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!