17 April 2024
It was amazing to have my teaching and game design featured on the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts website. I gave a brief interview which was turned into an article and a video. Check them out!
You can read the article here -> https://iac.gatech.edu/feature-news/2024/03/video-game-design-nagasaki-kitty
25 March 2024
I have always been a huge fan of Godzilla, but I have not had the opportunity to incorporate that love into my research until now. I have started to pursue a long-term, multi-media project centered on Godzilla and anti-nuclear representation. As a first step, I was happy to present my early findings in the DM Talk series at Georgia Tech.
My talk examines the origins of Godzilla from a collective memory perspective with a focus on the anti-nuclear representation of the early Godzilla films and novelizations. From here, I briefly discuss 5 selected Godzilla video games and their connections (or disconnections) from that original narrative. I conclude with a short look at how I wish to pursue these ideas through a multi-media project.
I’m excited to continue on with this project. The next step will be to refine my observations of the video games for my conference presentation at RePlaying Japan 2024!
9 August 2023
I am very pleased to announce that the final version of Nagasaki Kitty is now available. Nagasaki Kitty: Enhanced Edition can be downloaded for free on Itch.io! The Enhanced Edition adds new gameplay content, new original art, expands the map, and includes a new musical score written and recorded specifically for the game.
I was excited to add more content to the game for this edition and was exceedingly lucky to work with Mimi Okabe (Translation), Marc Lajeunesse (Music), and Robyn Hope (Art). While I was happy with the first two RPG Maker MV versions of the game, I was happy to upgrade the game through some key editions. Marc’s soundtrack replaces the licensed tracks from the original. Having musical pieces written specifically for the game certainly improves upon the atmosphere and the mood of the game. Robyn’s art helps to improve the player’s experience. Her art, based on artifacts from the Nagasaki atomic bomb museum, helps to add more authenticity to the side quests that the player completes in the game. As always, Mimi provided her translation skills. The download includes the English version, the Japanese version, and an updated workbook.
Here is the announcement trailer for the game:
I started the early work on the Nagasaki Kitty project in 2016. This eventually led to multiple iterations, both in Twine and RPG Maker MV. This project has been one of the most rewarding of my career and I am exceedingly proud of all of the completed versions. I hope that you will take the time to play it!
Nagasaki Kitty Enhanced Edition is available for download on PC here.
9 June 2023
This year for the Canadian Game Studies Association Annual Conference I was able to work with my good friend and colleague, Scott DeJong. Scott does some really amazing work on disinformation while also designing board games (find his game, Lizards and Lies here: https://www.lizardsandlies.ca/). Naturally, as educational game designers, there are overlaps in our research and development activities. In particular, we have found that many educational games do not take full advantage of the unique affordances of board games and/or video games as a medium. As a result, we made a short video about our design experiences and how we deal with this (and similar) issues.
Discussing these ideas and later making the video with Scott was an amazing experience. At this point we consider the ideas to be in their early stages, but we hope to revisit this project soon and make a more polished version. Hopefully we will put something more together soon because these are ideas that I am interested in pursuing further.
13 December 2021
After many months of working with Mimi Okabe, I am happy to announce that the Japanese Language Edition of Nagasaki Kitty is now officially released on Itch.io!
Remote development of a game was a new and (mostly) exciting experience for me, however, I am hoping that my next game project can be developed under more normal circumstances. Regardless, I was extremely grateful to be working with Mimi who was meticulous in her work, respectful of the content of the game, and added many excellent ideas to the project (especially the workbook that comes with the game). I am very proud of the work that we did and believe that we have created a unique and meaningful game.
Here is the original announcement trailer for the game:
Nagasaki Kitty Japanese Language Edition is available for PC and MAC here.
2 December 2021
I was honored to win a Hexagram Internationalization Grant for the period of February to May 2020. My original idea for the grant was to create a small game demo in RPG Maker MV and use it as the basis for a game-making and historical narrative workshop at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. Unfortunately, the entire project was scrapped due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Luckily, Hexagram allowed me to keep the funds which I used to cover non-refundable travel expenses.
Despite this, Hexagram invited me to speak about my grant during their 20th Anniversary Gala. Although I was unable to travel to Montreal to attend the gala, they were very accommodating and allowed me to submit a video in lieu of an in-person talk. Rather than simply reiterate how the project was cancelled, I took the opportunity to talk about the RPG Maker MV versions of Nagasaki Kitty. Though these projects are not directly connected to the grant, I thought that I should provide some kind of content other than saying, “Thank you for covering my non-refundable travel expenses after I had to cancel my project.”
Here is the video:
I would love to pursue my original proposed project (i.e., an international game-making workshop focused on historical narratives) again at a later date but I am also happy with the way that everything worked out. If the workshop had not been cancelled I would have been working on that rather than making a full version of a game (that would later spawn other, bilingual versions).
11 August 2021
I have been making progress on the translation version of Nagasaki Kitty with my writing partner Dr. Mimi Okabe. We recently released the pre-order for the game in time for our conference presentation at RePlaying Japan 2021 (hosted online by the University of Alberta). In our short video submission we discuss our motivations for making the game, American historiography, and our adventures in translation (in particular the dynamics of translating “meow”). We are continuing to make progress on the game and plan to start playtesting soon.
On another, semi-related note, I have been getting more practice making videos and I think that they are becoming higher quality. Post-pandemic, when we will presumably move away from remote conferences, I think that I will continue to make video versions of my talks so that they can be more easily disseminated (especially post-conference).
15 July 2021
I recently had my first opportunity to be interviewed about my work. I felt excited and honored that Epoch Xperience reached out to me to discuss my RPG Maker MV game Nagasaki Kitty. Epoch is a company that focuses on historical research (not only in games but also in more traditional mediums) and was interested in talking to me about the design and historical work that went into Nagasaki Kitty. Below is the full hour-plus interview where we cover everything from my academic research to how people who are interested in making their own historical games can get started.
I want to thank Mark LoProto for both organizing/recording the interview and providing me with the completed footage to present here. I should note that the lighting and video issues in the completed interview originated on my end and were the unfortunate consequence of completing the interview remotely during a lockdown. Overall I was quite happy with how the interview went and hope that I get the opportunity participate in more of these types of activities in the future.
5 April 2021
I am very happy to announce that I released my first game, Nagasaki Kitty RPG Maker Version, on Itch.io today!
The entire process of designing the game, playtesting, setting myself up on Itch, creating content for social media, and advertising the game is something that I want to revisit at some point. I plan on writing a full post-mortem about the entire process at a later date.
In the meantime here is the launch trailer for the game:
Nagasaki Kitty is available for PC and MAC here.
10 March 2021
Teaching, running workshops, and giving guest lectures have become much more complicated given the ongoing pandemic but I was very happy to be invited to speak to the students of Dr. Mimi Okabe’s Japanese translation class at the University of Alberta.
Typically I like to give a more hands-on experience to the students but I think that I was able to put together a compelling and (somewhat) interactive experience for the students. For the lecture portion, I introduced my research and how it connects to game making before shifting to the workshop element where I screen-shared via Zoom and gave a brief tour of RPG Maker MV.
Given that this was a translation class, my primary focus was to show the students how dialogue and text are inserted into a game and the particular issues that they would need to be mindful of when translating a video game. For example, video game translators need to be particularly mindful of their development tools when they engage in translation. In the case of RPG Maker MV, there are strict character limitations for text. If the translator ignores these, then the software will not be able to display the text correctly. This means that translators must make sure that they accurately translate the text while also limiting themselves to the strict character limit imposed by the design software.
My combination guest lecture and workshop concluded with a question/answer period. Dr. Okabe asked her students to prepare questions for me beforehand so that I could incorporate answers into my talk as best as possible. This was a wonderful idea that helped me to structure my talk and led to more in-depth questions from the students during the question/answer time. It is a strategy that I will implement in the future (both as a guest speaker or when I invite guest speakers myself).
Overall, I had a great time talking about video game tools and the intricacies of translation. I am planning some projects around these ideas for the near future. For now, I would like to thank Dr. Okabe for the invitation and the students of her class for their insightful questions.