First things first, The Queer Games Bundle is live for its 5th year! For around as much as a AAA game, you can support queer art by directly putting money in their hands. The bundle includes many games that were unindexed so this is a perfect way to support devs who were hit by the shadowbans. My games are in here too so I too will get a much needed financial boost I'm going to mention later in this devlog. And if you can't pay the full price, there's still the $10+ scale and spreading news of the bundle around.

So, hey. Long time no see~ You may have been wondering why I stopped my monthly devlogs for a time. Chances are this is going to come up in future game releases so I'll just talk about it here plus other things on my mind so I won't get super into it in their own devlogs or postmortems. This devlog is also going to be a bit messy because I have a lot to cover and talk about since I've been out for a few months.

First off, my dissapearance and what I had been doing:

Well May didn't have a lot for me to note besides updating my games with better accessibility options. I also held off on posting about it because Queer Games Bundle was meant to be live by the end of May and beginning of June and I wanted to post about it then, but it had to be delayed. And when it became June, basically everything went to shit for me.

Tl;dr ver: June can honestly fuck off and I want a redo for Pride Month. The entire month had honestly been a series of sudden emergencies and shit timing. First I get called into work to work 39.75 hour shifts because coworkers got injured and I'm the emergency backup, and I'm a part timer lmao.

Then my partner got badly injured enough to go to the ICU. Then a lot of family members and friends had to go to the ER for very different and isolated events, but it was wildly uncanny and extremely unlucky they all happened around the same time.

So with juggling the sudden workload piling up and intensely worried whether the love of my life is going to live or not and helping out here and there, needless to say nothing got done lmao. I had plans to make games for Neo-Twiny and Short Circuit Jam and was partly done with them but, well, I had more important things to tend to in my personal life and had to shelve the WIPs for the time being.

The good news is that my partner and all those around me are healing up well and nobody has died, thank fucking gourd. Since it's calmed down for me, I was able to participate in O2A2 this year with Upsetti Spaghettification, although stuff from the previous month still linger and feels like it's inadvertently bled into the game. (Which was that I needed something to cheer me up, hence why it came out more comedic than I planned for lmao). I'll touch upon it when I eventually get to its postmortem and the needed update that'll include better image captioning and alt text. I was hoping to get that published alongside this devlog, but ah well, Life.

Second off: lmao not enough hours for health insurance but still Tired

As harrowing as it is to admit it, the increase in work hours has helped out a lot financially. I haven't admitted this before but I had been contemplating opening art commissions because dayjob had not been giving me many hours and I'm pretty close to paying off a major loan I really wanted to get paid off sooner. But, well, they gave me more than enough hours and I'm hoping to get it paid off sooner (ideally, by this year's end) and help free me up more financially for dev stuff, like hiring people to work on my games and porting some of my games to Steam! This just means I probably won't have as much of a creative output for a while because of how many work hours I have to put in until further notice. The sales from Queer Games Bundle over the years had been helping my pay down my loans and I hope 2025's bundle will help a ton too.

These two points pretty much explain why I haven't been online much or creating as much. I do hope to get back onto my projects soon, but well I can't really promise anything haha. That being said, I do want to touch upon another subject I wanted to talk

Third off: fuck you payment processors and your shitty censorship + alternatives to host my games

Something you may have noted on socials is itchio having to ban and unindex several games due to payment processors pressuring them to get rid of "obscene content". I got lucky in that none of my games have been hit, (admittedly I havent made a true NSFW or gory game yet so it makes sense), but it's still pretty disheartening to see this happen to fellow devs whose works I dearly love. Especially since I myself wanted to delve more into NSFW games and write darker stuff as well, but seeing this all happen is making me think of how I would be able to make these games happen. This, alongside people from the UK unable to access some games on itchio, is prompting me to find alternative places to upload my games.

As of far I'm thinking of my Ko-Fi, Patreon, and archive.org for now. Admittedly I haven't used either Ko-Fi or Patreon in a while since I never seem to get any engagement on either of them and more often than not I'm too exhausted to constantly update them, but now’s a good time as ever. I am also hoping to see if I can do direct downloads on either my website or places like archive.org, but we will see when I have the energy to do all that orz.

In the meantime, please call and mail (not email, physical mail) to Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and Stripe to complain about the policies they're pushing onto websites like itchio and Steam. Stop-paypros.neocities.org and yellat.money are good places to start for resources on where to hit, how to hit, what can be done, and scripts. There's already been several articles written about how hypocritical and unfair these processors have been and there's currently a giant push to censor the internet as a whole in several countries, so, please, do everything you can to prevent this from happening!

So What Am I Going to Do For Now?

Just to be absolutely real with you, I have no goddamn clue. Or rather I know what I want to do, there’s just, A Lot. And not much free time.

There’s getting my games on the aforementioned sites. There's some work on my website to do. I had my Neo-Twiny games I had been working on before The Incident, and I may just rework them a little for different game jams like this one lmao because I do think it's a shame to not finish them since I liked how they were coming out before I needed to stop, but, well, no promises. But like there's also the image captions to do for Upsetti Spaghettification and Chimera Baloney. And the games I had been working on like Pillars on Poppy Hills 2.0 and I Got Transported Into My How to Draw Manga Book!?

And well I'm still living in this shitshow of a nation while working 39.75 hours a week so they don't have to give me health insurance so there's all that exhaustion too. I'm so tired y'all lmao. What gets done will be whatever my spoons can handle at the time.

Please support Queer Games Bundle 2025. My games Please Don't Understand Me, Chimera Baloney, Translucent Trails, and I'll Be Home With You are included and I do get a cut of the proceeds alongside many skilled devs who deserve so much better than what we've been getting. Even just spreading is will do a lot of good if you're not able to afford the bundle's $10+ option.

Also call your payment processors about their hypocritcal policies strongarming a lot of people's livelihoods! Check out  Stop-paypros.neocities.org and yellat.money.

Last and incredibly importantly: make sure you tell your loved ones how much you love and appreciate them because the good ol' saying “life comes at you fast” is no fucking joke and does not fuck around. I've had enough health and death scares for the rest of this fucking year and also the rest of my life thank you very much.

        ~Knickknack PJ

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PS: I'm going to be numbering my monthly devlogs a little differently from here on out!

EDIT HOURS AFTER PUBLISHING POST: LMAO DANGIT I also wanted to include the things I've been currently playing/reading at the time of publishing the devlog and completely forgot!  Well, here it is:

Currently Listening: Don't Touch My Ladder by Tom Cardy feat. Louie Zong ("That's not a metaphor, I just don't know how to do it" still makes me laugh each time I hear that line)

Currently Reading: 1984 by George Orwell (I'm doing a combination audiobook + reading the book because I dunno! My brain sometimes has a difficult time parsing reading words but has a much better time hearing words, ya feel?)

Currently Playing (Game): Deltarune Ch 4 (Yes I know everyone and their grandma played through it already, but I'm still taking my time!)

Currently Playing (Visual Novel): Several O2A2 VNs (It's the moooost wonderful tiiiime of the yeeeeaarr~!)