Salting the Wounds, Salting the Roads
How eating shit in the winter made me publish my first game.
So, I ate shit to black ice twice today - fucked my left hand right up, but it’ll buff out. One fall was right in front of a woman who was walking out of her house - hope she salted the ground like she said. It got me thinking though, thinking about the ever-present infection described in hushed tones amongst mums and dads when they chat about the places their kid is going online.
The alt-right pipeline.
The alt-right is a deceptively hard to spot slip-n-slide into the depths of the worst places on the internet you could imagine. People in the pipeline walk all around us, having a laugh about some maybe slightly inappropriate things, making a suspect friend or two, and usually nursing some trauma.
I experience the alt-right pipeline when I was roughly fourteen, and didn’t fully pull myself out until I turned eighteen, but the escape process started around sixteen - I was lucky, in a sense. Four years of my life were spent in school and online around a swirling mass of the most vile, dark-hearted men and the most deeply closeted trans youth you can imagine. Sometimes cis women were in these spaces too - typically with deep emotional wounds.
I found my identity, hauled myself out of the despicable throat of the fascist beast and have been a person of stronger character and healthier truth since. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen shit. Haven’t posted things I deeply regret. Haven’t been an awful little biting man attached to that beast like a clay figure from the Schism music video. I wear the sins I committed in my mind every day - there’s something horrifying in how subtly and quickly I was dragged into being the most monstrous version of me I can imagine. But I climbed out, as many do.
That black ice slope. The invisible descent into hell. The pain it causes when it all finally comes crashing down, and the scraping climb back onto your feet.
There’s a game in that. Not a pleasant one, but a game. Something to experience with pen and paper, and maybe a singular die. A journey to have.
Getting in the door, I proceeded to finish Black Ice in around 8 hours. Six of those were spent practically coughing up the bile of my past. The things I’d seen and experiences I’d had came pouring out onto the page. I’m a big fan of Harper Blair’s Don’t Invent The Torment Nexus, and decided to take that simple structure and shoot for a similar thing.
Some parts of the prose stuck to the page scarily quickly, and survived all the way to the end. When the game asks how you run away from each fascist friend you have, entry 1 immediately cemented itself as “You don’t. Commit another HATE CRIME and write 1 trauma on how you’re pulled back into the fray. Roll again.” I took a few other screenshots of the process that I shared with my mate Luke as I wrote - his encouragement was no small part in getting this over the line instead of choking down the tar again.
This game was frankly horrible to write throughout the whole thing. Feeling the demons of my past getting choked up and spat out into a .md file in Obsidian was both cathartic and rending. As such, I took a break midway through to get a logo knocked out - graphic design ideas come very quickly to me, thank god - as well as toss up a draft for the Itch page (the content warning greentext sent anyone who I showed it to early practically reeling).
It was about this point I was determined to publish the game on the same day. I couldn’t sleep on this, it would dampen it. It needs to be out and it needs to be out now. The mechanics were simple and got out the way - I think this is far closer to a lyricgame than a traditional RPG - and so I just kept writing, kept spitting the poison out until eventually my mouth runs dry and refills with healthy word. Those last few words of honesty rounded out the healing end of the game, and from there it was just a job of formatting and PDF-ing the text.
This is the first game I’ve ever published, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. It’s a part of me I really wish would stay dead and silent, but I feel like this was worth writing. Many of my friends have come to me since I launched this and told me this was either cathartic for themselves, or gave them a sight into the road they didn’t go down. To those who avoided the first step, well done. To those who fell in and got back out, I’m proud of you.
You can get Black Ice here - I’d deeply appreciate if you read and reviewed it. The donation link is entirely optional - you can skip past it and grab the game for free if you wish.
Sometimes, you just need to make shit. Maybe it’ll reach the right folks.
Thanks for reading. Take care.