This manoeuvre is what we in the industry call "having some fun with it".

To ease you into this, here's the story of how I entered IFComp in 2022. Back then, I was looking for any opportunity that would make me more hireable, after a slew of rejection after rejection for games jobs. In the Work With Indies discord server—which I was checking religiously, on account of the above—I saw a popup in the announcements channel.

"Oh, cool," I thought, "a free junior game writers workshop. I could get something good from this."

It was an interactive fiction group run by Jim Munroe, as a not-so-subtle promo of his tool TextureWriter, where we would be creating games using it. As the first meeting ended, he casually mentioned how the end goal of this workshop would be submitting our creations to IFComp, and guided us to register our intents before the deadline.

"Oh, cool," I thought, "some kind of jam, or something. I've done that before. This should be fun."

IFComp was brought up a few more times as the workshop progressed. Notably, there was emphasis on how useful IFComp can be for getting eyes on your work and feedback, with the claim that there would be thousands of people playing our games.

"Oh... cool?" I thought. "Jams get more people to play your stuff, but not that many. That's an exaggeration."

It was not.

I realised what I'd signed up for 2 days after voting started.

In 2022, Nose Bleed clocked in at 27th place, which I was pleasantly surprised at given the lack of any awareness of what I was getting into. It did nicely on itch too, and is a game of mine (even to this day, which surprises me!) people bring up that they enjoyed. It even got hit by MindlessFool, infamous heteronormative hentai addict who rates everything that doesn't give him a boner 1 star.

But here's the thing. Before, people on itch said they liked my games, and those who disliked them (in genuine earnest, and not because a game features the unrealistically diverse character of a white man with a vagina) didn't say anything. Often, people who stumbled upon them were looking for ones in a similar style to others they liked, or ended up there on personal recommendation. This was a nice thing; essential, even. To get that feedback that people were one, playing, and two, enjoying the games I put out.

But I'd never had someone who, intrinsically, would never connect with what I'd made, who then had some form of obligation to finish it, and tell their thoughts to the world. On itch, if you don't like something you stumbled on, you bail in the first few minutes (or seconds, even) and move on. If you do enjoy it, you're likely to leave some kind of positive feedback that you did, in the form of comments or a rating. Most people have too many games to get through to waste time on something they dislike, and waste even more time telling the dev about it. Then, those ranting with little substance behind their argument often get clowned on by fans of the game. This is the culture of itch.

This is not the culture of IFComp. Veterans of IFComp make it a personal challenge to play through as many games as they can, even the ones that they do not enjoy. On top of that, there is a significant culture around writing lengthy reviews of their experience and thoughts.

I had people who wondered why, in a game featuring an autistic MC, everyone was mean to you and you couldn't figure out why. I had people who got angry that the MC, with severe anxiety constantly affirmed by the environment they tried to survive through, didn't just "do what I would have done". I had people who were pissed at the mechanic of blood spreading over the screen wherever you moved the mouse (to encourage you to not move the mouse around so much, a double effect of trying to make yourself seem as small and out-of-the-way as possible, as well as a literal effect of not spreading your nose bleed everywhere), and instead of thinking why this was intentionally added to the game, immediately throw a tantrum that their experience had any amount of friction. It was, genuinely, like I'd put a glue trap out for ignorant neurotypicals.

They didn't like it, but they had feelings, and were getting mad about something I'd made.

This was entirely new to me. I hadn't had proper negative feedback outside of trolls. There was an inkling that I'd be able to take it on the chin and move on, but that was only a theoretical. I had no idea how I'd actually handle it.

I handled it with a devilish smile cracking through my face.

During the results, I learnt of a secondary award running parallel to the top three. The Banana of Discord. Awarded to the game with the highest standard deviation, i.e., the most controversial. The one with the most 10s balancing out the 1s.

Nose Bleed had the 3rd highest standard deviation, at 2.04. You can even see it visually in the pack it landed in, a run of scores graphing tight 6 to 7 with its gorgeous spread of 5 to 9. I'd made something that was divisive, and that was without much trying. By just being Me. It was only 0.26 lower than the winner. Without trying. It all culminated into one, intoxicating thought.

I'm going to win that Banana.

This experience was a critical moment in my journey as a game dev, as it made me realise why I was doing this in the first place. I wasn't here to make things with mainstream appeal, to declaw and dethorn the stories I wanted to tell, reducing them to a featureless nothing that falls out of your mind as soon as it enters it. I'm here to tell stories I know are needed for specific people while not giving two shits about everyone else. I'm here to be violently myself.

When people think of my games, I want them in absolute adoration, or hate so rich that their blood pressure spikes at the vaguest hint of their names. If anyone plays one, feels nothing, and moves on to never think about it again, I have failed as an artist. I want to get inside someone's guts and twist them. I want my mark carved on the inside of their psyche. I want bigots to loathe me and faggots to love me.

I'm going to win that fucking Banana.

The Plan

To tell the truth, I had no plan. As in, I didn't go into SEXTUPLE L with the active intent of making something to win the Banana. Active intent would be studying the trends of every year and crafting an experience that tries to hit every sore point I find. Despite those lines you just read I don't, actually, care if I win the Banana or not. I just think it would be really funny if I did.

This game came about because I read Penance by Eliza Clark. That's literally it. It's one of few books I can say has an actual jumpscare on turning a chapter page, and I've never seen a book more accurately depict the life of being the weird girl in highschool in 2010s England. 

Being fair, it was also a combination of that book and a string of words I was rotating in my head. This happens a fair amount, where some words or phrases will pop into existence and I let them marinate to see what artsy bullshit I can extract from them. The exact phrase was "latex leather lipstick". Obviously, that was something kinky. Then I realised, by happenstance, that each word follows vowel order. A E I. Were there other words that start with L that could follow nicely, in a similar theme? What would the resolution be? Love. Lust.

That's a game title.

Churning this through the detritus of my own brain, the story began to form on its own.

Five acts, one for each word. Just from that and the residuals from Penance the plot began to form, what would happen in each, where branches would happen, and what of my personal online and offline experiences could be farmed for it. L formed as a distinct entity in my head, what story he needed to serve, what would and wouldn't be resolved in this chapter of it, and why this story needed to exist, and exactly who it was for. Then, I realised something. 

The IFComp crowd would hate this.

If they hated the anxiety-addled MC, rail-roaded not-options building character, non-overt but ever-present neurodiversity, they would fucking despise L. He felt laser-targeted to piss off every negative review I received from Nose Bleed. Then I realised it was two months away.

There's also something I need to mention here. It's an important thing to know about my philosophy in making this game, and informs every decision I make after this point.

I do not give a shit about IFComp.

What I mean by this, is that I constantly see IFComp held to this lofty, almost biblical, status. Talked about in whispers and reverence months before it arrives. People paralysed just by the idea of submitting something, with the gauntlet of judgement and ranking to follow. Authors work on IFComp projects for years, desperately slaving away to their ideal of perfection. Anything less would be sacrilege.

I simply do not give a shit about this.

To me, IFComp is an interactive fiction event with interesting historical precedent with a lot of fanfare around the period. That's it.

Maybe it was my first introduction that broke this. Maybe it's my terminal sadism. Maybe it's something else entirely that I'll realise after looking back on ten years of my corpus of work.

Whatever it is, I'm just here to make people feel things.

The Execution

And so this game was born.

SEXTUPLE L is a first for me for a mostly benign reason. When I put projects up on itch, thumbnail graphics are an afterthought. I pull a random shot from a game. I grab the font I used the most and write out the title. The itch page vaguely themed around it. Whatever.

This one, however, I had a clear visual style in mind before I'd even plotted out the main story thread. The title grabbed me immediately, and I knew I was either using the leather or latex flag as the colour palette. I figured, I might as well ride the lightning. The project page with the thumbnail and background graphics were complete months before the game ended up on there. What a boring and uneventful first!

It was about a month (and a bit?) to get this game from scraps to playable. I don't have the exact timeframes, but it was around 4 weeks writing, a few days implementing, then one day for all the images. That was also broken up by my LBK-01 project, which took... three weeks? Ish? I really don't remember. I finished two days before the deadline. The IFComp version was the first draft.

This also, still, leaves me baffled at how IFComp projects can take years of development time. Having random scraps around, letting ideas cook in your head, or pre production, sure. But active production? As in, start to finish, actual time you spent working on it, not counting breaks or holidays away from it? I cannot fathom taking more than a few months for something at this scope. I dunno. Maybe this is a case of me being severely ill about writing, again.

The story needed to be real; the story was going to be one of toxic online relationships that almost everyone chronically online had, and it was going to be a snapshot of transmasculine life in the current moment to look back on and go "yes, really, this is what we were like". It needed to cut to the bone. It needed to cut through the bone, all the way to the marrow, and expose it enough that we can start poking and prodding at it for the next two hours.

And there's the question of why I needed to keep poking it after cutting as deep as we could go; surely the point was made. Because doing so is integral to putting the player in the same position that L was in. I wanted people in one of two headspaces, either of the numbing sameness we went through, with brief breakthroughs of how awful this is, or blazing anger at why we don't just bring this to an end when we had all the tools to. We've gone trepanning to let all this fossilised trauma escape until L reaches his actual limit.

I think I've drilled this metaphor enough.

From that came two endings. You engage in the fantasy, what the majority of us didn't do without the foresight or knowledge of now; this ending is bombastic, still with foreshadowing that even if this is how it went for us, there's still so much of ourselves left to reexamine and rebuild now that we can see clearly. You stay passive and nod along, and you get the realistic ending, still with a slight glimmer of hope that it will get better. Because it did, but not overnight.

Writing this game was painless. I sat down, wrote what came next, and then did that again the next day. The only thing I had a hangup on was exactly how the takedown of Valerie in Ann Summers would play out. Everything else was done in one shot.

But it leaves me with little to comment on the actual process. I knew what I needed to make. I knew exactly who it was for. The story was fully crystallised and every character's moves and motives were calculated to serve it. The length grew and grew and I was more an observer to that than a participant. I knew exactly what this game needed to be, and petty notions such as "word limits" were beyond it.

The only thing I can comment on is how the internal monologue, the right-aligned text, evolved as I was going. I started off with this purely being first person, but as I went, "you" started to slip in. This was L's voice as it was coming out, so I started to play with it. And playing with it, instances where L would say "you" become stream of consciousness in a different font, the constant self-deprecating inner monologue that doesn't really stop as much as L stops focusing on it. A short while after that, I lost the rule of only having this monologue use "you" and eventually became actualised with "I", and by that point it was effectively a distinct character. It made the lines between L's thoughts quite blurred, which I liked.

When it came to playtesting to see how long a playthrough took, I realised that act 1 took me a full hour to finish. Given IFComp's (soft) limit of 2 hours, I thought this might be a problem, but act 2 and 3 only took an hour combined, and adding act 4 and 5 totalled up the time to 2 and a half hours. That's fine to fudge down. I mean, this wretched thing advertising itself as 2 hours and actually tricking people into a longer experience feels on brand. 2 hours it is.

Metadata set, beta uploaded to IFComp and LBK, it was done. And now it was time to wait.

The Reception

You know the worst part about this bit? That period between the competition launching and no-one (publically) commenting on the game. I was waiting for some poor innocent heterosexual to wander into this with no idea what they were in for. Quoting myself to a friend who I'd roped into my plans:

i feel like ive left a landmine in the ifcomp submissions and now im just waiting for someone to explode

Shortly after the game went live on itch, I received a comment. And this comment, and receiving it so quickly, meant the world to me.

Like, I need to stress, this comment is it. This is the exact way I wanted someone to connect with this game. This is the exact person who needed to play it. This is the exact way I wanted them to emotionally respond.

So I managed to give even less of a shit about IFComp. I've got my audience. I've succeeded. Anyone else transfixed or traumatised was collateral.

A little after, the intfiction reviews started rolling in. This started off as queer people who immediately got what I was doing. I know that, because I got comparisons to Alison Rumiftt, which made me intensely giddy. I know exactly which parts prompted that, which made me even giddier.

I decided to make an account on there as THE BLOOD to reply to them, mostly to clarify bugs people hit, but also to engage a little. I started off not wanting to discuss the actual content of the game with reviewers, but the initial response was softening my heart. I was expecting abject confusion and disgust out of the gate before the people who understood it would play, so getting that first was a very pleasant surprise.

This initial wave also confirmed a grievance I had with one of the plot threads. One thing I was keeping an eye out for was reactions to L's comments and focus on Gestirn's weight. This was pulling on a common thread for transmascs that being skinny is an inherent trait to passing; the rassaku.net guide being the most obvious signpost of this, as well as, just, being an online trans masc in the current year. L, being a skinny twink, benefits from that line of thought and absolutely subscribes to it, even if he wouldn't admit it out loud. This was something I was already planning adjustments for after the first draft (but couldn't be fucked editing two days before submission and shagging the build), since L would think this, but it doesn't hook into why he knows he thinks this, as it's something he's consciously aware of as being bad. This was a fine line to balance, compared to other prejudices he held that he does not have a critical eye on himself for.

There's also the question of just cutting the thread entirely which was asked by some, but that couldn't be done. L is a skinny twink who benefits from societal fatphobia. That's a key part of his character and his relation to being trans. To remove that would be pretending a huge issue within online transmasculine spaces does not exist. The definitive edition pokes at this with a sharper point.

As more reviews came in, people were mentioning one thing over and over. It made me realise something unexpected.

I am a faster reader than I thought.

By several hours.

As you read above, my time playing through this game was 2 1/2 hours, which I fudged down to 2. I liked that, because it was a bit cheeky. I like stealing people's time when they don't expect it, and why I particularly enjoyed comments from people who just wanted to take a look and found themselves completing the entire game.

But this went beyond a simple trolling for someone to spend a bit longer on a game than they expected. Unlike almost everything in this game, which is bad to effect, this is just bad. It offers no reason for being bad and just fucks off anyone for the terrible crime of "not wanting to rush through the story and savour it instead". I halted all the extras I was planning for the definitive edition and shifted to coding up a save system.

And this was hard. I'd modded Videotome before so I was no stranger to poking through the guts of an engine, but Videotome was stripped back as a deliberate design choice, making mods an easy affair. After poking through the code and trying to dice apart how inkrunner works, I realised something.

I don't know what I'm doing.

Through a  game of Discord telephone, I managed to get in contact with the creator of the engine. Turns out, there is a save/load built into inkrunner! That is entirely untested! And hidden because it's entirely untested! isyourguy was generous enough to patch it up and make it usable for my purposes, which only needed autosaving and continuing on page reload.

So, I want everyone who doesn't read at a completely inhuman pace to send all your thanks to him. He saved many computers from being kept on overnight.

A common criticism that cropped up was that the end of the game began to drag, starting from the cystitis/Tumblr/Discord carousel, and the fallout from Gestirn's breakdown. To me, however, everything was a necessary inclusion. Of course, why didn't we just block those people and move on? Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back on how we actually acted strikes a chord that most people, for the better, do not have. This cannot exist in anything but the form it's in now, and to take out any aspect of it would be showing an incomplete trauma or an entirely different story. You could consider it a form of therapy, in that case, both for myself and those who need to experience it. 

If your reaction to parts of this game is "It would have been much more satisfying if—" this story is not designed for you. It may speak to human empathy (and, frankly, I'm shocked it speaks to anyone except its target audience), but the full conceit, characters or not-characters, and specific narrative beats are not for you. I cannot stress enough how this can't exist as anything but the structure it is in right now, and you should be very happy that you are baffled by the narrative choices in the second half. If you still feel  confused by this, I'd recommend running through the comments left on the itch page, particularly those I've replied to under the LBK account.

Some reviews, which I was wondering if anyone would pick up on, pointed out how Valentine exists as wish fulfilment. That is, expressly, his entire purpose in this story. He is a factor in this that does not exist in reality, as is an entirely unreal construct. He's what we wish we could have had (also, who we wish we actually were), and, ultimately, even if those people did exist, they would not have been able to save us. All of Act 1 is fantastical wish fulfilment, then hit with a sobering right turn that, even if this did happen, it would not have changed anything. Even the good end is a form of wish fulfilment, as mentioned, since the majority of those who go through this do not have that hard cutoff into an incoming personal crisis. We often know what has to be done, and are too scared to do it, and before growing enough out of the fear are fully subsumed in the thing at its dead, rotted end.

Val absolutely does have more backstory and personality beyond being an anti-messiah (as well as a fun explanation how he wound up in this role), but that's to be expanded on in other games I want to do with these guys, which branch out solidly into full fiction and let everyone have actual, satisfying narratives, and not quasi-realities/archetypes for a specific group of traumatised transexuals to hook into. Keep an eye out, if you're curious. It's going to heavily feature occult internet drama, which is objectively hilarious and terminally unserious.

And then there was a wave I found fascinating; ones who completely clocked into the entire conceit of the game, that L is not a good person, despite the presence and later shunning of people like Gestirn and how in doing so does not suddenly make him the better man, and then, were intensely angry that the story hinged on this. Mad at me, actually, thinking I endorsed everything he said and each subtlety of his character.

L is a bad person. I also think he's a bad person. I wrote him to be a bad person. The story is coloured entirely by his POV because he's a bad person. I intentionally placed every view he has and showed them through subtext because he is a bad person who refuses to confront that he is a bad person.

Why is fatphobia one that bubbles to the surface against everything else L thinks? Because it's a conversation that's starting to get louder, and one in current Tumblr contention, and the person he deems the villain in this story is fat. He refuses to confront it fully, knowing subconsciously how much this line benefits him, with it constantly staring him down with the knowing that he shouldn't think it. At the very least, he decides to be polite enough to never say it to someone's face. All these other views exist within L, dormant, yet still influencing him and how he speaks and what he does. Why does his internal monologue, the so-defined straight man of the story, not call him out on every instance of this? Because it's still L. Only in rare instances does it reflect on deep-seated issues he has rather than wallowing in the ones that are socially acceptable to post about online.

Everything written for L is an intentional act that fully realises himself as a product of these circumstances. All hinging, critically, on the idea of moral superiority over things you cannot change, much like Gestirn trying to justify their hatred of autistic people (and really, fear of being autistic themself) instead of confronting why they think this.

Fatphobia, helping him pass, justifying dislike of someone, mentioned above. His latent internalised misogyny directed at cis women; deification of real-world trans women that he drops as soon as they break his worldview even slightly. Having debilitating anxiety around social situations, projecting the judgement he has on everyone back onto himself, then paradoxically believing he should have a softer punishment than them. Fetishisation of another culture that aligns with his ideals of masculinity, while deriding those who do so to a socially unacceptable degree. Resentment that anyone he sees as lesser is able to obtain a romantic partner. Inherent bias against "gross" medical conditions while making light of cystitis he experienced. More. Dig for them yourself. This whole game is built on parallels and hypocrisy.

What would be the solution to that? For this story, it's not something to be solved (and if they were, this game would be quintuple its length), and "solving" such issues are not the burden of the author. This story is not a metaphor; it's a slice of reality, that does not care for how absurdist or thorny that reality is, then playing with the lines of how this could be different in fantasy. That, to me, is transgressive. I'm not here to spoonfeed you what my actual views are, to wrap it up like an 90s American children's cartoon and give you the Moral You Must Learn, to hand you a list of the ontologically good and bad characters.

Because that list does not exist. This game is a point of reflection of a moment that me and many others went through, and commiseration that we did, while also refusing to put our own perspective in a fully "good" light, speculative on how things could have been different. Even in fantasy, we still would have been "bad" people, even if we deserved a break from it all. But, is the "bad" of us suddenly absolved for suffering, and immediately the better, perfected person for getting the perceived worst end of it? Of course not. Nor does it justify any treatments we made, actualised or not. In reality, we are not all that different, and a product of the same circumstances.

The only difference between L and Gestirn is that Gestirn said it out loud. We see the worst of L from the seat inside his head.

It also speaks to a meta commentary in parallel to the relationship breakdown of L and Gestirn. Starting from L presenting himself as a mess, but a sympathetic one, slowly breaking down this spectre with nothing he doesn't see as wrong held back as his temper rises (as, of course, the only intended audience is L himself, going through his own memory of the events), how do you see him? Do you bet on him growing and learning about his faults, knowing you have in the past? Do you discard him entirely, not having the emotional bandwidth to watch or help him grow? How does this reflect on you, if you related to him? Is it better to live through paralysis so no one can see those beliefs? How much of those beliefs make you you? How much should they? How much of them can you change? How much is the company you keep or the society you can't escape from? Do you, in spite of everything, still deserve the right to human connection?

I'm not here to answer these.

And for people to fully realise this, so laser-focused into the entire point of this game, point out and dissect every intentional piece of language and subtext I slipped in, and handwave it all as unintentional bigotry was the funniest shit I've ever seen.

There's almost an insult I felt that my skill as a writer was being skipped over to immediately assume malice and sloppy character building. Most people touting this line, notably, found themselves relating to L at the beginning of the game. Then, as the game progresses, found this slipping away and suddenly find disgust in relating to someone who thinks things like this. There are two ways you can take this: the recognition that you were L in the past, maybe still with factors of L with you today, and realising how you've grown from this point. Or, recognising that this is not you, and for whatever factors it may never be you, but understanding how close it could have been you if your circumstances were two paces to the left.

And if you don't think it could ever be you, you might need to take a long look at yourself.

Then the people who would never get this game started to play, and the devilish grin returned. One of my favourites said the game—lifted from real, actual experience—was unrealistic, and gave gorgeous echoes of the victim-blaming I saw from Nose Bleed, vitriolic that an MC has debilitating anxiety, makes bad choices, and can't see for himself that those choices are bad. It suggested that instead of scrolling through Tumblr, L should do Duolingo instead. You know. A linguistics graduate. Churning through machine-translated AI slop language to make himself feel better about his life choices. That one really tickled me.

I would also like to leave, as a bit of a read, something a friend of mine pointed out: for those who kept complaining that L didn't just put his phone on silent, you have not been able to stop talking about this game on Discord for the past 6 weeks.

Further reviews and comments fed back into everything already above, and fully affirmed what I'd set out to do. Everything was done exactly as it needed to be. My actual audience clocked into everything I wanted them to, relating to it through the ups and downs, and everyone else got mad about something not being for them or were twisting themselves into knots over the idea of queer people being bad, and not just faux-fantasy bad because they stabbed someone. It reduced the people I targetted down to blubbering messes, and fucked off everyone else. Wonderful.

So, from all that, here's the quick and quotable FAQ:

What inspired this story? Penance by Eliza Clark. This was combined with personal experiences of being on the internet with no other social outlets and various discourses you can find online right now. Several DMs during the Discord sections were real, actual things people have said to me.

Why did you make it? Because the game needed to exist for the people who needed to play it. If six thousand words of context still leaves you confused, I dunno. Ask your parents.

Why wasn't this just a novel? What the fuck are you talking about?

How did you do [feature] in Twine? By not using Twine. This was made in inkrunner by isyourguy, which serves as a replacement for the ink web player that isn't shit.

Is this game autobiographical? Semi. Parts of this game are an almost 1-to-1 retelling of something that happened to me or someone I know, but I would like those lines to be kept blurred. Mostly because I'm curious what others think was lifted from real events and what was extrapolated.

Where the hell did you get those Youtube videos? I asked people I knew for the weirdest low-count Youtube videos they could find. Some were posted by themselves when they were 10 years old, in-jokes between people I didn't know, or someone putting together an entire python script to scrape low-count views. The rest I filled in with random finds on deepdives and channels I already followed before.

How long is this game? That's a very good question.

Do you have other games? Yes. Ones with substantial playtime are found here, and everything else is on my itch page.

This game and your other work is great and amazing and you are incredibly hot and sexy, and you are so hot and sexy that I as some rich cunt who wants to do all your advertising for you would like to give you, say, £2k per month or sign you for a publishing deal to make more things that make you even hotter and sexier; how can I do that? Why, thank you! person who definitely exists in the current games industry climate, and I'm sure you're just as hot and sexy as I am. You can contact me through whichever means is best for you found on my site.

I am not a rant about the state of the games industry and would like to support you; how can I do that? If you have some spare cash to throw at me, I have a ko-fi which you can do a monthly subscription or a one-time donation. If everyone who played SEXTUPLE L subscribed for £2, I would be entirely self-sustained and independent for the foreseeable future. If you don't have money, just talking about my games and recommending them to others does more than you could ever imagine.

The Results

Ah! Up until now, I've been speaking in an apparent past. As in, all the writing before this point was before the results dropped. I had no idea what would be the outcome, and the only goal I had was being a mildly annoying twat.

So, leaving space for my future self to jump in, we now snap to me knowing the placement of this game, in 3, 2, 1...

Huh.

That's higher than I was expecting. Considering that I was expecting 40th.

Again, I don't give a shit about the placement. I'll bag 11th and slap it on my CV.

And LOOK AT THAT VOTE DISTRIBUTION.

THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT BABY!!!!!!!!!!

I saw several people that I was a lock-in for the banana. I didn't believe that, but 2.59 smashed my old record. Just by being even more violently myself.

As a wise sage once said: lol. Lmao, even.

The Future

After all this, it begs the question of where to go next.

For SEXTUPLE L itself, the definitive version is out now and playable for free. The audio brings an extra layer to the experience I feel, so even if you've played already I recommend giving it another look. I've also submit it to IGF to see what happens. I'm expecting absolutely nothing much like Quinn & Flynn last year, but who knows.

Because I can't stop, I'm already working on my next projects. There's... too many to write about here. Drop me a line if you want to hear about any of them. As for if any of those will end up in another IFComp, probably not. I've got everything I want out of it, I feel. What I want to work on next is bigger than deliberately trying to piss off a select group of people. More than usual.

I am also prone to flights of fancy.

But for now, I'm not thinking about this at all. I'm instead thinking about how the hell I'm going to get CHILDREN OF HELL a publisher and/or suitable funding. Or just a god damn job. I'm still open for work. Hire me. Please.

Either way, thank you everyone who played this game, any of my games in the past, and is sitting patiently for whatever I make next. I will not stop until I carve out a place for me in the games industry to do this forever. Even if that takes wearing my fingernails down to the nibs.

Have a good one.