Hi ghosties,

We’re back this week to introduce you to a new Baby Ghosts game studio co-op from Ontario: Void Blob Worker Cooperative!

Who is Void Blob?

Lee-Orr: We’re a group of queer, lefty story-tellers and artists making narrative games focused on serving our communities.

Nicholai: I see Void Blob as an intentionally-crafted space for our small collective of indie devs to create meaningful, story-driven games. We strive to maintain an equitable working environment that accommodates our respective disabilities and respects our perspectives as marginalized creators. Our games are a reflection of our values.

Daya: Void Blob was created in response to a lack of care in both the capitalist systems that run our world as well as within our own creative industries; we know a different future can be possible! We believe that our passion for games, art, and storytelling can live alongside and thrive with accessibility tools and low tech systems so anyone can enjoy the things we make, even on an old library computer.

(^. .^₎Ⳋ

We are just coming out of finishing our first official game as a studio!

There will be Beauty is a dark horror choices-matter visual novel set within a cursed manor in the South Caucasus region bordering the Black Sea. Players explore through crumbling halls and interact with the spectral residents of the manor to discover new rooms and unravel clues to this winding story of cyclical violence and colonial upheaval.

The game asks you to consider what redemption means to you and what you would sacrifice in the search for peace.

This was a challenging but overall rewarding way to see how we work together as a team. We were able to test out systems for sharing progress, divvying up tasks and managing our workflow in anticipation of our next game. We definitely hit some pitfalls along the way, like over-scoping our narrative design and switching tools partway through our ideation process after hitting some unexpected paywalls. This challenged us to find new tools that we’re now eager to bring forward into our game making process.

Needless to say, we learned a lot!

Along with being a challenge for our team, we also wanted this game to set the tone for The Inverted Spire, which is planned to be our first commercial game!

Our next fantasy setting draws on an even broader range of inspirations; from queer refugee experience to Central Asian folklore, Eastern European speculative fiction, and English-language authors like China Miéville and Ursula K. Le Guin. You play as a delinquent goblin mage, guiding your expedition of outcasts and political prisoners through a deadly architectural marvel stretching deep below the earth. We’ve recently received a generous grant to develop our prototype!

There will be Beauty is available now on itch.io

It will also be part of the Power of Pride bundle for the month of June along with an amazing lineup of other queer games!

What’s your biggest takeaway from Baby Ghosts?

Daya: Baby Ghosts really got us to sit down and think about things that were easy to overlook through the hustle and bustle of trying to build a studio from the ground up. Through the program we were able to slow down and examine our values and how we want them to shape what we do. We were quick to see that our values around care and anti-burn out culture weren’t always being met through habits ingrained in us over years spent in capitalist systems we wanted to leave behind. Baby Ghosts offered space for us to address this through advice from our peers on systems and habit training we could employ to our specific needs. ♡

Nicholai: I went into Baby Ghosts hoping one of our greatest takeaways would be forging connections with like-minded studios. Partway through, I feel the environment nurtured by the program really goes a long way to support this! Knowledge-sharing is strongly encouraged, and we explore a lot of challenging topics together with the whole cohort. We’re all out here navigating a notoriously hostile industry space in tumultuous waters. I think contributing to building community together is one of the most powerful things we can do to survive the odds.

Lee-Orr: For me, the biggest takeaway is the sense of community. We got to meet and start evolving our relationships with folks from other studios with similar values - both among our cohort and Baby Ghost’s wider community. And not only that - Baby Ghosts gave us the tools & the push to be more vulnerable and open within our studio, and really solidified us as a group, rather than individual friendships.

What do you think all of us involved in games could do to make the video game industry better?

Nicholai: A shift we’re already seeing in the industry is this pivot towards recognizing game production as labour and developers as workers who deserve recognition of their workers’ rights. I think one of the most important things we can do is support that movement by advocating for (and better yet, applying) work practices that support our own health and work-life balance. I also think it’s important to highlight the ways that marginalized developers continue to face additional barriers to job security and financial stability, even within union-building spaces. We can all play a part in making sure these emerging support structures take the needs of the most underrepresented game workers into account.

Daya: Resource sharing doesn’t have to be monetary! Especially as small independent studios who are often made up of marginalized folks with fewer access to resources, things like knowledge sharing, skill trading, co-working, and safety support are all so valuable.

Let’s build the anti-capitalist network of our dreams! ⋆˙⟡♡

Lee-Orr: The thing that comes to mind for me is that we can’t allow “professionalism” to keep preventing standing up for ourselves or with others. It’s been used as a shield by people enabling, or committing, exploitation and violence for a long time - all while also putting the blame on those of us willing to take a stand.

You can play There will be Beauty and meet Void Blob at our upcoming event for Toronto Games Week: No Bosses! Real Talk from Cooperative Video Game Studios.

Register for free here!

And if you’re in Halifax, you can say hello to us at XP Summit Atlantic this Friday June 5 where we’ll (of course) be talking about building cooperative studios.

Here’s to building that anti-capitalist network as best we can!

- eileen & Jennie