Released today on Steam!

Now includes unlockable custom play mode where you can turn your friends or favorite characters into minions and see how they fare as schoolgirl detectives. Will they give each other cookies, get into a huge fight, or be BFFs?

We've released a free 1.1 update to the game, which adds a number of features. The most notable are:

A second art style, and the ability to switch back and forth between the two styles at will:



Which means, of course, that you now have twice the lesbians.



Also, a roguelike save-and-quit option, which makes a temporary save which will be automatically resumed the next time you play the game.

If you already own the game, you can download the 1.1 patch by going to Options, Updates, Check for Updates

If you don't, you can get the new 1.1 demo on the Black Closet Webpage

[Jeanette]

9 AM Monday morning. A report lands on your desk: Jeanette's monogrammed silver locket has gone missing. The last time she definitely remembers having it, she was walking in the Field with her friend Susan. Shifty hallmate Ashley had also been admiring the locket recently.

Imagine an RPG where instead of fighting monsters, you're fighting scandals. You're in charge of the Student Council of an elite all-girls boarding school, and you must send your minions to investigate crimes and protect your reputation by any means necessary.

Going to search the Field for Jeanette's locket? You'd better assign a minion with good Observation skills. 
Think that Ashley might be hiding it somewhere? Maybe you can assign someone good at Stealth to tail her. 
Want to scare information out of Susan? Send in someone with a good skill in Intimidation. 

Your minions each have their own skillset, which you can level up as you solve cases. You assign minions to tasks, along with bonus equipment to boost their stats. Then you compare those stats to the target, along with the luck of the magical d20:



The cases themselves are randomly generated per-playthrough, so you must rely on the skills of your minions in order to find the clues to proceed. Unfortunately, one of them is secretly a traitor... and that's where the real plot of the game comes in. You can interact with your minions in either a friendly or romantic way to build their loyalty and find out about the big conspiracies behind all of these little crimes.

So, to sum up: Lesbian schoolgirl noir secret police investigation RPG.

Game website with demos (PC / Mac / Linux) and trailer

Obviously I've already taken a stab at my Harry Potter-reminiscent game.

I'm not that interested in a fully-licensed game, although if there were a Bioware-esque RPG of it I'd obviously go for it. But a properly licensed game is almost certainly going to insist on keeping the characters behaving in their strictly canon-locked roles instead of letting me roll around and change things wildly. I don't want to be just dragged along by the book plot. And I don't want to run around in the HP world without interacting with the characters I already know. If I were doing that why not use an original property to begin with?

Hmm... A Marauders-era RPG that didn't keep you tied to the book's history, that could be entertaining. But you can't really imagine them letting us have a game where you really do end up with Neville as the Boy Who Lived and/or have Harry never even born.

Schoolgirls. Aliens. Slime. Nethack jokes. Turn-based combat. Don't make me use complete sentences, I haven't slept enough for that.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/269010



Um, for those looking for more detail... It's JRPG-ish, but you do get to choose where to assign your skill points at each levelup, so you can tweak your strategy to favor the characters and attacks you like best.

There are dialog options but it's not really a visual novel. The choices impact which version of the final boss you face in the end.

If you already bought it from us (or you draw interesting pictures of the characters - no, not THAT kind of interesting!) you can email me for a Steam key.

i've heard that most indies who are on steam make a majority of their money on steam, but it's almost never like 90%+, it's usually something like 60%-40%. some indies even make more money by selling the game on their own site even though it's also on steam (world of goo is an example, they claimed that 70% of their pc sales profits come from their own site, even though their game is on steam and often on steam sales)

Percenages vary but I raise an eyebrow at the 'almost never' line... I've certainly heard multiple reports of people with extremely high percentages from steam, especially if the game did well there.

Its totally unmoderated and unprofessional for some 11 year old kid to tell you to take your product and do something to yourself with a dildo regarding it.

Pfft, take a look at what people say on the steam forums for games when they're released. You won't get away from keyboard-chewers that easily.

Was there actually a firm statement, or just a "we would like it to go away"? Because frankly they've been hinting it would eventually change for quite a long time now, without that meaning it's going to happen any time soon.

Having had a game released through greenlight and a game released pre-greenlight, I'm pretty content with the way GL is working at the moment... and I do mean at the moment, where acceptances are no longer so rare but they're not taking in EVERYTHING either. There have been some things granted a green light that really shouldn't have (because they don't even exist) but the number of actual releases doesn't seem to have turned into a flood of doom, particularly now that early access titles aren't shown in the main new releases display.

I would not like to see the whole thing turn into an appstore mess. However, one of the ideas that's been tossed around a lot is the idea of developer stores, which would NOT be listed in the 'main' steam store but would allow anyone to sell games and then to be bumped up into the main steam store if they were doing well. That would give indies the 'benefits' of being able to use Steam's servers and reliable payment mechanism, which would make a lot of users happy, and also allow Steam to make decisions on intake based on actual sales figures, since they'd be seeing the sales you made. Of course, that move could also raise some serious monopoly questions.... But this is all conjecture.

I'm one who can get motion sickness from games - although I've discovered it's possible to trigger it in a 2d game, just more difficult. Constant swaying in the background, urgh. Or 2.5D platformers. KEEP THE BACKGROUND STILL I'M TRYING TO JUMP HERE.

That doesn't mean I never play any 3d games. If they're in third-person perspective and don't require a lot of spinning around, it's not a problem. So I still get into a lot of the big RPGs.

I do tend to like 2d better even as a player, though. It's what I grew up with and it seems like people are better able to make weird, distinctive styles in 2d than they are in 3d. A lot of 3d stuff looks too samey to me.

What puzzles me the most about these people who are ardent defenders of the male-centric industry status-quo is that this isn't some zero-sum game. Neither Anita or even the most extreme SJW tumblr feminist is trying to take your damn Call of Doody away from you, they just want some reasonable female characters presented in a manner that isn't stupid.

Never say 'even the most extreme'. The most extreme of anything are batshit beyond belief. 

There are people who want violent or sexist or whatever games banned completely and taken away from you. They're just a tiny minority of the people out there and they're not really all that important, because most of the time, that sort of person doesn't play games anyway, so who cares about their opinions? (Answer: The media, when they're looking for a quick filler story and want to pull up someone to whine about those young people today.)

Most people complaining about representation in games want to be able to play more games.

Really, the fact that prices vary was sort of the original point of the thread, no?

Either "europe is totally affordable" or "europe is totally overpriced" is a simplification.

Sadly while business ties would let me move anywhere since I only deal with people online, personal ties force me to remain somewhere where my rent alone is more than that thousand a month. Such is the trouble of being married!

There may be, but when I've searched with the housing tools I know how to use, the rent is still pretty awful everywhere I look. It's totally possible that there are better deals on offer in local areas if you know the area and know where to find a bargain.

However, in a lot of cases, when you check farflung rural areas the rents actually get *worse* because the people living there are those who want the Country Life. So in a lot of those places, you can't find any apartments, you're expected to be going there to have a nice house and garden.

If you really want cheap rent, you want to find the most crime-riddled, economically-depressed *&%hole in England. That's probably Hastings. If you go to a place like that, then yes, you can find a studio apartment for less than $500/month.

I've been to Hastings twice. THe first time we were looking at cheap apartments (and decided it was not worth it). The second time was just to look at the coast - and we were attacked by drunken thugs and I got to visit a british emergency room. Hastings! It's a lovely place!

If you make 1000$ a month reliably, I don't think there's even much of a problem living in any country, if you move out a bit from the big cities.

Do you have any basis for this, or are you just assuming that if it works in Portugal it must work other places as well?

Just saying, looking at British rents...

[Teslagrad]

(LLTQ was released in 2012 but I did add a batch of new content at the Steam release if that counts)

It's tough for me to pick things within the release year, as I'm usually years behind in picking games up, and occasionally playing things in-development that won't be technically released for a long time yet.

I will go for Teslagrad - I haven't beaten it yet, mind, I'm less than halfway through, but it has the rare honor of me actually buying it when it came out!

I started to fill this out but gave up because it kept asking so many questions requesting specific numbers. Sure, you say approximately, but with SO many questions all wanting numbers and numbers and numbers it starts feeling oppressive when you can't remember.

I don't remember how many games I've bought this year. I'm not a Steam gamer (serious!) and I don't have a neat organised backlog. Things I've bought include GOG games which are easy enough to look at, but also a stack of visual novels and DS games, all of which came in boxes...

I didn't even remember that I'd technically bought a bundle (though it was really more of a donation) until bundles were mentioned halfway through the survey... and without stopping to go look that up I can't remember how many games were in that bundle.

Given all that? I'm pretty much stabbing random numbers with all your percentages. If I don't know how many games I bought and I don't know how many games were in the bundle, an unknown percentage of unknown is 

So when after that it asked about hours spent looking at gaming media I just plain gave up. I don't know, how many hours a week am I awake?

If there are only a few questions asking for numbers I can do my best to approximate but this was just too much, I started feeling bad about giving garbage data so I quit.

Sure, there's diversity in porn as a whole, but it also tends to strongly enforce a pretty strange set of "norms" and calls out anything that is outside those norms in the way that it exaggerates those niches for promotion. (It's now a 'fetish' to *not* wax yourself smooth and have surgery?) In particular the way blacks are treated in most porn I've seen is pretty cringe-making.

You can't look at tiny niche porn and compare that directly to AAA games, you need to map indies to indies. Web-porn is full of small businesses doing their things. All sorts of little sites are run by only one person...

It's a pity that you started that post sounding reasonable and then jumped full into "IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT SO STOP WHINING".

For that matter, the whining IS how people are trying to get companies to pay attention to them as a demographic. It's silly to tell them to shut up at the exact same time you're telling them that it's their own fault for not being loud enough.

But the pink aisle is not what's keeping you down, it was years of hanging back and not taking an interest in playing games.  So blame some fat shill in a suit. 

As one who's old enough to ahve seen the before-and-after, I blame them for intentionally spreading games-are-for-guys memes and the resulting effect it had on my childhood interactions with boys. Alternately I could blame the boys and say they all suck, but that would be mean.

Marketing in general is a bunch of poisonous bullshit, games are only a small fraction of it. Stereotype is a quick and dirty shortcut which is very useful to them when they want to get a point across in a hurry, so they tend to rely on it heavily.

Our tiny little JRPG passed Greenlight. I promised I would upgrade the battle graphics if it did, so dammit, I need a pixel artist!



(I have people now, but thanks)

It's been a long time since I played Immortal Defense. From what I remember, no, there wasn't any problem there in terms of content.

As for what happened in Mass Effect 2 - one, dancing Asari girls all over the place. (Not that the Asari are a completely negative thing, having an all 'female' race also led to some interesting characters who might not normally be cast 'female'.) Filling your clubs with half-naked blue chicks and no correspondingly seductive men says "Come here because you like boobs." ... I do like boobs, as it happens, but it's a contrast with the brothels in Dragon Age which, while they might still focus a lot on sexy ladies, at least try to give the impression there's more of a range on offer.

Second, there's an asshole recruiter you have to talk to who makes a nasty crack about FemShep being a whore for no other reason than that she's female. Yes, the character was supposed to be an asshole and it's prompting you to get Renegade points by punching him, but it was so completely out of the blue... I'd designed my Shepard as an older, no-nonsense woman who wasn't at all glamorous, and I was so shocked by the game suddenly throwing this shit at me that I honestly couldn't respond within the prompt time limit. I just sat there staring. This encounter only happens if you're female, and to the best of my knowledge there is no flipside male-insulting encounter anywhere in the game.

Third, Samara. I honestly didn't mind the whole "miranda ass cam" as much as some people did because it fit with her character, she would have wanted you staring at her ass. Samara just looks ridiculous, and strikes a bunch of poses to be sure you notice how ridiculous. As I blogged at the time, "unless she's secretly got machine-gun nipples that she needs to be able to whip out at a minute's notice, that outfit seems totally nonsensical."

Beyond that, there's a handful of much more minor things - lack of female characters of any races other than sexy chick races, ("Oh, well, our race sequesters all our women" gets really, really old.) imbalance in romance/loyalty rewards, etc, but that stuff's more arguable. It's the earlier things that really set the tone of this being a boy's playground.

I love scifi, but Mass Effect sort of went out of its way to say "THIS GAME IS FOR GUYS" several times. (At least, 2 did. I only ever played 2, so I can't comment on the rest.)

Like many things, it can be a self-reinforcing cycle. If you expect your players to be a particular way and cater strongly to that, anyone outside of that who shows up may feel turned aside, and in the future even more of the audience is that particular way.

Which doesn't mean it can never change. Supposedly Doctor Who never had a large female fanbase until New Who. (I don't have stats on that, it's just what I heard. But considering the hordes of Tennant fangirls, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a population shift!)