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Besties Gandalf Big Naturals and Dolly Parton

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Knight and the enemy within

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Knight and deep-set venom

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Since late August of 2022, Barry Topping and I have been working on a shoot ‘em up game called BIRDCAGE.

Now 2024 is wrapping up and – surprisingly – so is the production phase of BIRDCAGE. There’s still plenty of work to be done, but the game itself is all there, playable and asset complete.

Now we’re left with an ever-growing lernaean hydra list of other tasks to handle – emails, wider testing, stability, updating store presences, promotional stuff and in general, just trying to maximize the reach and polish of what we’ve made.

The final stretch of production (roughly the last 5 months?) was really fun. The game had matured enough that we just instinctively knew what would work and what wouldn’t.

We’d become comfortable enough with the tools we built and our process where we’d just be constantly in hyper mode. The game really came together in this final leg of development.

POLYGON BIRD, our studio name, and EXCEL Framework, the name given to the "shmup tools" we made for the game.

I was expecting ending full-on production on BC to be frustrating and depressing, but some switch flipped in my head and now all I want to do is email people about the game, optimize our Steam tags and figure out how to get this in people’s hands – and I’m finding that fun, at least for now. The game isn’t this ideal brainchild piece of art to me, suddenly. We did the work to make the thing, now it’s time the thing worked for us.

It surprises me how often I find myself thinking ridiculous things like “we need to activate our discord members” – but I’ll take this over the usual pit of despair I fall into after finishing a big project.

I guess this is what motivated me to write down these thoughts in the first place – I was bracing to be fully depressed and lost right about now, resenting the game and the time we spent on it. Maybe this will serve as a reminder that finishing a thing doesn’t have to feel so bad?

So now we’re kind of going back into uncharted waters – promoting, releasing, dealing with feedback, hotfixes and support. There’s going to be a lot of “learning on the job”, I guess, but I’m excited to see that aspect of game dev.

I’m really glad we were able to hit our goal of wrapping up this phase of BIRDCAGE as the year comes to a close – it makes it easy to look back on the past 2 years as a whole and see how much we’ve learned. I can’t wait for us to make another game, knowing what we know now.

There is still nothing to announce regarding the release of the game, but it still felt important to make note of this milestone.

For now, just know we’ve made a game and are working on getting it out there! We should have a lot more to say soon.

In the meantime, you can help us out by adding BIRDCAGE to your Steam wishlist.

Thanks for sticking around all these years.

Happy holidays!

-G

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Final Girls

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— ANNA KAMIEŃSKA, trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak.

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NOSTALGIA WILL EAT YOU ALIVE (if you let it)

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MANHOOD i want manhood soft / manhood tender / manhood kneeling down to be eye to eye with a child asking a question / i don't want to look down on anyone / least of all someone so new to the world / i want manhood leaning on a fence watching the horses in the fields / no need to bother them / we're all just figuring out how to live for the first time / manhood working with something in my still soft hands / hands that never wish to make acquaintances with violence or become strangers with love / manhood never raising my voice higher than my pride except only in cheers and laughter / manhood never allowing my pride to be made smaller than the insects who rest their wings on my fingertips manhood soft / manhood tender / manhood joyous, defiant, wanted / manhood of my own creation and nobody elses

[IMAGE ID: "i refuse to take up the sisyphean task of striving for a manhood i do not even with to possess" in pink wavy text. the background is a black and white depiction of sisyphus holding the boulder. the image is decorated with white, black, and pink stars and hearts. END]

<3 if you'd like to help me out during my hysto recovery in august - my kofi is here <3

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messed around with digital collage today instead of printing

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BIG BAD TRANSSEXUAL

[IMAGE ID: "who's afraid of the big bad transsexual" in white text except "transsexual" is in red. the image is of a black and white wolf holding a blurred syringe in it's mouth. to the right of the wolf is four blurred scalpels positioned as rays facing away from the wolf. the background is black with white and red stars. END]

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Edmond Simpson "Magical Elf" (07-24)

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Mr. E Gallery 'Sisterhood Of The Moon And Stars' v2 (van Dongen) (03-22)

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Edmond Simpson "Metamorph" (11-24)

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Who’s gonna take you home tonight?

Happy Trans Day Of Visibility!

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self portrait from 2022

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TOP DOG / YOU'RE MY BITCH (2024)

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‘Desire’ - cut and paste collages

I am inspired and driven by these intangible feelings and my seeming inability to put them into words. I’m a very visual communicator and most of my work is an expression of a sentiment, a feeling, or a wider thematic issue I’m trying to come to terms with on a personal level. To that end, I’m very inspired by the human body and the idea of form, how the body can evoke and emote, and what it means to reorganise the form.