful in my day to day existence.

As my life changed (in ways predominantly good and healthy, but there definitely were upheavals) I found that I was having a much harder time connecting with the mentality I had at the start of the game's development; however, I'd now promised something to people, had financial support to deliver it, and had external expectations to meet. I was stressed that I couldn't seem to figure out how to link myself back to that despondency, and I questioned why I even wanted to.

When Alcyone became my full-time job, I found myself dealing with a lot of writer's block at first explicitly because I didn't want to write a dark, helpless, hopeless story like I had in mind when I first began the project. And I was struggling to figure out how to reconcile the game I'd pitched publicly with the sort of stories I want to be telling now.

In the end I think I've managed to find a balance that solves the conundrum, and I'm very excited for players to experience it when the game is released (just a couple of months to go!), but it was a challenge bigger than I expected and held me up creatively for a lot longer than I wanted it to. But, I think the story is better for it, and I think people will enjoy it a lot more — particularly because my heart is in it rather than it would have been before.

There's a lot to be vexed and stressed and despondent about these days; I didn't see a reason to drag all of it into my fictional sci-fi world, as well.

PS: I was a huge fan of In Other Waters and Citizen Sleeper — if the latter had existed earlier in the development cycle for Alcyone I would have been "heavily inspired" by it in a lot of ways. I'm very much looking forward to the sequel even if the likelihood of me having the time to play a video game over the next few months is hovering around absolute zero.

Hello world!

Back in the prehistoric era of the internet, when "social media" wasn't a term (nor was the concept of a blog), I got small-time Internet Famous™ by maintaining an online diary as a teenager living in the southern United States. I never sought to do anything with it at all; at the time I was already a prolific journal-er, usually scribbling into a binder full of looseleaf paper several times a day, and it was an accidental segue to turn that into something that others were able to read.

The internet was a much smaller place back then (and I'd definitely say nicer, but what a benefit we get with hindsight and age) and there weren't a lot of people around. There seemed to be even fewer people like me — a queer kid in a shitty home dynamic — something I didn't realise the gravity of until the editor of a random magazine I'd never heard of asked if I would be willing to rewrite one of my journal entries into an article that they could publish. It was my first paid job as a writer and the response I got from people who read that issue surprised me considerably.

I was just writing about my life, largely for my own benefit and to an audience of myself, and had no idea that anyone else cared — much less saw something relatable — in their own lives.

In the years since then my life has changed in myriad ways. I left the south for New York City just as I was becoming a legal adult. After several years living there, circumstance brought me to the other side of the planet and I landed in Sydney, Australia. After nearly a decade there I moved again to Melbourne — where I still live.

I lost the habit of writing a daily journal — a sad reality that wounds me every time I pick up a pen and bemoan how bad my penmanship has gotten — and while I still maintained some form of online journal for quite a while, as the routines of my life changed I found that habit hard to keep up with, too.

Then, enter social media. In retrospect, I've never really used it like other people seem to. It's always been a relatively passive thing for me and in a lot of ways my Facebook presence was just the next iteration of the online journals I'd kept for a quarter of a century; though, perhaps with a more robust comment section.

With the latest hard-right turn by a billionaire asshole sucking up to a fascist autocrat, I've decided that I want to pull back on my presence on anything Meta-related beyond what's unavoidable. And, here we are now.

The one thing that Facebook excelled at, in my opinion, was allowing me the ability to passively share something and people could engage, or not, as they wanted to. I have yet to find a decent replacement for that (or Twitter, but the latter has more options to work with), but it's spurred me to bring my personal website back from the netherrealm.

I don't anticipate that this is going to be quite the "dear diary" that my website was in the past, but I see this being a place to muse, write longform thoughts about life and politics and whatnot, and essentially keep doing more or less what I was using Facebook for anyway. Just without the alt-right enshittifying my existence without my consent.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes. The internet is a lot different than it was back at the turn of the century, and teenage me never would have had any idea of what was coming down the road.

But if you want to interact, please feel free to! For now, I've put the comments section behind an account, but it should be quick, free, and easy to get going with it. I'll take feedback on the experience from others and will no doubt keep tweaking this as I go along and get used to using a new CMS.