part 1 of today's pics.

I'm putting together my materials for academic jobs and one of the lovely things I need to do is a DEI statement. Which those are always fun as a person who is the diversity.

But I can at least say that every single person I have worked with for Tracks' development is marginalized in some way. And at least half the contributors are non-binary of some stripe. I guess this is what happens when I work with my friends.

I have broken Tracks in Snow's tutorial three separate times in the exact same place because of changes to the input system. The first time was missing it as part of an API rewrite for the stand alone system. The second time was because Ren'Py 8 no longer auto converted key constants to strings. The third time was because I made a key configuration file to let people bind keys themselves and forgot to change the key display code to reflect that the input system was storing strings instead of key constants.

All of this to say, rebindable keys are good but also, thoroughly test your shit because that one part of the game that is slightly different than everything else, it will break. It will break so hard in the most ridiculous ways

I've been thinking again about the question my dramaturgy professor asked me about the yuri VN during my MFA:

"Why this story in this way?"

Why was the first thing I made with character acting tech a story about Jewish lesbians finding home also ghosts and mecha?

Mostly it's because I find a lot of commonality between the way theater, Judaism, and queerness approach storytelling. Everything is worth playing with and digging into and not taking at pure face value.