There is a spectre haunting my gamedev journey.

It’s a realization that has profoundly shaped me not only as a game developer, but also as a game player. It’s a simple, chilling fact that colors my enjoyment of everything I ever try to play or make:

It’s that the best game has already been made, and it’s Disco Elysium.

Three years later, I still haven’t found anything that made me feel the way DE did. There’s a handful of games that I love more than my own mother, like Growing My Grandpa!, Roadwarden, and anything where the protagonist is an unreliable goblin man, but no other game has felt as perfectly tailored to me as DE was.

The only way for me to go on living with this reality is, of course, to make my own game. A solo developer like me will never be able to create a 3D illustrated 1,000,000 word fully voice acted RPG, but I can make something that’s just a little bit more personal to me. I don’t know what it’s like to be an alcoholic middle aged cop, but I do know what it’s like to be a transsexual failed novelist. And like all great authors say: write what you know.

So, I’m making a game about a transsexual failed novelist.

Who’s also an alcoholic.

The idea for The Ape Painting came to me when I was in a cafe with a friend, brainstorming ways to escape our shitty jobs. She was looking into jewelry-making classes, and I was storyboarding ideas for a game. Out of all my absolutely dogshit drawings (years of pixel art have not been kind to my ability to hold a pen), one in particular stood out to me: your one-night-stand’s Bored Ape NFT painting falling off the wall and killing him.

I felt that the premise was entertaining in itself, but also posed some interesting questions. What, for example, had screwed up our protagonist so bad that she was willing to sleep with a cryptobro? This was the central question that I tried to answer while writing this story.

Within a couple months, I had something resembling a game. The basic premise was that our protagonist, Trixi, was a struggling novelist who was trapped in a haunted apartment following the cryptobro’s death. Technically, all the player had to do was open the front door — but it wasn’t that simple. Most of the interactable characters, including the door itself, would dissuade you from that as a solution. Whenever you tried to open the door, it would remark that you haven’t found all the correct items yet, and that you would get the bad ending if you left the apartment now. It was an attempt to align player psychology with developer psychology: convincing yourself to publish something is fucking scary, and I wanted finishing the game to feel scary too.

There were problems with the design, though. It was going to be difficult for me to sell a game that some players would be able to finish within the first five minutes. Apart from that, I felt like something key was missing: like I was hurting the game’s narrative for a gimmick.

Eventually I got fired from my job, probably because I spent most of my work hours doing gamedev, and I shelved The Ape Painting to instead focus on making a small free game — WASTE EATER. Up until that point, I’d spent a miserable 8 years doing gamedev as a hobby without ever once managing to release anything, and I knew that Ape Painting was going to end up in the trash too (ironic, considering the core theme of the game) unless I could teach myself how to actually fucking publish something.

WASTE EATER was supposed to be the ultimate test of character for me, the distillation of 8 years of struggle — I knew that if I couldn’t publish a 15 minute text game, then I couldn’t publish anything. I told myself that if I shelved WE, then I was going to shelve Unity and Aseprite too. I’d walk into the woods and wait for something to eat me and then I’d finally, finally be free of this.

Except, I’m not free of this. Because I did finish WASTE EATER. And suddenly publishing a game wasn’t my biggest hurdle anymore.

As much as I love WE, there’s a lot of things that the game is missing — there were parts of dialogue that I cut out not just because I needed the game to fit under the 15 minute mark, but also because I thought they were too personal or messy. And I think that WE suffered for that.

So now I’m coming back to The Ape Painting with renewed confidence and a different central theme: now it’s not just about the difficulty of publishing something, but about the difficulty of putting yourself into anything when “yourself” is something that’s raw, messy, and easier to hide. Trixi isn’t just struggling to publish a novel — she’s struggling to write one that’s honest.

The Ape Painting is a game that’s going to be messy, strange, and at times outright cruel. A lot of people won’t be into it, and that’s alright. But it’s the only way I can think of to give the world back a little bit of what so many other great indie games gave me.

Thanks for reading, and if you’re interested, please keep an eye on my future devlogs too!