You opened the box, we came.
THE RITUAL IS COMPLETE! Black Heaven is finished and released to backers! Thanks to our 300+ backers and over $13,000 raised, we have brought this project to life!
Right now, the plan is to keep the game exclusive to Kickstarter backers for about 3 months, then release the game on Steam and Itch.io. Keep your eyes peeled for more updates!
Here are some screenshots and image assets from the complete game:
You can download the free 2-hour Extended Demo for Black Heaven here!
After almost two years of development, Black Heaven is nearly ready for release to Kickstarter backers! Here’s a summary of what’s coming:
The game has reached almost 400,000 words (including the separate romance routes), which is more than the combined wordcount of Fellowship of the Ring and Dune!
Linnea Kataja has created dozens of beautiful sprite artworks, including costume changes, expressions, and terrifying horror forms!
The game features 50+ backgrounds commissioned from Lim Chin Yang, and each one has been as stunning as the last.
Marek Domagala has been tirelessly working to compose, revise, and sharpen the game’s tracks, which include over 15 unique songs and roughly 45 Fractal Madness versions of those songs–three for each track.
The Seeker mini-game has been completed, and some of the private playtesters have already called it “addicting” and “fun”!
Here are some screenshots of what the game looks like so far:
We’ve also created a fun, free personality quiz that matches you with one of the characters–try it out here!
You can download the free 2-hour Extended Demo for Black Heaven here!
My favorite tabletop game of all time is Onitama, a martial arts-themed, chess-like game by Arcane Wonders. I was so inspired by its simplicity and elegance that I wanted to incorporate it in a story of mine, and this became the catalyst for a concept I called “the Lotus Gambit,” as well as a playable, real-life variant for the game.
In Onitama, players control four “student” pieces and one “master” piece on a 5×5 grid board. Players can win by either moving their master to the starting place of the opposing master (the “Way of the Stream”) or by capturing the opposing master with any of their pieces (the “Way of the Stone”). Like chess, you capture a piece by moving one of your pieces onto the same square.
However, unlike chess, your pieces don’t have set movements. Instead, there are five cards with different patterns on them, each of which is named for a different animal. When you use a card, you move one of your pieces according to its pattern, then pass that card to your opponent. Players always have two cards in front of them, giving them some flexibility in what moves they can make.
One of the things that makes the base game so fascinating is that there’s two levels to it–there’s the position of pieces on the board, then there’s the flow of cards between players. Will you use a valuable card to get a better position, even if it means giving it to your opponent? What card will you get next? Should you make your big move now, or wait for a more favorable card to sustain your advance?
Onitama is a game of deceptively simple decisions. It’s also about predicting your opponents moves. The latter part is what really sparked something in me.
In chess, the first few moves on both sides usually follow predetermined formulas. There are whole books on opening moves, and experienced players are intimately familiar with the optimal ones for different strategies. This means that the game essentially moves along like clockwork for a while–entirely predictable.
Eventually, however, the perfect patterns are disrupted by a player making a move that was not entirely expected. From there, it’s not certain what the player intends to do next, and this is where analysis, prediction, and intuition takes over. This is also where chess crosses over from being a perfect mathematical equation to a contest between minds, where illusions, feints, and doubts are equally as important as the objective reality on the board.
In the words of Mikhail Tal: “You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.”
Tal seems to be expressing that victory in chess is achieved by understanding how to exploit your opponent’s mind, rather than simply making better moves on the board.
Imagine if you could anticipate each one of your opponent’s moves and their reactions to yours. If you could do that, then the game would be won from the start. But how could you know every single move, unless you knew that person’s mind inside and out?
This is something I’ve spoken about before, but I’m fascinated by the idea that no piece of origami can be folded perfectly. The closer you look, going all the way down to the microscopic, the more deviations you find from the ideal, “perfect” form. The closer you magnify those little flaws, the bigger they become in your perspective, until you start to see how each one is unique. And I’m enamored with the idea that, if you knew how, you could learn something about the person who folded that piece from those flaws, just like you can tell something about a person by the way they talk, or eat.
You could argue that deviations from perfection are what make us distinct personalities. The cracks in our souls manifest themselves in everything we do, and you only need someone with the right mind and eye to interpret those cracks, like a geologist studying a seismograph. Fortune-tellers and confidence men are experts at doing cold readings and picking up on someone’s emotional state, but what if you could go deeper, and gain insight into the core of a person’s being just by observing the folds they made in a piece of paper?
If you could go that deep, you’d be able to see the fundamental traits of that person’s personality and identity. And if quantifying a person’s identity is just a matter of measuring their deviations from perfection, then you could use that knowledge to create a model that would allow you predict what they would do in a given situation.
This is the central idea of “The Lotus Gambit.”
In chess, one possible tactic is a gambit, in which a player sacrifices a piece in order to gain some kind of advantage. It’s up to the other player to accept or decline the gambit, depending on whether they think they can exploit the situation to their advantage instead. In my conception, the Lotus Gambit goes like this:
One person challenges another to a game of Onitama with the following stipulation: the gambit-maker will wear a blindfold the entire time and move their pieces without seeing their opponent’s moves. If they win, they get whatever they desire from their opponent. If they lose, their opponent can take whatever they want from the gambit-maker. Here, the “gambit” is taking place outside of the actual game and is used to lure the opponent into accepting terms that they would otherwise not accept.
From there, the gambit-maker asks their opponent to fold a paper lotus. When they are finished, the gambit-maker examines it, blindfolds themselves, and the game begins. If they win, the “gambit” is successful.
Now, you might ask “If the opponent knows the gambit-maker is going to be anticipate their every move, couldn’t they try to make moves that are the opposite of what they would normally do, or attempt to anticipate their opponent’s anticipations?”
Well, that might be a little more complicated, but in theory, a skilled gambit-maker would be able to anticipate that reaction as well (based on their knowledge of their opponent) and play accordingly. And if the opponent anticipated that anticipation of their anticipations…well, you can see how meta-games develop within meta-games, becoming infinitely recursive.
Now, obviously you can’t execute the Lotus Gambit in real life (unless you really can anticipate someone perfectly), so how can you apply its principles to a real game of Onitama? Well, I created a variant of the game that allows you to get close to the spirit of it. The variant, called “Seeker,” is played like this:
One side has all of its normal pieces, but its “master” can’t move from their starting spot. The other side only has its “master,” but that master’s movements are invisible to the opponent. Instead, the player with the invisible master puts their master on a separate board hidden from their opponent and uses it to keep track of the master’s position.
From there, the game is played normally, with players choosing cards, passing them along, and attempting to capture each other’s masters. If the invisible master captures a student piece, that piece is removed from the board as normal. The player with the full set of pieces is the “seeker,” while the player with the invisible master is the “hidden.”
The seeker’s key to victory is anticipating the hidden’s movements by figuring out what kind of player they are and what kind of risks they will take. They need to pay careful attention to the cards used by the hidden to narrow down their position, but as the game goes on, the sheer number of possibilities can be overwhelming. Eventually, intuition begins to play a large role, and this is where the spirit of the Lotus Gambit comes into play: making moves based on your assessment on your opponent’s character.
Meanwhile, the hidden needs to choose their moves carefully to avoid being caught, while feinting their opponent into thinking they’re somewhere they’re not. The hidden thrives on playing mind games and exploiting their opponent’s assessments of them, which are expressed in their movements. They are everywhere and nowhere in their opponent’s mind, and that uncertainty allows them to exploit their opponent’s fears: “Have they made the expected move, or are they doing the opposite to throw me off? Are they expecting me to anticipate the unlikelier move?”
If the seeker isn’t careful, the game can quickly spiral out of control in their mind, all while the hidden capitalizes on the confusion.
In my mind, the Lotus Gambit (and the Onitama variant) aren’t about beating someone at a game through superior skill, but rather test one’s ability to understand their opponent. As many martial artists can tell you, sparring matches between experienced practitioners are as much mental as they are physical.
To take this a step further, consider what the Lotus Gambit means when it comes to being an invincible martial artist (or chess player): if you know your opponent and can anticipate and counter each of their moves before they even make them, the contest is over before it began. If your opponent recognizes this before or during the match, what can they do? They can’t defeat you, so all they can do is surrender.
In this way, someone who is invincible doesn’t have to fight (or play) anymore. They’ve transcended the contest or game, and when someone does challenge them without recognizing the truth of the situation, the invincible person isn’t really beating them–their opponent has provided them with all the correct moves to defeat them. And so the “game” collapses as the line between opponents dissolves.
Announcements!
First, the final chapter of “The Crownless King” (Part 4) is up on The Fantasy Hive, marking one of the darkest and most heart-wrenching endings to a story I’ve written in years.
Second, “Old No-Eyes” is up on Beneath Ceaseless Skies and it’s received its first review from Charles Payseur, an SFF reviewer and blogger, who nails the key theme of the story:
…to be immortal is to face the infinite, and to face the infinite means to annihilate the self. It’s an idea that means complete destruction in some ways, because a person cannot touch upon true infinity without being destroyed by it. They become no one, an absence, one with the universe. It shakes necromancy because the necromancers are egoists, are selfish and cruel. Not that Yute seems to have gotten over all of that. But he has become that which necromancy was point to, which means he is the realization of a goal that perhaps was never meant to be reached. The horror falls from the growing realizing that this group has [planted] the seed for their own destruction, and from the horror of what Yute has embraced on his way to immortality—true immortality. Dark, heady, and very much worth spending some time with!
Third, I’ve got new articles up on The Portalist and SyFyWIRE–one on what ‘serious’ fantasy writers can learn from Terry Pratchett and one on the real-life science behind giant robots!
After submitting “Old No-Eyes” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies way back in April 2017, it’s finally being published in two weeks!
Thanks to Scott Andrews, the editor at BCS, “Old No-Eyes” ended up becoming even better over the course of a few months of edits (and a lot of emails back and forth). With “Hypnotica” and “The Crownless King” serialized on The Fantasy Hive, this will be my third story released to the public, which is really exciting. Each of the stories takes place in the same secondary world, though at different points along the timeline: “Old No-Eyes” takes place in the same city as “Hypnotica“ (Senkaku), and reveals a few more hints about Togorun, who was mentioned in “Crownless King.”
“Old No-Eyes” centers on Yute, a disgraced immortality scholar who returns from exile to meet with an old colleague named Tenza, who has asked for his help in decoding a forbidden book called the Nokizi. The story introduces readers to some of the major elements of my world, especially immortality and fractal mathematics.
I’m super proud to finally have this story published, and I look forward to unleashing Yute (one of my favorite characters) on an unsuspecting world.
In case you haven’t seen them, here’s a rundown on some of the new articles I’ve written for the Fantasy Hive over the past few weeks. Most are about magic systems (like the pieces on D&D and Warhammer), while the one with Wicker is a Tales From the Tabletop story about the time I threatened a city with anthrax zombies in D&D.
I also put out a new listicle about the tech in William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the Portalist, with another listicle coming up on Earthsea soon!
This past month, I interviewed for a job at a game company and had a gushing, energetic conversation with four staff members about how much we all loved the game Doki Doki Literature Club, a Japanese dating sim that’s taken the internet (and numerous awards) by storm.
Soon after, however, I had a long Skype conversation with my Ma. My Ma and I always have deep conversations, so to lighten the tone she asked what I was doing for fun. I got excited and told her I was watching a playthrough of DDLC, which was…
I stopped and realized how insane I was going to sound.
Doki Doki Literature Club is a game about madness, suicide, horror, and nihilism. It’s about wiping people from existence. It’s about manipulating people’s deepest, darkest desires. It’s about twisting love into horrifying parodies of itself. It’s about chipping away at reality until doubts begin to gnaw at your soul.
So why did the thought of sharing it with someone fill me with unironic, exuberant joy?
DDLC is different from horror games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Dead Space, where the excitement among gamers comes from the thrill of a good, scary time surrounded by blood and monsters. We know where we stand with those games—we’re the squishy victim in a universe made of razor blades, and the fun comes from surviving.
Dating sims are not that. There are no sharp edges in them, because dating sims are meant to be dollhouses where the player is in control, and all the characters exist only to titillate and excite them. The fun comes from forgetting (for a while) that this is a game and losing ourselves in the fantasy. There have been some fucked-up dating sims (e.g,, the murderous professor in the infamous fever dream called Hatoful Boyfriend), but the vast majority of them play upon the knowledge that the player is here for some light, romantic fun. It’s hard to find a more ephemeral genre than the dating sim.
…which makes it doubly disturbing when you play through DDLC and start watching the game break down all the comfortable walls between you and the game. Then the chilling realization hits you: DDLC isn’t just three steps ahead, it’s gotten so far ahead of you that it’s been patiently waiting for you to catch on from the beginning.
But that kind of detached, cerebral appreciation for a well-crafted story isn’t what I felt. I doubt it’s what anyone felt their first time, because even as the game breaks the fourth wall again (and again [and again]), the emotional core of the game comes from truly caring about the characters, even after you acknowledge (in your mind) that they’re all fictional. I cared about Sayori and genuinely, genuinely wanted to help her, just like I wanted to show Yuri that she could be herself and help Natsuki become more comfortable with the idea that someone could be her friend.
DDLC doesn’t provoke a golf clap from those who play it, even after all the tricks are revealed. It provokes a white-knuckled fear, a creeping anxiety that breaks into wide-eyed, nihilistic emptiness deep down in your soul.
So I return to my original question, and the strange position I found myself in when Skyping with my Ma: if Doki Doki Literature Club is a truly disturbing nightmare of a game, why did I feel so much joy at the prospect of talking about it? Where did this sense of life-affirming exuberance come from?
I think there’s an argument for catharsis, that playing through a game that evokes such strong emotions is sort of like a release valve for all the stress, sadness, and anxiety we have pent up within us. For me, though, I think the answer is different—it has to do with gazing into the abyss.
I think there’s something wonderfully freeing about staring into the abyss, because the ultimate home of the abyss is within ourselves—that deep-rooted emptiness that we try to fill with things like careers, accomplishments, and pleasures. It becomes exhausting to keep fleeing from it and blocking it out, pretending that I really am all the things I present myself to be. When things threaten that image of myself, my instinct is to repair the damage before I lose everything and have to face the abyss, which has always been there. But if I’m being honest with myself, truly honest, I know that image of myself is a fabrication.
DDLC is about tearing away illusions: the characters, the gameplay, the plot are all fabrications, except for Monika (according to her). As Monika strips it all away, I’m forced to examine what was real: my feelings, my desires, my actions. Why did I act the way I did? Why did I feel the way I did? Why did I want to romance one character instead of another? And when it all comes crashing down, what kind of person am I? Everyone in DDLC loved me, even Monika, but only I know my thoughts. And as the game shifted, only I remain the same. Who am I?
Beneath all my desires and actions is the abyss.
I don’t imagine ‘the abyss’ to be an unavoidable force for entropy, lethargy, depression, and self-destruction. If anything, it’s the on part of myself that I think I need to understand better. After I’ve spent enough time gazing into the abyss, I gain a clearer perspective on life: I get a better sense of what’s important to me and what are just distractions or my own illusions (something Yuri deals with). After touching that immovable sense of nothingness at the core of my being, I feel free, even energized. It’s like I’ve let go of all the things that were weighing me down.
The feeling reminds me of two quotes. The first is from Jacob’s Ladder:
“If you’re afraid of dying, and you’re holdin’ on, you’ll see devils tearin’ your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freein’ you from the world. It all depends on how you look at it.”
I think undergoing the small ‘death’ that comes from touching upon the abyss does something like that: it frees you of the self-destructive things you’re holding onto and shows you that you don’t need them, and they don’t define you. At the same time, it illuminates the beautiful things in your life…only, you realize that every part of life suddenly seems beautiful. As Franz Kafka put it:
“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
Doki Doki Literature Club is a terrifying, disturbing game. It’s upsetting, sometimes even disgusting. But instead of doing all of that for the sake of shocking people, I feel like the game’s intent, as Yuri says, is to change the way we see the world, if even if it’s only a small change. I think it accomplished that for me. It changed the way I looked at stories, at life, and what is possible with writing.
This is my experience. Maybe other people felt the same way. As to its widespread popularity, I have this to say:
Anime and otaku culture have become synonymous with modern “internet” culture, which seems preoccupied with deconstruction, nihilism, and exploring the darkest depths of the human experience, all while maintaining an ironic, irreverent attitude. I think Doki Doki Literature Club speaks the language of the lonely young men and women who have invested more and more of their lives in an intangible world of video games, websites, and increasingly elaborate memes. These are the same people who embrace meaningless and absurdism while constantly pushing away the acknowledgement that they’re not happy with their lives and are escaping into fantasies rather than dealing with their problems.
DDLC tears down the comfortable, familiar fantasy of a Japanese dating sim and starts crossing over into reality, leaving the player nowhere to escape to or hide. You’re not playing an idealized avatar anymore, you’re you dealing with a situation that has spun out of control and left you heartbroken, frightened, or disturbed. In this sense, DDLC takes a fake experience (dating fictional anime girls) and creates a real one (reflection upon the nature of DDLC’s fantasy, and reflection upon oneself), all while giving a strong enough framework to make sense out of it all.
That unexpected encounter with reality is powerful, and I think it resonated with a lot of gamers. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the name of the ending song to the game is “Your Reality.”
I just got tickets to go see Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm at the Bell House on October 7th! I haven’t seen them since 2010, back at PAX Prime in Seattle, when I went with my West Coast buds.
I remember getting up at 4 AM to drive up to Seattle in the dark. The first 100 people who arrived at PAX got free tickets to see JoCo and Paul/Storm, and we were dedicated to getting those tickets. We decided we were going to cosplay as gangsta versions of Mario, Luigi, Wario, and Peach.
This was me at 17, sitting in on one of the panels at PAX.
So, through a series of convoluted circumstances involving Bob Iger, a Darth Maul cosplay gone bad, and an out-of-control ice cream dispenser, I’m going to be representing Outer Places on the October 8th “Science of Star Wars” panel at the NYC 2016 Comic-Con.
This is the third year in a row that I’ve gotten into the NYCC for free due to unforeseen circumstances, and it just goes to show that if you live in New York and make a lot of offerings to the right entities, all your wildest dreams can come true.