Clearing House

Queer Man Peering has taken up so much space in my brain for such a long time that now, post-release, I find myself in a nice little daze.  There are still applications to be worked on and marketing to be done, but the cramped, cluttered, interminable feeling of a project in its final stages has lifted. The house is emptied and I am just wandering around, trying to remember what it looked like before.

As a few reviews have pointed out, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Dong Aka The Hole are both explicitly referenced within the game, as well as being influences on its creation. In that vein, I thought now would be a good time to share a few of the game other influences. Clearing out the old and making space for the new and all that.

Gongshi

Earlier today Pete reminded me of how both of our games feature rocks. This reminded me of one the earlier inspirations for QMP. Gongshi, or Scholar Rocks, are traditionally a feature of Chinese gardening.  I think I first noticed them in Chinese brush paintings, most likely at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I remember them being described as thoughts captured in stone. Or something like that , anyway. The idea stayed with me.

“Landscape with Freckled Woman” by Gerald Murnane

In this short story a writer describes cultivating his inner space, not unlike a manicured Chinese garden. He has even stopped watching films “for fear of their intruding on his landscape”. Murnane himself has spent much of his career writing about these inner spaces, rarely leaving his community in rural Victoria. This got me wondering about what one of these inner landscapes would look like. Especially if, unlike the writer in this short story, these landscapes were intruded on by movies, games, the Internet, etc.

Memory Palaces

My last attempt at learning Japanese brought this to my attention. I think I was looking at tips from previous “World Memory” champions. Taking information and imagining storing them in a physical location, preferably somewhere familiar, appealed to my visual brain. It was effective—for a little while. Then I started learning 3D and game development and Japanese gradually fell away. I imagined my Memory Palace slowly crumbing and warping as I forgot and misremembered kanji. This got me thinking of the organic nature of memory and thought. How they change and shift over time.

Daylight Matters, by Cate Le Bon

This appeared just as I was doing the first sketches for the game. Not only did the song capture the mood we wanted for the game, the clip—featuring Le Bon wandering a sprawling coastal flatland littered with seemingly abandoned industrial structures—was spookily perfect. It became the guide to return to everytime we felt the game was becoming a bit too heavy. Happy to report that even after so many months of listening it still brings joy.