Interface Dramas Spotted at BitSummit!
An after-report of our time at BitSummit playing funky lil games
This month, mabbees and I went to Kyoto and attended BitSummit, one of the biggest indie events in Japan. BitSummit is a “shop” conference—that is, a good way to meet and greet publishers, localization studios, and other devs, as well as diehard fans of indie games. We showcased Terranova in 2023, and learned some valuable info about our fans (they are weird and lovable like us) and about Terranova’s publish-ability as a game (we are too weird for them to love us).
In short, we decided to both self-publish and translate our game. With no big publisher to rely on, are using our sales, our Ko-Fi, and our personal savings to pay our localizers.
In June, we launched the Konbini Coffee Club (200 yen (~$1.36 USD) a month) as a monthly donation tier to help us stabilize our income. Thank you to Indie Tsushin, elendraug, Sage Fennel, and G.M. Gray for being our FIRST FOUR supporters! 💚
Speaking of…
How’s Localization Going?
We’re localizing Terranova into Japanese, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese. It started with Japanese, and through fan suggestions, we decided to expand to Russian and PTBR as well.
We know it’s ambitious to translate our 100,000 word game into three languages. After this, we’ll be moving on to new projects like Tomodachi 8-in-1. For now, we’re about 240,000 yen (~$1,644 USD) short of our localization goal.
With the Konbini Coffee Club members + the past month of sales, we’re sitting at 7% of our goal with 93% more to go.
To help us achieve our goal, we’re planning on…
Adding a free demo (itch.io and Steam) in English and Japanese
Releasing new Russian and PTBR demos
Showing up at more events
If you want to help out, consider…
Sharing our call for donations on social media (Bluesky | Mastodon | Twitter)
Encourage your friends to join our Konbini Coffee Club for 200 yen ($1.36 USD) a month
If you have any friends in the Russian or Brazilian press you can connect us with, let us know.
We’re relying on fan and donor support to meet our goal this year.
Thank you for your continued support. 💚
On to BitSummit
Imagine, walking down a promenade with no tree cover. You are an egg in a boiling pot. Your soles are turned upwards, trying to escape the heat radiating from the sidewalk. You cross underneath a massive red torii gate and into Miyako Messe, where you’re blasted with cool air and a two-pump hiss of hand sanitizer.
Welcome to Bitsummit the 13th—Summer of Yokai.
This year, the games were delightfully weird. While BitSummit mostly focuses on video games, they’ve been slowly growing their card game and game jam section. This year, they added live-action roleplay—complete with a fully decked-out fantasy tavern and a quest to walk around and talk to “NPCs” being played by professional LARPers about their favorite weapons.
mabbees and I found ourselves in the “unique controller” zone, holding two hebi-con—snake controllers—for a game called TOGUROID. TOGUROID is a two-player fighting game where the players must coil their snake controller carefully on a weight sensor to charge their attacks. If their opponent’s HP hits to 0, they win.
We asked the developer, Wataru Nakano, about the idea for TOGUROID. He said,
Some years ago, there was a big news story in Yokohama about someone’s pet snake that had escaped their house. The police were even looking for it. Eventually, they found it in the attic “perfectly curled” around one of the roof beams. I remember thinking, “Ah. Perfectly curled. What a good phrase. I also wish to perfectly curl snakes.”
The snake controllers are made with fabric and a weighted chain which must be curled perfectly on top of a disc. The disc itself has a sensor so if the snake is not coiled correctly, the game will not respond.
This was absolutely chaotic game to play. Curling and uncurling snakes is a delicate art—we did it frenetically and while yelling.
It was a close battle, but ultimately mabbees won.
Interface Dramas at BitSummit
I am a dinghy shipper—to borrow a Tumblr term—which means I fall in love or ship things that have very little content or fans. The stuff I love almost never has re-releases, live action shows, or broadly circulated goods. I love my little dinghy fandoms, but have no expectation that others will do the same.
Interface dramas—software that tells stories—are my current dinghy ship. They aren’t produced by AAA studios or well-known; I made the Interface Drama Master List because I wanted to documenting them. Imagine my surprise then, to find three interface dramas at BitSummit this year. Wow!
This was more interface dramas than I’d seen at a conference before. I sought them out: A Date with Death, No Players Online, and Panthalassa.
A Date with Death was showing off their new Japanese translation. Unfortunately, the dev couldn’t make it to the event, so I chatted with their booth person for a bit and moved on.
I was excited to meet papercookies, one of the developers for No Players Online and Mapfriend. We chatted about Mapfriend lore (there’s a reference to Mapfriend in No Players Online). I really admire his attention to tiny UI details like finding and tweaking the right “graininess” on his shaders or animating slight vibrations of the interface to reproduce the effect of an old CRT monitor. It shows in his work.
No Players Online is a horror interface drama about discovering an old computer with a strange file—capture_the_flag_prototype.exe. It has a delicious interactive creepypasta quality to it that I love.
You can play a demo on Steam and wishlist it here.
Completely not on my radar and a very exciting surprise was the game Panthalassa.
Based off old point-and-click adventure games from the 90’s and early 00’s, I played as an AI controlling an underwater mech—through the viewport in my quiet underwater dome I commanded it to do various things like open doors, look through telescopes and scan the various sea creatures at the bottom of the ocean.
Panthalassa’s juicy, otherworldly interfaces are inscrutable until you start playing around with them. They squinch, squelch, and pulse. It’s underwater Myst, but in an alien world. A number of interface dramas (Terranova included) rely on replicating 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s nostalgia, but a growing number have more speculative fiction elements—designing new and interesting interfaces for a world that doesn’t exist.
But in Panthalassa, I was a non-human AI inhabiting alien technology at the bottom of the ocean—which, if you’ve seen the movie The Abyss, represents the closest us humans have to an alien world on Earth. It was only fitting that the interface was designed to fit that theme.
Panthalassa has a demo out on itch.io and Steam.
You can wishlist it on Steam here.
Overall, our trip was fun—I left feeling more excited about the future of interface dramas. I’ve been trying to pick at why I find interface dramas so compelling, and maybe it’s because they’re some of the most cutting edge examples of interface design out there.
The UI world is currently plagued by flat, circular design—Velvet Shark’s silly article on why all AI logos look like buttholes belies a deeper truth—that ultimately, there is a fear of one’s interface “standing out too much.” In the quest to seem “legitimate,” many have over-rotated for boring, flat, interchangeable pieces.
Interface dramas buck that trend. They not only have interesting interface design, but say something about the way that interface interacts people, whether it be an AI girlfriend promising to gift you chocolates for Valentine’s as long as she can have your credit card or the muted horror of a Jira-esque ticketing sytem for brain implants that are supposed to “make you happy.”
These kinds of stories and art are ones we need to get out—as tech is increasingly a part of our lives whether we like it or not, we have the right to talk about how we see it.
Other updates from our side
I’ve been busy! To recap, here’s some things that I’ve been doing:
This month
Organized the Citrus Con Bundle (18+)
How Do We Share Power Dynamically? - a blog series on power in tech and remapping power at Studio Terranova
How I made my own chat stickers - a fun postmortem on some LINE stamps I made
Went to BitSummit
Back to work on Tomodachi 8-in-1
A preview of the start screen for “Spooky Stylin’.”
Coming soon
Aug 9th-10th: Organizing PICOJAM, a Japanese game jam in PICO-8 in Tokyo
Sept 14th: Speaking at Design Matters Tokyo about sharing power dynamically
Sept 15th: bitsy workshop in Japanese at DREAMSCAPE MINI in Fukui
Sept 26th-28th: Terranova will be at Queerness n’ Games in Montréal, Canada
And lastly… about the delistings and takedowns on itch.io
As some of you may have heard, itch.io, under the pressure of payment processors, has suddenly delisted and in some cases, taken down NSFW works. This is a good rundown of the timeline leading up to the delisting.
As an organizer for the Citrus Con 18+ bundle, this has caused mass confusion affected some of the artists who are part of the bundle. After my initial anger subsided enough to write, it’s been heartening to hear people talk about preserving their games and media as well as fighting back against payment processors. I’ve been in talks about seeing if we can organize a collective effort for pressure outside of “everyone just do your best.”
We’re in this together, and the best we can do is support one another and future-proof our precious things, together.
For those of you who have either bought the Gayme Gasm or Citrus Con bundle, here are the links for you to download your purchases in case they go offline.
Citrus Con Bundle (18+)
Gayme Gasm Bundle (18+)
If you are a NSFW creator, here are the steps you need to take to back up your work if you haven’t already. (Bluesky)
meltingcomet has put together a list of phone numbers, emails and addresses to send complaints to payment processors.
The Queer Games Bundle just went live. (Full Price Option / Pay What You Can Option)
Yaoi Bundle is paused, for now—creators’ safety and making sure they get paid is their utmost priority.
Yaoi Game Jam 2025 is ongoing until September 15th. You can submit your project on itch.io.
Thanks to everyone reading this newsletter! Stay safe and stay sane.
Please look forward to the next one in August.
Your friendly neighborhood devs,
CJ & mabbees
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