Caelyn Sandel

Bloom, Episode 1

Looks like I just can't get this project out of my head!

Reception for Bloom's prologue was so wonderful, and I was so inspired, I launched headlong into making the next segment! I've been writing like a demon, and the first episode is already done! :D I switched out the directory webpage, so reloading the game should take you to the episode index.

Please be advised that this may be a very difficult story to read if you have The Genders. Take care of yourselves, ple...

Bloom: Prologue

Hey beloved pledges!

Today's release is the beginning of a new project that I hope to run with going forward.

I recently read a very good webcomic called 'Rain', the story of a trans high schooler trying to live her life and getting up to wacky hijinx. It reminded me strongly of 'Venus Envy', a comic from the early 2000s that was one of my first experiences with positive, realistic(-ish) portrayal of a trans person in media.

When I realized that there was no g...

The Skeleton Key preview draft!

Hey everybody! I really, really, really thought I posted this last week, but evidently I didn't! I'm skating in just after midnight on this, and I dearly dearly hope it counts as an April release. Anyway, here's the preview draft of The Skeleton Key of Ambady, my Shufflecomp entry. It's very close to being complete, but hasn't been released to the public yet. Sorry for the posting snafu and the rapid-fire posting! http://inu...

You Are Good.

My other April release is a little empathy bot called You Are Good, a tool for people who feel bad to help them feel better. You Are Good is a LIVING PROJECT and I'm actively taking suggestions for how to make it better. If you have ideas, or feel like the bot isn't asking the right questions or isn't providing the right resources, please let me know. I plan on actively developing this project over time. Enjoy! http://inu...

Don't forget to fill out the survey!

I'll be updating my page this week, and I'd like to have as much feedback as I can get! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/18zdHT3McM9sQ_ZKZMlCqyp6Q1q2_dmgDHDqs7q_bZiY/viewform there it is! Go fill it out if you haven't!

Doors

My birthday release this year is a piece of interactive poetry with accompanying art and sound. I wrote it for the Porpentine's 'twiny jam' ( https://itch.io/jam/twiny ), where she challenged us to make twine games whose wordcount is 300 or less. Doors is very heavy on CSS and has some javascript, which don't count toward the wordcount, and it features quite a few graphics, but there aren't very many words at all -- just 223! Here...

Please give me feedback!

Hi Pledges! If you're reading this, that means that you have helped me get to an amazing landmark: $300 per work (hoooly crap)! As we head further into my second year of crowdfunded creative production, I'm finding that I'd like to gather my wits about me and start thinking about the direction I'm going. I'm not sure about the future of this page, or myself as an indie game developer, and I'm still learning a lot. But there's one thing I know for certain: I wouldn't be able to do any of this wit...

BECCAA 1.0!

Hey Patreon backers! First of all, here's my latest release: an updated and polished rerelease of the Better Entitled Correspondent Confession & Affirmation Android! Since its prototype release, BECCAA has gotten a bunch of accolades, being adopted as a faux "contact form" by game journalists Maddy Myers and Gita Jackson, and even receiving a spotlight in an Offworld zine article by Leigh Alexander! BECCAA 0.8 had a version number for a reason, though; I wanted to see how people responded to...

Connected Kit Season One and bonus Epilogue

Hey friends! Attached to this e-mail you'll find a zip file containing a folder. Unpack it and run index.html to play the Connected Kit season collection! Don't pass this up just because you've played all of the S1 episodes -- there's an epilogue at the end that you might like. :) As I've mentioned before, this collection is being made available publicly on itch.io with a suggested donation of a dollar; I'm hoping that people play and are interested enough to come subscribe. Please feel free to ...

3 more tracks added to Tundra!

Hey everybody! I'm trying to knuckle down on Choice of Games this month, but in a fit of inspiration the other day I sat down and cranked out three new tracks for the Tundra asset album: Ice Lake, Frozen Solid, and Breaker. Ice Lake is a soft piano piece, the kind that most of my friends already knew me as being fond of improvising. Frozen Solid is meant to be an ambient 'creepy' piece for horror games or sections. Breaker is a clanky electronica piece, significantly slower than Sleet but with a...

Introducing: Yayfrens!

Hey Patreon pledges! I'd like to introduce you to my daughter!! Okay, she's not a 'real' daughter. She's a twitterbot, made via collaboration with my favorite collab buddy, Carolyn VanEseltine. Yayfrens exists solely to love you. She tweets nice things throughout the day, and anybody including her on an @ reply will get some friendly and kind words back at them. She started out with the full library of Nice Phrases from AffirmApp, but I've almost doubled the amount of phrases and replies that sh...

Sunburn

Sorry for the radio silence, dear pledges! I have in fact been very hard at work, but have had little to show for it until now. What I have for you today is the pre-release of my ParserComp 2015 entry: Sunburn. This game was written for the theme 'sunrise' and is set in the city of New Washington. It's a standard text adventure, so you play it by entering typed commands. If you're confused, enter 'help'. I've attached the .zblorb file to this post, so you can use an interpreter like Gargoyle or ...

Connected Kit SEASON FINALE!

Hot diggity dang, it's Episode 5 of Connected Kit Yanked into the Faerie Court! Please play it when you get the chance, and don't forget to leave your results in a comment or an e-mail (not a chat window, please! I will lose them). Since this is the end of the Connected Kit season, I plan to bundle the first 5 episodes up, give them some fancy CSS, and sell them on itch.io for a modest price. As my pledges, you will obviously get the bundled version for free. Thank you SO MUCH for supporting me ...

More tunes: Tundra!

Hey gang, I felt bad charging you for just a single song, so I've uploaded more free of charge! I'm hoping to spearhead some kind of collection of pay-what-you-want video game asset music, to be used with attribution by any indie dev who can't afford costly licensing fees. Stay tuned for that, but in the meantime, enjoy Tundra, an small icy-lands-themed album of video game music. https://soundcloud.com...

Spered Hollvedel

Well, this is going to be a little different, folks. This is my first Patreon-funded ... song. For Xmas this year, my fabulous younger brother gave me a compact MIDI keyboard. I've been messing with it, and I got the wild idea (inspired by #antholojam, which my team recently submitted a project for) to do a weird sci-fi jazz/ambient arrangement of a traditional Breton song I knew about via the Revels called Spered Hollvedel. The result was strange, but I felt happy with it and it felt really goo...

The 2014 ADVENT calendar!

(apologies for the double post; I forgot to mark this one paid!) The very first text adventure ever to exist was known as 'Colossal Cave Adventure', a fantasy story by Will Crowther named and modeled after the real life Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Of course, back then, file names got truncated, so the only part of the game's title that got displayed were six letters: ADVENT. Fast forward to this month, when I thought about releasing a Christmas themed game, but also wanted to release an article of...

Bonus screensaver: Flight of the Toast!

One last screensaver! My flagtoast entry for ‪#‎FlyingToastWithJam‬ is done, with only 15 minutes until submissions close! Those of you who remember Mac OS System 6 or earlier should find the graphics on this one pleasantly familiar, though I hand-drew every sprite! It can be played on the jam page, obviously, but a full-screen version up to 1080p (perfect for your next party) is on my website: http://inurashii.xyz/flight/ 2014-12-01 05:24:34 +0000 UTC View Post

November Pack 2 - Creepy Spooksgiving!

Those of you who follow me on twitter know that I entered a speedIF competition called Ectocomp around Halloween time. You also may have heard that the two games I worked on (one solo project, one collab with Carolyn VanEseltine) placed first and second in the competition! Well, yesterday I finished the polished, post-competition versions of each and I'm ready to share them with you! Warning: both games play sound (no jumpscares, though!) and are spooky. Candlesmoke, which placed first in the co...

November Pack 1: Screensaver Pack!

Hey gang! Rather than releasing two medium-sized works this month, I'm going to be releasing four smaller ones, including several collabs, and releasing them as two packs. As many of you know, I'm running a 'game' jam for screensavers called Flying Toast With Jam: http://itch.io/jam/flying-toast-with-jam I have two entries in it myself, and I'm releasing them together as my first of two entries for November. Both en...

$200!

Ohhhhh my goodness! I've hit $200 in pledges! I'm really happy; thank you to everyone who has generously pledged. I guess I'll be buying a Choosatron, then! Stay tuned for updates :)

BECCAA 0.8!

Hello lovely pledges! Big thanks to all of my donors for sticking with me, and big yays to my new donors! Hi! My release today isn't really a game so much as it is a strange sort of quiz dialogue thing. It was inspired by some recent conversations that I've had, and it's about entitlement and communication. Hope you like it!

AffirmApp beta!

AffirmApp is ready to be seen now! It's still a smallish toy, and I think it could use some improvements and features, but it's been a rough day for some of us and I think we need an app like this going around. It was inspired in part by the Porpentine's self-care apps, and you may see me make more stuff like this in the future. I made AffirmApp because I just wanted something that was unabashedly positive and unobtrusive, a nice little app that you could run in the background and check on when ...

Little affirmations?

If you had an app that said nice, tweet-sized things to you, what kind of messages would you like it to have? (psst don't forget to give me your Connected Kit stats)

Connected Kit Episode 4!

Hey pledges, Guess what time it is? That's right, your girl Caelyn is bringing you a hot new episode of Connected Kit Yanked into the Faerie Court, coming in juuuuust under the wire for September. Also, exciting news: After the next episode, I think we'll be about ready to release this season to the public! Finally you can show all your friends how great Connected Kit is, and they'll all rush to pledge. ;D As always, you'll find the episode attached to this post as an .html file (look for tha...

Checkin Time!

Hi there pledges! It's checkin time! Sorry for those of you who got an incomplete version of this post; I accidentally confirmed it while still working on it. Anyway. This is the part where I check in about how I'm doing, and whether I'm producing the kind of work that you like to see. I'm diving back into Patreon work after having finished #RuinJam and given two talks over the past weekend. So now I turn to you. What have I done that you've enjoyed? What do you want to see more of? Anything you...

Vivant Ludi!

Hello pledges! As you may know, I've been hosting the #RuinJam game jam in honor of the death of video games! Please consider playing some of the amazing games that have been submitted; the submissions close tonight and we've already got FIFTY FRIGGIN SEVEN GAMES! And I promised I'd play them all. Whoof. Anyway the games are here: http://itch.io/jam/ruinjam2014 My game for #RuinJam is a short point-and-click adventure game wh...

Author as Audience: Personal Narrative in Games

Early this month, I gave a presentation to the Boston Women in Games group about 'diary games' and other personal narratives in video game design. Attached to this post is a zip file containing my powerpoint presentation, an edited OGG Vorbis file of the presentation's audio, a text transcript of the whole speech and all questions (oww my hands), and all of the powerpoint slides in .png format. I've also linked to the file on dropbox for those of you who would prefer not to deal with an attachme...

Important Update/Query, Please Read!

Hi Pledges! As we roll into August, I have an important update for you: I plan to renew my dedication to Patreon, producing at least two, probably 3, possibly even 4 works a month. Now would be a good time to check your pledge cap in case that would be a financial hardship for you. Pursuant to that, I just gave a well-received talk at the Women in Games Boston monthly meetup; it was about Author as Audience and personal narrative in video game development. I'd like to clean up and release the au...

Connected Kit Episode 3!

She's aliiiiiive! Yes, folks, after a rough two months getting acclimated to my new 2nd and 3rd jobs, I return triumphant to my first, favorite job, and my favorite pledges. (That's you. I love you.) I'll tell you a little bit more about my 3rd job, which is a very exciting opportunity and the upcoming fulfillment of my $100 stretch goal, which I swear I didn't forget about. But in the meantime? It's a new episode of Connected Kit! There should be a link to download it on this post -- I believe ...

Light My Way Home

Ok! Shufflecomp, a prizeless mini-competition where we write games based on one of a set of songs sent to us, is over! That means that I can reveal myself as the pseudonymous Venus Hart, and by extension, my game: Light My Way Home. This game was one of the nine 'commended' entries out of about thirtysomething. You can click the title to go to this link, or click here: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=6yfiv4b8a...