Hey friends! It will be a short one today, because I’m writing this on Monday morning just before heading out on a Easter hike. I’ll briefly gush about One Piece, share what’s going on with Bibidi and introduce a new side project I’m collaborating on.
How Am I Doing?
I’m really good! I’ve been going out for lots of walks, even though the weather has been a bit unpredictable. Hard to dress when you don’t know if it’s going to be tops off or hailstorms.
Other than that, I’ve watched the live action One Piece series and have some thoughts. Honestly, they did a good job at adapting an completely unadaptable manga. The One Piece universe and character designs are so bonkers, it should not work in live action. But somehow it does?
I think part of it is that camp is very in vogue right now, through the popularization of drag. And boy let me tell you, One Piece is campy as hell. But more than that, it has heart. I think Oda, the creator of the manga, has truly mastered the fundamentals of storytelling. The story is simple and straightforward, but the choices characters make are always justified by their own code. Each character is iconic but manages to have mini-growth arcs throughout almost every act of the story. It builds up expectations and capitalizes on big emotional payoffs. It’s just bloody good storytelling!
What Am I Doing?
We’re making steady progress on Bibidi’s accessibility and polish update. I’m knee deep in implementing controller support but it’s slow going. The way we iterated on the game from prototype to where it is now was very good for game design and creative direction, but not so much for user interface, maybe.
Essentially, I’m manually cleaning up each and every screen in the game to make sure it’s useable with controller/keyboard/mouse or each combination thereof, allows for re-mappable keys and is readable enough from a bit of a distance away from the monitor. Contextual input is a big one: there’s too many menus and little informational cues to map to a controller layout, so we have to somehow be able to zip around different parts of the UI and change the controller layout based on where you are. It feels good, because I’m cleaning up so much of the old code base, but it’s a pretty tedious process overall.
‘Smash the Fash
Other than that, I’ve joined the Games Transformed 2026 game jam with my mate and creative comrade Calum. Games Transformed is a self-described “festival for radical gaming” and this year’s theme is “‘Smash the Fash”. I’ve long wanted to get into serious games, particularly ones that could help against fascism, so this seems like a great opportunity to jump on it. We’ve brainstormed a bit and landed on a crisis game where you help volunteers to apply direct action and care for the community after they’re done.
Why Am I Doing? (this)
It’s great to work on something ideologically satisfying for once, as I’m generally working on hopefully financially sustaining games, which are very much directed by the Invisible Hand of the Market™. That’s not to say that I don’t like making entertainment-focused games, but it does often feel like I’m gambling with capitalist systems that keep incentivizing me to be less original.
I have quite the affinity for serious games, and crisis games in particular, and would love to explore those as an avenue of potential livelihood.