Fighting Game Romance
So recently my favourite games conference, the Queerness and Games Conference, announced that in September 2025, they'll be hosting the conference in person for the first time since I last went in 2018! I can't describe how happy and excited this has me, especially considering the event is going to be fully masked and they'll be taking precautions to mitigate any spread of COVID-19, making it accessible enough for me to attend without worry of putting the people around me at risk. QGCon 2018 was a hugely important conference for me, given I had recently realized I was genderfluid and I was living out in a rural area with my family. I left the conference feeling excited to be alive, excited to move out, and excited to be queer and make queer games for other queer people! I wanted to make games that I could take to QGCon and connect with people over.
September 2025 feels like a long ways away right now, but I think a goal I want to set for myself is to have enough of my fighting game done that I can show it there! The possibility has made me so excited to nail down the characters and get started on writing some of the dynamics and romances for the game, cause if I haven't mentioned it already, the fighting game is a romance. ✨
(Also btw I've added a projects page that lists all the projects I'm currently working on, so you can read more about it there!)
The "story mode" for the game revolves around playing as each different character and exploring their relationships to other characters via going on "dates" where they "duel" in the "park". Imagine drawing out one of those big polyamorous connection webs and then for each line between two people you get to explore their dynamic and play through it from either character's perspective.
This is an idea I've been enthralled by for years now. Polyamorous representation in media is hard to come by as is, let alone media that's not fucking weird about it. It can just be normal! Not everyone in the game is polyamorous, there's nothing ~taboo or risqué~ about it, it's just all about people exploring and developing their relationships to each other and themselves. Not everyone will be looking for the same things, not everyone will stay with the people they date, but everyone will end up in a better place for themselves by the end.
There are so many different ways that different people approach dating apps and their relations to each other, and I'm so excited to explore it. With the ability to play each interaction as either character, it feels like it has potential to be a fairly high scope type narrative system that will take a LOT of planning to execute properly. That's really exciting to me though. This whole project feels like a labour of love and patience, and that at it's core is what I want it to be all about :)
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