Zoë “GhostAss” Quinn

I have very little idea and am trying to do so myself. Outside of just forcing yourself to write, even stuff that isn't great, the living off of it part is something I'm figuring out. I mean hell, I actually make *less* money on the patreon model as I do more and more (I should really give mine a makeover), and pitching to sites is something weird that I'm not sure I'm even doing right, given that I think I get pitches accepted largely because of my momentum and back catalog of work. If I had to cold call pitch and I wasn't already a writer with a wikipedia page and pieces on places like Cracked and Giantbomb? I have no idea. I've just been writing as long as I can remember and I've been *extremely* lucky to get the opportunities I have. I don't know that I could repeat that success if I had to start over completely (which is the biggest thing keeping me from writing under a pseudonym).

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I mean, it honestly depends and this can swerve super hard into Theory of Mind territory and existential questions of what consciousness is. Personally, I'm all for hybriding myself with technology. The main deterrents for me would be if that sort of thing would make you open to manipulation or hacking, but as someone who has been in abusive relationships I'm painfully aware that being made of meat doesn't magically exclude you from suffering being controlled by another person against your will in such a way. However, the flipside is that if I had some kind of AI integration that could have a therapeutic effect, like something that would help me bypass depressive states or reign myself in when I'm having a bad ADHD day, that would be invaluable. Honestly I'd prefer something like that to hacking myself with drugs - AI is easier to figure out than biology. But on the flip flip flip side how do you even integrate AI with a human mind? What consequences would that have, given that we still have issues with mapping out exactly how brains work in the first place? What would something like that do to a consciousness - and how would you interface with others? Could you? Who would implement your tech and would whoever has the power to do so exploit that (almost certainly yes if you look at the current state of humanity)? What about cyborg rights?

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There are so many questions that kinda suffer from the whole time travel thing - it's so far outside what we know that all we can do is wildly speculate. Which, granted, is fun, and one of the reasons science fiction is basically the best, but yeah.

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Yes! Stencyl tends to be the best for this - the visual coding language looks a lot like legos, and the games that it comes pre-packaged with is a great place to start for kids. Essentially what I'd suggest is on your own, go and download it and run through the tutorial. Then once you've done that, download it with her and take one of the premade games it comes with and just play around with it and help her make it her own. Help her put her own art stuff in, on the code side of things, find the numbers in the code blocks and show her what happens when you double the numbers or divide it in half (change a variable then hit play to see what happens, then repeat that process). Pull the code apart by unsnapping blocks and see what happens. Basically just play with blocks in the coding side and get her experimenting on her own, and she should have a great time.

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Or at least that's how it's gone any time I've taught children stencyl! They also tend to really love that when you're done and have totally taken a premade game and made it your own, they can easily put it online on the stencyl arcade and get their friends to play it :3

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First and foremost, please do whatever you feel is right for you. If it's too much stress, and the stress outweighs the joy you'd get from pursuing software engineering, then by all means take care of yourself. Life's too damn short not to.

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As far as how to stay strong? I guess my first thing would be that I'm not. I'm emphatically not. I don't know if me sticking around is even strength as much as it is stubbornness and inability to change. Those things aren't strength. Some of the strongest women I've seen in all of this have walked away, and it's not out of weakness - it's out of self-respect, and deciding that they are worth more than being treated like this. So I don't think it's due to strength that I keep on doing what I do. It might be out of weakness - I don't know that stubbornness is inherently strong, even.

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I keep making games and caring about tech and existing online because I just love it, in spite of everything. I love games more than I hate being treated like this, or living looking over my shoulders. I care too much about the internet and the ways it connects people and how it's impacted my life to simply move on to something that might pay better and come with less risk. I'd still be a game dev because 1 person who told me that my work mattered to them like Depression Quest, or made them laugh when they needed to laugh like Clone or Busey means more to me than a hundred death threats.

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I got my first really scary threat a long time ago. Someone had sent a detailed rape threat to my house. It was why I originally pulled DQ off of Steam Greenlight, quietly. I didn't talk about it because I was afraid people would be horrible to me for talking about it, or that the person who sent it would know they got the right address. But that was before I started doing many talks about the game or doing festivals with it. It was before I saw with my own eyes the real, actual people telling me their stories and telling me that I made some little thing that meant so much to them. That's when I put it back on. Thinking of their faces and stories keeps me here and keeps me moving forward.

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So, yeah. I'd do it all over again knowing this. Or at least I'd like to think I would.

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The love and support of the amazing people I'm surrounded with keeps me from completely breaking down, especially when it looks like me breaking down would hurt the people around me. Even just being accountable to them keeps me honest about when that's happening, and if anyone is strong, it's them. It's the amazing friends I have left who haven't given up on me, and Alex for sticking by me when I was too wrapped up in my own pain to be as good to him as he deserves. It's my dad, who is ok with me continuing to be a dev knowing that people will harass him every time I do something with, that's strong. It's the other devs who stood up and said "this is wrong" knowing what would happen that are strong.

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I'm just some nerd tbh.

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There's a whole other option: use open source game art! http://opengameart.org/

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If you use it and still don't like how your game looks, you can always finish it with approximate placeholder assets with open game art, and use this to show to artists who might wanna jump in and add polish. Besides, it's your first game - the most important thing you can do is finish it. If you finish it and it's good the polish can always be added later. Having a prototype to play with is super beneficial to anything that might end up being a full scale game.

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Also consider using something like Stencyl, which has a built-in asset store that you can get art from. Obviously what tool you use depends on what kind of game you're going for. If you wanna explore more options, check out http://sortingh.at for a good walkthrough of what you might wanna use.

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