I am pleased to announce that some of the student projects from my Project Studio: Game Design class from last semester are now available on the TUBBA Games Manufacturing Concern Itch page. The students were challenged to make small prototypes over the course of a 16-week course. The prompt that they were given was to make postcolonial games that incorporated ghosts or monsters. They were allowed to use any tools of their choice, but they were required to use Godot as their engine.
The games can be found here: https://tubba-games.itch.io/. Each game is available for Windows and is FREE to download.
I was pleased to be invited to give a research talk in my new department’s DM Talks series. I agreed to participate right after I arrived in Atlanta and did not have a solid idea of what I wanted to talk about exactly. Luckily, I have been working on a book chapter that I thought would benefit from some public discussion while I was drafting the first version. I think that the talk went very well and I was able to get some great feedback that helped with the first draft. It was also awesome to get to talk about my research in detail with my new colleagues and our amazing graduate students.
The talk examines the Atelier Ryza trilogy and assesses the games’ attempts at decolonization (both narratively and through game design). While I think that the decolonialization attempts made by the series are not perfect, I argue that the games are significant and interesting from a postcolonial perspective. Please note that this video is rough. The talk was delivered in a hybrid format, so the audio is extracted from the original Microsoft Teams recording. My introduction of my other research and the question period have been cut for the sake of time and avoiding privacy issues. The screen recording has been replaced by still images of the slides from the talk and some limited gameplay from the Atelier Ryza games.
I hope to have the finalized version of this chapter published sometime in 2024.