It's the last day of Pride, but we stay gay all year long!

You might have seen that we missed last Saturday's post, but only because I was busy playtesting for an Otome Jam game I was invited to be a cowriter on: Good Lord! Everyone at the Reunion For My Religious All-Girls School Is a Trans Man... And They're Hot?!

It's exactly what it says on the tin, and I'm the writer for Angel Devin! I was unfortunately busy towards the beginning of the dev cycle so we couldn't get xir route in, but we have the remainder of Trans Rep Jam to finish the game. If you like the premise, please support us with a 5 star rating~

In other cool news, Blood & Play was featured in Say It In Red's Episode 54: Indie VN Compilation Track Vol.3! It's a delightful podcast featuring one of our programmers on Trans Masc Reunion, Runa, where she praises Blood & Play for being grounded and realistic despite the fact there's a vampire in it. We encourage you to give it a listen!

Thanks for reading, and we'll see you this Saturday!

Happy Saturday! Today I wanted to write a post about how I recruited folks for the Blood & Play team, as I have a certain philosophy I follow when starting new projects I have creative direction over.

Know Thy Neighbor

I've been developing games a long while now, and when you've hung out in creative spaces for so long, you start getting familiar with the names of your peers without even needing to make the concentrated effort of networking. I would see what folks were interested in back in the day when Twitter used to work, what they good at, ​and things they'd fantasize about wanting to play or make​. I'm the type of person who wants to work with people I admire, so I'm always thinking, "what kind of game would I make if I could work with so-and-so?"

Passion alone doesn't pay the bills in any creative field, but I like to think that being paid properly to work on something you're passionate about is better for everyone involved; if you know someone likes working in a certain genre, they're probably going to be delighted that you want to pay them to do something they were already doing. Inversely, someone who's not as into the subject matter may only give you presentable results; there may be nothing objectively wrong with their work, but the end product may not be as memorable.

One of the first folks I approached to work on Blood & Play was inkymaw​ and ReverbInTheVoid​, both of whom I've wanted to work with on a longer project and both of whom were enthusiastic about the concept. timepatches also wanted in on the project when she saw me spitballing ideas in a server we share. From there, the rest of the team shaped up as folks I knew would be interested in the themes I wanted to write about responded to me.

World Beyond the Veil: Preoders now Open

Shout-outs to the World Beyond the Veil​, who have opened up pre-orders for their latest charity zine benefiting Medical Aid for Palestinians! They are a collection of transmasculine artists from various backgrounds who've created a zine of artwork, comics, short stories, and poems in horror subgenres ranging from gothic to psychological.

We're not in this collection, but their work is pretty important, so I highly encourage y'all to check it out.

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Next week I hope to talk about designing our characters, Santiago and Matikas. We'll see you then!

It’s been a busy week for us here at tofurocks! As promised, we’re going to try doing the weekly updates schedule again.

State of Development

We’ve got a whole load of updates for y’all to take a gander at this time around:

• Overall story and route divergences mapped out
• Current word count within Ren’Py: 17.5K words (Day 4 out of 14 for the common route)
• Santiago can now get wasted
• Santiago’s full body sprite is now complete, and he has also received rhinoplasty

A lot of our attention has been put into assembling the pitch deck these past few weeks, and with Santiago’s full body sprite now ready to go, we’ll be redoing a lot of the scene direction for an updated demo. We can’t quite give a date on when that’ll be done but we hope you look forward to it!

Queer Games Bundle 2024 Now Available for Purchase!

We’re also happy to report that the Queer Games Bundle 2024 launched earlier this week! We’re participating in the bundle with 'have your monster,' as well as the All-In-One GUI template and snowfall GUI for Ren’Py! If you haven't picked up your copy, you can grab over 480 games, tools, assets, and more for USD$60, or for USD$10 if you're strapped for cash. The bundle benefits 271 creators/studios this year, and your purchases help developers like us keep on creating.

Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next week!

It's June again, and the tofurocks and Project Ensō websites are (mostly) back online! They've both been rebuilt in WordPress so they can have proper press kits for our larger games, among other neat little features. The place you're reading this blog post on now is built using Fourthwall, which will serve as a combination merchandise shop and monthly subscription platform a la Patreon.

Supporting queer folks is important year-round, but now is a crucial moment for the future of tofurocks. I (aka BáiYù, hi) was fired from my day job a little over a month ago, and still have yet to secure traditional employment; it's difficult to find work that won't aggravate my chronic fatigue and pain. I would love to take this time to transition fully to indie game development, but to do that I need to pay the bills.

This is where all of you can come in! I've been preparing a pitch deck for Blood & Play so I can approach a few funding groups, but this is still a process that takes a while as we communicate  with each company. I've set up several tiers that you can pledge to so you can show your support for tofurocks during this time. Each dollar keeps me afloat so I can concentrate on game development and gives you access to some of the exclusive posts sharing progress on Blood & Play and other projects in the works.

To kick things off, we have a 10% membership discount until the end of June. Just enter PRIDE2024 at checkout to get it! And if a monthly contribution isn't feasible for you at this time, you can always buy some merch or leave a tip on itch.io!

We have a backlog of posts to share, and I'll be publishing them on a weekly basis on either Friday or Saturdays, just depending on how things shake out. Thanks for reading!