I make visual novels! Also play them sometimes. Wish I had time for more of both. I also do a podcast and LPs, because I don't know how to stop myself.



SuperBiasedGary
@SuperBiasedGary

I'm going to post various links and such you can use to find me after this. But I want to suggest you do more than just click follow on a new site (that odds are one of us won't stick with). Reach out with a message, DM me, add me on discord. I don't really mind if you just want to say a quick thing or want to ask something. I can't promise I'll be equipped to answer it but I'll say something!

One thing I'm sitting with as the site closes is that I want to be more intentional and interactive with people. I think the worst habit social media enforces is passive consumption. Clicking like instead of ever saying anything of value to another person. And there's a reason for that, because active engagement takes more energy, effort and spoons. But also a big part of what always makes me not do this is a very silly thought:

"Oh they don't want me to bother them."

I tend to assume this, overly much. Erring on the side of assuming people don't want to hear from me even if it's something like simply complimentary like "Hey this thing you made is sick."

So I'm categorically giving you (yes you reading this) permission to bother me with whatever it is you want. I have the bandwidth to be able to say "ah, I don't really know, sorry!" if I need to. But I would much rather people try shoot that shot than not.

Also asks here are open, fire off anything there too while you still can.


SuperBiasedGary
@SuperBiasedGary

I have a newsletter now:
https://buttondown.com/SuperBiasedGary

That is where I'll be focusing my long form updates, news about new releases and development chat. Some of that will be about previous games (I want to do a "year of com__et" one at the end of October), but I'll be talking a lot about my next game Ravel the Frays - a sci fi mystery puzzle game. Enjoy a deeply exclusively sneak peek of some art:

Besides that itch.io is the best central location for my work, though you can get com__et on Steam and eventually Ravel will appear there too.

Other places you can find me trying to make things work are still twitter, bsky and mastodon. I have made a neocities I'd like to tinker with.

I'm on discord with this same username, you can also email me if you want to reach out and chat! garydos AT hotmail.com



Consolidating a new pinned post for some basics and to link to all my various things. I'm a nonbinary visual novel developer in Ireland. While making pipeline tools for animation is the day job that actually pays my rent, I like writing games. Especially all the other bits around games that make stories do weird and different things you don't see in other media.

I'm not a fandom person I finish something and then move on from it. But if I was to highlight some favourite influences that have wormed their way deep into my brain, I'd pick out:
The Simpsons, Terry Pratchett's books, Twin Peaks, Tokyo Godfathers, Annihilation, Utena, Rose of Versailles (Manga), The Ancillary Justice trilogy, Sayaka Murata's Earthlings, Gundam X 🤝 Turn A Gundam, Umineko and Tsukihime.

Anyway, now for all the stuff I do...

Visual Novels

This is my primary creative output. You can see all my works on superbiasedgary.itch.io, but I wanna specifically highlight three games below. If you have been kind enough to play them already, please consider rating/reviewing them to help boost The Algorithm

com__et cover art

com__et is a 1-2 hour queer romance/horror for sale on Steam and Itch.io. It plays with what text says by its placement and its omission. It's currently my favourite piece of work and has been gratifyingly well received.
Art by @esshemasha on twitter.

It Started With Hairs cover art

It Started With Hairs is a very short, 5-10 minute visual novel about the horror of having a body. Read it in your browser. It's a short run project that poured out of me when processing some things and if you too struggle with having a body, it might hit for you too.

Sink Your Teeth cover art

Sink Your Teeth is a 30 minute visual novel made for NaNoRenO. A woman, a vampire, a brat and a pathetic creature, just 2 characters bargaining for blood. It's a rough prototype but I absolutely want to develop it further and expand it.
Art by Janm, @JanKapnoc on twitter and Instragram

Please do send asks or whatever if you're curious about anything related to my games, I like talking about this stuff and helping other devs with all the stuff I had to wrangle ren'py to do in the above games. I wrote some posts about having dynamic audio in ren'py as well as using custom text tags to create the special text in com__et. I should write more posts like this, so do bug me with any questions you'd like answered.

Podcast - Leftist Reading

I have a podcast called Leftist Reading, which is basically just an excuse for me to read through leftist theory and actually engage with it. Primarily it's just me reading the text, occasionally with some of my off the cuff thoughts afterwards. But really it's a way to get serialised audiobooks. Already covered is The Communist Manifesto, Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, seminal anarchist text The Conquest of Bread, Angela Y. Davis's Women, Race & Class, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Mao's On Practice and Contradiction, Russia in Revolution (about the history surrounding the Russian Revolution) and Murray Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism. I'm currently coming to the end of reading The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism, a modern textbook that tries to give a thorough foundation about the theory of Marxism-Leninism.

That's a lot of stuff! Many of it good, at least interesting to chew on. I don't always agree with it, and talk about it from a modern lens and try to process it as best I can. Definitely worth poking around if you've meant to get to any of them.

Let's Plays

I have some Let's Plays up on youtube, mostly of me covering narrative games. I take them slow, trying to read out the full text and occasionally talking out loud about the themes or design of them. Mostly updating right now is my playlist where I play small indie games:

A bigger project that's currently on hiatus is my complete re-read of Umineko:

with all the spoiler talk of themes sequestered to this playlist instead, so that first time readers can enjoy the playthrough unspoiled:

It's not actively being updated now, but I would like to finish it out when I have the physical, mental and temporal space to do so. (also because I also want to check out the bonus episodes, none of which I've ever read)

And the rest

I also have a soundcloud where I throw up different songs I do.

And I'm on other social medias if you need to find me there. I post much less than here, but I have spread like a fungus so I'm also on twitter, mastodon and bluesky. I'm in so many discords with this same name you probably already share a space with me. If you want to see whether I'm on another site, just search this username because I use it constantly.

But also feel free to send asks if there's anything else you're curious about that I somehow haven't covered here!



The Queer Halloween Stories Bundle is out, please check out a fantastic collection of seasonal queer work. There's options to get the bundle for $60 or $10+, the content is no different, but the $10+ option exists for anyone who can't afford the full price.

But because cohost is closing today, I'd appreciate anyone on other platforms boosting it and pick some things to suggest people check out. com__et and Sink Your Teeth are in there, you should also check out 77 Oleander Avenue, Neotrogla, Catch Your Sacrifice, The Need to Live and Paper-Girl-Chain.
Feel free to recommend me things you think I should look at, but you'll probably need to do it elsewhere. 🥹

https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/5380413
https://www.tumblr.com/queerhalloweenstories/763106706615140352/the-queer-halloween-stories-bundle-2024-is-live
https://gamedev.lgbt/@queerhalloweenstories/113230169893423609
https://bsky.app/profile/queerhalloween.bsky.social/post/3l5gdkgovsx2q
https://x.com/QueerHalloween/status/1840965236435698109



austin
@austin

i have been trying to find some words for cohost's final days for about a week now. everything i write is self-serving and self-indulgent and a little too woeful. so here's the heart of it.

it's good to make things, even though making things is incredibly hard.

it's even better to make things that you believe in.

it's not a liberatory act that will save us ('evil people make things they believe in too'),

but making stuff does propel us forward, towards new intersections of thought and action

the alternative is entropy--real or abstract, and we live in a time where both have advocates

the latest and greatest developments of capitalism would prefer we made nothing, and that dare we make something, it better not be something we believe in for its own end.

exception: you are allowed to believe in a [product/service/brand's] abiltity to ['find an audience'/'create a niche'/generate profit]

but ideally, you don't even make a [product/service/brand]. you dropship a product that was made 5 years ago. you subcontract a service for pennies on the dollar. you leverage a brand built by following trends that you did not even need to organically understand.

soon, they dream: replace the 'you' with 'your ai agent of choice.'

it's good to make things, even though making things is incredibly hard.

it's even better to make things that you really, really believe in.

making things will not save us. but the alternative is creative annihilation.

and many people are rooting it to arrive.