ctmatthews

Indie game developer

a trans woman in the UK making 2D action games about ducks:

Ducky's Delivery Service (Steam/itch/Switch)

Chessplosion (Steam/itch)


i mostly post on my Blog / Newsletter / Patreon


i play fighting games! i won Evo in 2021.


pfp/header by NomnomNami


✉️ Contact (email/DM)
ctmatthews.com/contact
🖼️ pfp/header by NomnomNami
nomnomnami.com/

ctmatthews
@ctmatthews

my current indie games look and sound completely different to the games i worked on as part of a team, and the indie games that i'll be making five years from now will almost certainly look and sound completely different to the games that i'm making now. i like working on my visual art and music skills and i'm proud of what i'm making along the way, but i don't feel like i'm anywhere near my destination yet. i can't wait to see where i end up.

on the other hand, the overall game design direction of my games has never really changed at all, ever since i started building gameplay prototypes for my own amusement as a teenager in the mid 2000s. i've always been obsessed with games that are all about continuous motion. whether it's controlling a character with strange movement physics, tracking and dodging enemy projectiles, moving into the right position to bait enemies into acting a certain way, or guessing where my opponent is about to move in a fighting game and throwing a projectile that meets them there a second later. i just like to move around in a little game world, while trying to track and predict all the other objects that are moving around in there at the same time.


the games that i make are an attempt to distill and express why i love this so much. sometimes they take place on a grid, sometimes they're in continuous space, sometimes they have snappy movement controls, sometimes they have heavy interia, and they're very occasionally even in 3D, although i get bad motion sickness so i've never gotten a 3D game idea past the early prototyping stage. but however they end up, they're always about the joys of movement and geometry above all else. i'm not interested in making a game with a parry, an invincible dodge roll, or anything else that takes the focus away from the joy of being a little moving object in a world full of other little moving objects.

in short, i want to build weird little electronic real-time puzzle boxes of applied geometry that tickle my brain, and hopefully they can make some other people understand why i'm so obsessed with this stuff too.

it feels like everyone else managed to give single-sentence responses to this post. i don't know how to be concise, sorry. if i felt that i could express my thoughts adequately in words i would be a writer instead of a videogame programmer


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in reply to @hthrflwrs's post:

at least for now, the work is not just about imagining futures that center people and have compassion for them and are equitable, but recognizing the slippery, obfuscated, reality-bending present too—and trying to connect the dots between these things. i get there through queer, racial, and climate lenses most of the time. it’s really hard and rancid and beautiful at times!

Honestly I think it's lonely people and misfits trying to find love. Visually it's a lot of big boobs, but the characters all have that loneliness in common I think. Struggling with feeling apart from everyone else. Hadn't really thought about it until now

Depression.

Also rejection of the status quo and asserting kindness over cruelty even if the characters involved are not the ones who should be handling the responsibility of the costs that inevitably come from it, because nobody is.

But mostly depression.

Intentionally, I put emphasis on stories where setting, place, space, the environment is as significant as character or plot. That was my thesis in my architecture masters degree and I've continued to follow through on it.

Interestingly, I realized that, unintentionally, a number of stories I've written revolve around worlds that exist only inside people's minds, mental landscapes, places that have no material form but are no less 'real' despite that.

So I guess it'd be exploring the 'constructed environment', whether that has a material form (where the body lives) or an immaterial one (where the mind lives).