/m/ - media

Reposting from another thread

one of my personals heroes and one of the most influential game designers of all time, Roberta Williams, she was a housewife who had no experience or knowledge about programming or game design but she had quickly developed a passion for early text based videogames when her husband(an IBM computer technician) bought a personal Home computer(this was during the 70's) she had played almost every text based adventure game that was available at that time and wanted more and so she set to create her own
Her husband handled the programming aspects, she wrote the story and dialogue and most importantly used a simple singular black and white graphics for the Apple II computer, this was the first computer game to include graphics
now she created this as a fun hobby and shared it among friends, but it spread like wild fire, eventually reaching 80,000 copies sold overall(something never been seen before or even thought possible)
Roberta had created a new genre and a new era of gaming, she and her husband then started their own studio and built upon and improved their previous works and they revolutionized gaming once more in 1984 with King's quest, something which challenged the limits of what people thought could be done with PC gaming
Roberta would continue to work on more adventure games that would have good to mixed reviews but nothing on the level she had previously accomplished, she still loved games but technology had caught up too fast and for a newer (mostly male) generation of gamers didn't have much interest for her type of game design and the genre of adventure games as a whole declined popularity, even then her most badly reviewed and most experimental game, Phantasmagoria still has a cult following to this day

so out of her own choice she retired from game development and set out to write a historical novel, which she did and released in 2021, it is a fictional account about her ancestors in Ireland during the Irish famine. a lot of reviews I have seen praise it for its historical accurate and generally okay story

either way she is incredibly accomplishment woman and I love her so much

>>170052
samefag from what I've researched the early game development scene(in the west at least) had probably more working in proportion to men then today

Interesting thread idea! I'm a concept artist in games and I'm so close to just quitting this shitty industry tbh. My current job is so boring to me and I'm the only woman on my team which means they all dump emotional legwork on me just for being female.

>>170056
Aaaay, I'm also a concept artist. How long have you been working in this delightful industry?

>>170058
It's been 4 years. I get paid well but I can't stand how fucking lame the projects are 99% of the time.

>>170059
HAHAHAHA, I know what you mean. This is only my first project but I'm less than excited about it, tbh. In my spare time I doodle ideas for games that would be way more fun to design, in my humble opinion. Did any of your team members ever get to make their own games?

Holy shit thank you for making this thread. I'm a female indie dev and I'm glad we can have a discussion to boost other women in the industry. I'm absolutely sick of seeing TIM devs take up spaces for women and all around acting unprofessional online, and really want to see which devs to actually support.

>>170085
Not on my current team, to my knowledge. I'm in talks with some people to maybe form an indie studio but honestly I just wanna go do a normal job sometimes.

I do highly recommend continuing to develop your own ideas. You may run into something that you can make on your own, just keep the scope small.

>>170056
>>170058
Side note but when I was young I wanted to be a concept artist for video games, I adore seeing it for games I love (especially landscape artwork) so I admire you guys for making it, even though you have gripes with the job

>>170127
It would have been an amazing job if not for the industry. Any field dominated by men is a fucking drag but this one doesn't even pay well enough to warrant all the hours you spend slaving over it and all the gross males you put up with. In a few years I'm definitely getting very serious about restructuring my career and probably gonna start a studio with women only. The projects I'm developing are all for a female target demographic too so I hope I get to make things I like before it's too late and I burn out. I want us to get our voices heard and I want to hear nothing of marketability.

>>170172
Oh anon please do! it would be nice thinking about you anons working togther for a game

>>170172
Knowing an all-women studio was around would do wonders for my motivation even if it was nowhere close to me kek. Working in gaming has been my dream since I was a child, but I lost motivation to improve my skill set or work toward that as a career due to the industry being so shit. Big props to you anons who kept at it.

I want to learn programming so I can make simple fan games for people thirsty for content from larger IPs but I'm not sure where to get started. Coding is a form of art I've always been into but it seems near impossible to fully self-teach it. I haven't looked into resources for years though, maybe things have changed. It's annoying when you're non-stop creating things in your mind but don't have the knowledge to make it a reality.

>>170211
Tbh anon if you're just looking to make simple fan games you can start programming with one of the easier to learn engines like Godot or Gamemaker. If there's a specific language you want to learn, you could always just start with that, but working with an easy game engine is a good way to figure out how coding as a concept works. At least for me, coding made 0 sense until I started using a game engine. If you're just trying to do hobby projects it doesn't tend to matter what you're using anyway, since it isn't like you'll be able to market/make money off fan stuff.

If any of you nonnas actually make a woman only studio I'll send my portfolio ASAP. I live in a 3rd world shithole but I can work remotely if you let me, wish you all the luck in the world.

>>170275
I want in too lmao

>>170172
I'm not in this industry since I was kind of forced down a different route but I love you anon

>>170275
Same, I don't have a whole lot of free time, but I would definitely work for free in a female game dev team.

Not a real dev, just someone in an adjacent industry who fucks around with little Twine games sometimes, but I'd fucking LOVE to support anything you guys make. What kind of ideas do you have? Like, your ideal, unlimited budget and timeframe, who-cares-about-marketability, who-cares-what-men-think-about-it games?

>>170315
I like to make RPGs. Ideally if I were to start a new project, I'd want to get unapologetically weird, either in a whimsical sense or some sort of depressed avant-garde sense. And I'd probably want it to be about something that's either inherently nonsexual or just where stuff like that never becomes the focus of any characters. I guess that isn't anything groundbreaking but hey, it's what I like. It isn't hard for me to come up with something that could be marketable with the right PR, but if I didn't have to worry about that at all I'd be throwing random stuff at the wall constantly.

>>170318
Also samefag but if anyone wants, before attempting to form a studio of any kind, we could always try a very small game to collaborate on and see if that works out well.

>>170318
anon I looked at your post and I thought this were me lol.

Isn't adventure horror rpg been popular in indie scene lately? I saw they take off so easily when a new title released (bonus if it's edgy anime girl doing yandere thing). I keep getting recommended to those by my peers just because I'm running a game project as a hobby.

Is there any game engine you're familiar with? My mutual recommended me to use gamemaker (picrel) and I haven't tried it yet. Unity and Unreal Engine cant run on my poor PC so they're out for me.

also are we allowed to plug our itchio page here

I'm not in the industry and don't know if I would plan to make a career of it, but I'd love to offer creative/art support if anons pursue this!

>>170318
>>170322
I love weird, avant-garde, heavily story or lore driven stuff. I'd be curious what everyone would come up with.

>>170322
AYRT, and yeah, I use Gamemaker! Not the best at programming but I can hammer a game together. I would love to see itch pages if you guys have them, but definitely only do what's safe for your anonymity. I will 100% follow you if you post your page though kek.

I hope this doesn't come off as milky or anything, I found Pacthesis twitter by accident recently, which got me so excited and nostalgic to replay her old otome games (she's the only female game dev I had known back then!).
I googled her and ran into this reddit page, and it seemed that she took down her games due to unhinged tumblr fans. Can anyone confirm this for me? This is pretty recently too and I'm just sad about this in general.

Link to reddit discussion
https://www.reddit.com/r/otomegames/comments/paegka/pacthesis_games_shutting_down/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x

>>170257
Honestly, thanks for this. I'm gonna look into those engines when I have time and see what I could make of them!

>>170275
this pls!

So my original plan was to go for the game industry and I still very much want to work in it. After graduating 5 years ago with a general game design diploma I landed myself a job as a CG Generalist at a rather large animation company. From the friends I had that went to games instead of animation it didn't sound so great. A majority of them are in QA (which is barely anything to do with our fields), and the rest that made it had rather short contracts. I'm asking if it's worth it to go into gaming after my contract is up or continue to work in the animation industry for a bit? I'm an environmental/asset modeler if that helps.

>>170315
I want to make an RPG fangame that has a ton of lore to patch up missing pieces in the original universes of my favorite games. So it'd be almost like a series of games focusing on different IPS, each with story add-ons for highly requested characters. Ideally having simple to learn, hard to master real time battle systems that can be heavily customized and enjoyed by casual and hardcore gamers alike. I want to have in-depth romance and sex scenes tailored to dialogue choices you make along the way so you get to experience your favorite character exactly as you imagine it, right down to the sounds (or lack thereof) your favored character makes during a sex scene. A character creator that has no male options and instead has cute things like nail color, custom piercing/accessory placement, a mini clothing design system of sorts (similar to Animal Crossing possibly), etcetc

If I could create my own studio, I'd want to make something fully dedicated to husbando/waifu culture for women specifically so each game, no matter the genre, could be trusted to appeal only to our tastes. Just pure women-approved ideas with no scrote-pandering undertones. I wouldn't be making money off any of this if I'm doing fan games of course, but I'm so passionate about women getting to explore fictional worlds as the comfy self-inserts they deserve to be. It's a place of bliss left untouched by so many ladies because we're made to believe not catering to real people at all times somehow makes us less deserving of our own comfort and happiness.

This will never happen because I have no real game design knowledge so i'm sure a ton of my ideas would clash when programming comes into play, plus it's a lot of work for no pay, but it sure is nice to dream.

>>170326
Damn, I miss the good old days..
Confirm what ? yeah, her site is down but it's already archived, you can still download her stuff through that, but it's not exactly straight forward, still easy tho. The only thing about the "drama" i can find is her tweeting this:
https://twitter.com/misspacthesis/status/1429631855448428546
I think she just wanted to delete her old stuff because she cringed at them then made it like these lame 2 tumblr posts mattered. I can't find anything on tumblr other than fanart.
Anyway, Lancer is best boy.(this is an imageboard. post screencaps)

>>170351
thank you for the twitter link. I found her situation quite too similar to me as another creative who was deeply affected when fans expressed that kind of reaction. Seeing others saying that she was "overreacting" was sad for me to see, just hope she's doing better with her current webtoon now.

>>170106
Np np. I fucking hate troons in gamedev. I was watching old GDC Indie Soapboxes and EVERY SINGLE ONE in the last 4 years has had a tranny up on stage.

>>170172
If you ever do make that female-only studio I will definitely apply.

>>170315
I've had this idea knocking around in my head for a while, and I've been doodling concepts for the protagonist at least. But the premise is this: what if electricity was discovered in the 1600's? And what if electricity could be stored in voltaic piles, and used to power things on the move? Now what if a crazed, power-hungry madman made his own army of electric soldiers to take over all of Europe?

>>170404
That's a neat idea, anon! I'd really love to see what would happen if we could just make a bunch of proof of concepts for ideas we all have. It would at least be a fun learning experience that way.

>>170405
Thank you fren. Unfortunately I'm a dumbo and don't know how to code, so all I can do is make mock screenshots.

>>170408
Shoot, if someone knows how to make a good discord I'm down to help people out with small projects here and there. I said in an earlier reply here but since so many anons are interested in joining a team, the best way to get that started is to form a group to make small demos and stuff. Just because formally creating a studio would be a decent amount of work if none of us have done that before/without even knowing if the team even works well together.

>>170319
Nonnies, for real, if any of you ever want to try this out I can give you free character design art. Just be like "hey here's my idea" and insert
>Character Designer Needed
and I'll come and drop u my best art possible.

not to sound doompilled but I've in and out enough passion projects based on "oh I have such a good idea for a game, I will do the arts you do all the coding/SFX/music/UI". And even so none of them made any progress for months despite for just being tasked with arts and writings. I'm retired from being a mule for those girls.

Alright, I made an extremely bare bones Discord to at least hopefully take a head count of how many anons here are interested in collaborating and what our different skills are. I've never organized something like this on an image board before, should I just drop the link publicly or is there a better way to do it to keep riff raff out?

>>170429
Holy shit anon thank you. I have no idea how to go about something like this but I am in.

I'm using a throwaway email, just feel free to send a message to the email I put on this post and I'll send you an invite to the discord. Not sure if this would keep unwanted randos out much but hopefully it helps!

>>170445
Bless you nonny.

>>170445
We can ask for info about lc lore to filter out the unwanted randos, but /m/ is a fairly quiet place

>>170453
That could work, I dig it

Bumping, anons if you wanna join the gamedev discord, get in here!

>>170538
Did it get posted yet or?

>>170594
Click on the "Anonymous" of >>170445 and you'll find the email to send to for the invite code

Any programmers currently working in the industry? I’m working as a backend engineer atm but hoping to make a switch in the future, but all these horror stories about gaming companies are really spooking me away.

Unfortunately, the only female game dev space I’ve found is otome centered (and most otomes are done in renpy which gets pretty boring for a programmer ngl)

BUMP
for /ot/ anon who asked