Spectre Writes

The PIZZA PRANKS Videogame Tape Club is now open!

The latest of my attempts to answer the question of "how can the no-budget/micro/alt/etc. indie space be even slightly more financially sustainable without forcing itself into a more commercial mold?", I've started publishing physical editions of indie games and selling them through my site, selling them at events, or selling them to devs directly. Money is not the point of art, but it also doesn't hurt to have. I started making Indiepocalypse working a terrible job I increasingly hated, if I could make a fraction of that making games, you wouldn't find me complaining¹.

I started putting Indiepocalypse on tape² to bring to local art markets. I had previously been pasting codes to the back of postcards but they didn't usually have a strong draw on their own. But these tapes, they're exciting! They draw people's attention! And most importantly I think they're maybe the ideal format for low-cost physical game releases? The game equivalent of zines, mini-comics, and CDs. (or i suppose actual cassette tapes?)

I'm a long time champion of Your Local Show whether it's an art, game, zine, flea market or whatever. I think it's generally a better place for indie devs to consider than the various expensive corporate focused festivals, events, and the like that command the most visible attention.

The Tape Club is open for sale or submissions from now until the end of time and they're print-on-demand (you might call them unlimited run games) so there's not really any upper limit to how large the library can be. I like the format! I think it should catch on as the norm and am gonna stick with it until it does! (or if doesn't i suppose i will still stick with it)

You can submit Here or just email me or contact me however you feel. I'm not picky. I also wrote a bit more about the logistics of the project on this very site.

1. Indiepocalypse has not made any money. Give it time, it'll get there?

2. USB stick inside cassette case

Villain who broke your payroll program.

"We've got thousands of city employees with no payslips," Detective Parker sneers across the interrogation room table. "Union threatening to sue the city. Entire system choked to death on an—" he flips open his notebook, checks something— "illegal input character."

"Did you guys get confused into arresting the nearest bystander because of the word illegal?" Internationale says sympathetically. "Could happen to the best of cops."

"Smells like sabotage," Parker says, wrinkling his nose in a conspicuous, contemptuous sniff. "Smells like your MO."

"Wow," Internationale says. "Wow. Who says 70s-style policing is dead? We reckon you dunnit, scum, because you're scum. Fess up before you trip down a flight of stairs a few times, is it?"

"You're known," Detective Falconer says, sitting back in her chair, pen a silently swinging metronome between her fingers, "for cultural awareness activism."

"A lowest-bidder local government IT fuckup sounds like activism, to you?" their suspect says pityingly. "You people enjoy the mayor ringing your boss and telling him to tell you to frame somebody because his corner-cutting came home to roost?"

"Yeah, wise guy? You know IT fuckups, do you?" Parker leans across the table.

"I know you just told me about it," Internationale says, offering an angelic smile. "Somebody typed something in — input — and the software was too goddamn incompetent to either reject it or handle it — illegal. Though, for the cops in the room, still not illegal in the against-the-law sense. Who was the IT contractor? Because it sounds like they took the city for a ride. Substandard product. Corporate negligence. Getting the city sued by labour unions, did you say?"

"You have a little history with software corporations you characterise as incompetent with regard to handling cultural matters," Falconer says coolly. "Non-Western naming conventions. Gender identity markers. Characters outside the standard English alphabet."

"Me and millions of people with, say, Chinese names," Internationale says. "Ooh, maybe it's an act of spooky Chinese cyberwar, officers."

"I kinda doubt that a Chinese cyber warfare battalion sneaked in an employee record with surname—" Falconer checks her own notebook, "Unicode Waving Hand, Hi Pigs, with the two little dots over the first letter I—"

"That's called a diaeresis," Internationale says helpfully.

"And an accent mark over the second one."

"Depends which way it slopes. Downhill from left to right, or uphill?"

Falconer ignores him. "Doesn't sound like a Chinese cyber attack to me."

"That's the quality of the police work here, is it?" Internationale says. "We reckon it was you, not some other guy, because we don't like you?"

"You're a real cocky piece of shit," Parker says.

"Oh look," Internationale says, and points a little at the door. "It's my lawyer. You want to explain to my lawyer that you're charging me with We Don't Like You?"

Having fun writing Reka being just, an unrepentant monster. All my other characters it's like,

Okay Sikka eats people, but she's not malicious. That's just what she eats. She didn't choose it.

Alice is in the same vein, you definitely get more of a sense that she's not burdened with morals but like, she's... fine. she also didn't decide that some monsters should need to eat human meat, it's just a thing that she facilitates.

Reka is a dickhead. She kills people because it's so fun for her to be the scary pirate who leaves no survivors. Fuck you for being in a boat near her.

Saoirse will not fix her. Reka will make her worse.

Starship pilot who lost track of where they end and the ship begins.

Amber broke up with Tee two months ago, after she caught her plugging back into shipsense after hours.

"You know everything ever committed to paper or training video about over-use," Amber had said quietly. They'd had arguments about it before, about the per-period and lifetime safe limits, about how close to the redline she pushed it. This wasn't an argument. This was worse. "I've seen it. We had a pilot on the Thrace—" and she trailed off, staring at the wall.

Amber has nightmares about the Thrace. She'd never articulated exactly what was in them; the ship had never had a major safety incident. Tee had assumed long-term emotional wear from workplace toxicity, both on Amber directly and, as the ship's med officer, on everyone else that she got a secondary dose from being unable to fix.

"If I take second place to doing this to yourself, then...." Amber had shrugged, defeated. "I'm out."

Tee waits, now, for a night shift, one of the ones she knows Amber got moved to so they wouldn't bump into each other coming off duty. Creeps into sickbay, clutching the hem of her flight crew sweater so her hands won't shake.

Amber starts to say something when she sees her, then checks herself and stares into her face with a gathering frown. "Are you hurt?"

She hesitates. "Phantom pain," she says eventually, eyes sliding off Amber. Sounds small and shaky.

Amber starts to reach for her other hand, the robotic plastic one, and Tee shakes her head, an abrupt snap of movement, teeth digging into her lip.

"In my — in my core drive diagnostics," she says, in a horrible, scratchy voice. "I'm not plugged in and I can feel my stardrive and it feels malfunctioning. I've — I've fucked my brain."

Amber inhales, holds the air in, lets it out steadily. "Probably a bit," she says, with the professional smoothness of bedside manner. "First time? And for how long?"

"First time," she confirms. "Since — I dunno, I logged off feeling, feeling that kinda connected-too-long hangover, but I didn't realise it was wrong wrong until I had a nap and I woke up and realised I could feel—"

"If it's the first time," Amber says quietly, "mostly it's correctable at that stage." If, she doesn't go into.

"If I give you medical consent to notify the captain," Tee says, hating how small she sounds, how lost, "how long do I get yanked off piloting?"

"Six weeks, minimum. Then medical reassessment, and by ear." Amber looks away. "I'm not going to lie to you, and you know this anyway: no guarantee it'll be safe for you to fly again."

Tee closes her eyes and winces around a flare of pain in her — hardware. That she doesn't have.

"Now," she says shakily. "Do it now before I — before I get more chicken than I am now."

Amber's hands settle on her shoulders. "You're being brave," she says softly. "And smart. And I'm proud of you."

"I'm gonna spend the next six weeks being a hateful scumbag about being cut off," Tee says, and chokes up. "I'm scared," she adds forlornly.

"Yeah," Amber says, and leans their foreheads together. Her voice lowers, down past professional, into unmistakeably intimate. "But I've got you," she says.