Making Games

and my vanishing archive

More than a decade ago, I thought I might have a career creating little video games and teaching other people how to make them for themselves. Between 2011 and 2014, I co-founded and helped to run an organization in Toronto called Dames Making Games (which survives today under the name DMG). For a variety of reasons, I’ll probably never write about that experience for this newsletter, but I did want to pay tribute to some of my past work here — especially since, without significant effort, the games themselves are likely to become lost to time, as much as I’d wish to keep them.

Like probably many middle-class kids of my generation, I grew up playing a lot of video games. Throughout my adult life, I’ve cycled between being obsessed with one game or another and feeling like absolutely none of them were worth my time (the latter periods have been lasting longer and longer, and I suspect this trend will continue). The exception to this was between the years of 2011 and 2014 when, as mentioned above, games became something of my job.

At the time, there was a boom in what some people were calling “personal games” — games made by individuals, often from non-technical backgrounds and made using “no code” tools, and often taking some aspect of their life experience as their subject matter. The book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, by Anna Anthropy, was optimistic about the possibilities, and I was one of a number of people carried along by that optimism. I was writing fiction back then but very negative about my prospects for even modest success, and video games seemed like a medium that hadn’t been exhausted yet, where someone who wasn’t scared of technology and had creative ambitions could still be playful and free.

As part of a six-week workshop for women run by the Hand Eye Society, I made my first complete game: Adeline’s Elopement. It had a simple premise and simple mechanics: Adeline, a woman vaguely from the Victorian era, wanted to escape her house to elope with her lover. To do this, she had to gather jewelry from her house while evading the gaze of the servants. I designed some levels and made/copied some terrible art, and spent a while figuring out how to do the line-of-sight mechanism by which the servants could spot Adeline when facing her but not when their backs were turned. There were also potions you could drink to become invisible for a few seconds. I made it using a tool called Stencyl, which still exists and provided an engine for a lot of the basic mechanics.

At roughly the same time, I was working as the “social media coordinator” (this is a real job now, it wasn’t back then) for a Canadian musical called Ride the Cyclone, which was then a scrappy little show doing its first tour. When the producer asked me for novel promotional ideas, I offered to make a video game for the show. It was based on one of the musical numbers and titled Space Age Bachelor Man, and featured the titular sparkly-suited man flying through space and shooting hearts at space-catgirls (arrow keys to move, space bar to make love, said the instructions). The actor (Elliott Loran) in the part sent me some voice clips to use, and the show’s composer (Brooke Maxwell) sent an 8-bit-inspired musical track to use as background music. As a game, it wasn’t much, but it wound up helping on the marketing side: a musical with an associated video game was a novelty, so it got some mentions in the press (including this one in the Globe and Mail by a rather bemused Robert Everett-Green).

It wasn’t my last theatre-oriented game: the Cyclone game led to a commission from Praxis Theatre for a game called Save a Pinko, for their production of Jesus Chrysler. This, again, was a very simple game: you drove a little ambulance and picked up wounded anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War. The theatre work was fun and I loved doing it, and it felt like a way out of career and creative exhaustion.

Sadly, despite digging through a lot of old emails and abandoned accounts, I can’t find even a screenshot of those games. Ride the Cyclone, the show, wound up going on to greater success — though falling just short of a Broadway run — and has now found a second generation of devoted fans, thanks to TikTok. Every once in a while I’ll get a DM from one of those fans, asking if I’m the creator of the Space Age Bachelor Man game. Once I confirm, usually they ask if they can play it, and I have to tell them, sadly, that it’s probably impossible.

After my focus switched in the following years from personal creative projects to nonprofit administration, I spent less time making games. When I made them, it was usually part of a “Game Jam” event — hackathon-style weekends where the object was to complete a finished project under time constraints. I’m a loner by nature, and the games I mention below were mostly made by me during a span of 48 hours.

This one, called Company Loyalty, was about gathering incriminating corporate documents and stuffing them in a paper shredder before the auditor gets them.

Another was called Minor Celebrity on the Red Carpet, where you tried to raise your status by accosting A-list celebrities at a premiere (pretty sure this one was inspired by watching the CBC’s coverage of the Oscars that year, where the Canadian personality on the red carpet got embarrassingly brushed off and ignored by almost everyone).

And a sentimental favorite was Feed the Ducks. It had very simple controls: arrows to move back and forth, and a button to toss a crumb to the ducks. You’d throw a crumb in the water, and a duck would spot it and swim over to eat it. I wrote some relaxing music for it.

As you can probably tell, there wasn’t much to these games besides the concept, my amateurish pixel art, and a few basic mechanics. But they still constitute, in their own goofy way, a personal body of work — one I wish I could revisit.

Stencyl was a neat tool, and I used it for almost all the games I built back then. The trouble was that its games ran on Adobe Flash, which was to be summarily executed a few years later and is now officially unsupported by any web browser. There are a few extant Flash emulators I’ve used to try to play my old games, but they run on the wrong version of ActionScript and won’t run the files. As far as I can tell, everything I made back then is now unplayable. Stencyl made the games fast and easy to make, but if I hadn’t relied on it so much and written more code from scratch, I’d probably have a better chance of being able to run them again. And, as always, that’s the trouble with digital tools and platforms — they grow obsolete at an astounding pace, taking all their content with them.