Making Playgrounds, Not Toys: A Discussion With ‘Secret Little Haven’ Dev Tori Rose

For Pride Month, I wanted to take the time to talk to some queer indie devs about their games, what it’s like to be making indie games as a queer person, and what they want to see from queerness in games going forward. For this first interview, I sat down over Discord with Secret Little Haven developer, Tori Rose, to get into the weeds of these topics, and more.

YGGP: I’d like to start with a little background on you. How did you get into making games?

Tori Rose: I have been interested in game development my whole life, and have always dabbled in it, but I didn’t start working towards it as a career until I started college. I majored in Game Design, made plenty of games and prototypes there, and learned enough from my time to spearhead my own solo projects. While I consider Secret Little Haven to be my first solo project of note, my time making experimental games while at school gave me a good sense of the kind of games I wanted to make.

YGGP: Awesome! So going off of that, what kinds of games are you looking to make in the future? Are they going to be in a similar vein to Secret Little Haven?

TR: I’ve learned over time that I am not so much interested in making games based around a narrow mechanics set, explored and exhausted fully in one experience. Instead, I am far more interested in exploring a loosely-associated set of mechanics all interacting with each other in emergent ways. To use an analogy, I don’t want to make a toy – I want to make a whole playground.

Exploration in particular is what compels me the most as a player – the mystical promise of the unknown has driven me to games since I was a child experiencing Wind Waker’s massive Great Sea for the first time. I have always been the type to try and push against invisible walls, hoping that there is something out beyond them. Those walls tease, but ultimately defeat players’ curiosity. I’m not interested in creating games about invisible walls. I want to make games about what we imagine beyond them.

This is why Secret Little Haven needed an entire operating system to tell its story: It immerses the player in the world in a way that would be impossible with just a simple chat program. It tells the player that their desire to explore is valid and should be encouraged. I don’t know if I will ever make a direct sequel to Secret Little Haven, but I want to keep exploring its concept of virtual spaces, hidden treasures, meaningful connection, and the hope of infinite possibility.

YGGP: I definitely see what you mean with Secret Little Haven, I was really surprised and impressed by the level of care and encouragement that went with exploring the computer and its features. This kind of leans into my next question: what does queering games look like to you and how would you like to see it implemented on a larger scale?

TR: Queering games to me means not just amplifying the voices of marginalized queer creators, but encouraging the creation of stories not often told, even within those communities. Secret Little Haven is not a game about a trans person going through transition – it is about the process of self-actualization and discovery. That’s not to say that the latter kind of games are lesser, just that they are more common, even though all games with transgender leads are extremely rare in a relative sense.

In addition, we need more games that celebrate our own continued existence in our queerphobic society. We absolutely should have games about our struggles – it’s important for activism and to inform others of societal oppression, but we also need games that remind us that we are valid and loved. We need games that talk directly to our own community without feeling the need to placate or even accommodate non-queer people. We need games that are our own personal spaces, reminding us that our experiences are felt by many, many others just like us. There are many meanings behind the name Secret Little Haven, but I like to think that is one of them.

YGGP: Do you think those kinds of spaces are starting to emerge more in game dev, especially in the indie scene? Or I guess better phrased, spaces for those kinds of games?

TR: I think they are, albeit slowly. There are a ton of great queer indie developers out there, all telling their own stories in their own way. But I know that a lot of them are apprehensive about making games entirely about being queer because indie development is a financially precarious field to be in. I don’t blame them in the slightest, either. When you make games specifically talking to and about queerness, you unfortunately limit your audience compared to making a polished, mechanics-driven experience that does not address such things in a significant way. That can mean the difference in sales between a hit and a flop, and when your rent payment is on the line, I understand being hesitant. Especially since the most marginalized groups often face the biggest hurdles to a profitable career in game development.

But it’s important that such games are made, and it’s important that we continue to bring new voices into game development. If we continue to actively encourage queer creators to tell their story, then we will get more of these games. If we work hard to make our community as welcoming and accessible as possible, then we will get more of these games. If we always let queer people know that their story is worth telling, then we will get more of these games.

YGGP: The precariousness of indie dev has been a pretty big topic of conversation recently. Do you think there’s a way to make it better and safer for folks in the near future?

TR: If there is, it won’t be an easy one. The only real way to solve that problem is formal grants, scholarships, and crowdfunding. Given that the indie development scene is already not terribly well-off, this makes the creation of such systems difficult. I wish I had a better answer for this, but I really don’t. Indie developers, especially marginalized, queer indie developers, barely have enough funds to make their own games, let alone outside development.

YGGP: That’s totally fair, it’s a giant question. But getting insight from people who actually work in the industry is always helpful for gaining insight. Circling back to Secret Little Haven, why did you choose that era for the game?

TR: The internet of the 90s and early 00s was a very different beast from what we use today. For the most part, corporations and businesses had not begun to monetize it. The internet of today is a select few bustling cities, everyone in the world using major services, not sites. But the 90s web was more a federated archipelago of hamlets. Most websites were tiny, personal affairs, made by individuals with a particular interest that they wanted to share with the world. Sites affiliated on a personal basis with each other out of a sense of shared community.

Webrings and forums weren’t so much a utility as they were a broader extended family. Modern social media encourages us to present the best possible picture of yourself, but in the early web, you knew all of the regulars on their favorite forum in a much more intimate way. The web was limited and nascent, sure, but it was also much more personal, and fostered connections on a very different level.

In addition, it had far more potential for freeform exploration. The web was fresh and new, and search utilities were not of the scale that they are today. Finding new treasures online meant actively looking for them, and it made each discovery feel special. It felt like there was always something waiting for you, and the possibilities were endless. The invisible walls were never even a thought.

All of this is why the early internet was by far the best time and place to set Secret Little Haven. I gathered a lot of inspiration for the game from browsing old fan forums on my 1999 pink, translucent iMac. It reminded me how to use a computer solely for fun again, which was a remarkably refreshing experience. I wanted to share that sense of community, exploration, and fun with the world.

YGGP: It definitely comes through in the game! What are some of the positives and challenges you’ve dealt with as a dev?

TR: Being able to see people’s reactions to my game has been an unbelievable experience. Seeing people tell me how my game made their life better or made them feel valid has made all of this worthwhile. Because of that, I want to keep making games that reach people in that way.

However, the road to get here has been difficult, to say the least. Game Design school may have given me a lot of skills that have proven useful, it also instilled an unhealthy crunch mentality. This is absolutely by the school’s design, and was one of the reasons I left. Teaching people that crunch is necessary because “That’s how the game industry is”, is deeply damaging to young creative people. I took that mentality with me even into my solo projects – there were times during Secret Little Haven’s development where I worked nearly the equivalent of a full work week in addition to an actual full time job. Every spare hour I had went into making this game and I was constantly worrying about my self-worth whenever something went wrong. Stepping back from the game post-release has given me a lot more perspective, and has taught me how to practice self-care again. My next projects will absolutely have a more reasonable development schedule. But I want to do more than that – I want to make an effort to dismantle crunch mentality in this industry, aid unionization efforts, and ensure a more healthy road forward for future game developers.

YGGP: Speaking of your next projects, do you have any that you can talk about or would like to plug?

TR: My next project is a minor one, a digital adaptation of an old board game I made a few years ago. It playtested well, and I got enough requests from players to make it into a videogame. It’s called Rainbow Farms, a game about competitive farming.

But my next major project is a low-poly 3D exploration game inspired by the open-world game inside Nintendo’s unsung N64DD classic, Polygon Studio. Polygon Studio was a game I only played just recently, but has already significantly impacted the way I design and look at games. I am very excited to start work on it, and it will absolutely be my most ambitious project yet.