Picking the Pieces Up: A Conversation with Who We Are Now Dev, Bryce Duzan
Video games have always been part of Bryce Duzan’s life. “I’ve always been playing video games, since I was a baby pretty much,” he told YGGP over Discord. It’s not surprising then, that this lifelong interest led him to wanting to develop his own game.
Alongside three artists, an editor, a musician, and a graphic designer, Duzan created Who We Are Now, a post-apocalyptic visual novel that focuses on four queer men trying to make it in the aftermath. Despite a successful Kickstarter campaign, the development wasn’t without its challenges.
“There were three separate artists who worked on the game but originally it was supposed to be one. Problems popped up so unfortunately the first artist couldn’t work on the game anymore and then the second artist couldn’t work on the game anymore so that made it difficult so we ended up with a game that’s a blend of three people’s art styles.” While Duzan ultimately sees this as a positive thing, it made the development cycle tricky and led to a year long delay for the game’s release.
Other challenges included learning curves, both for Kickstarter and being a first time game developer. As far as Kickstarter goes, Duzan said, “it was kind of a lot of figuring it out as I went. There’s some stuff that they have, but that’s mostly like how much tax you’ll have to pay, and what their fees are. But other than that you’re kind of on your own.”
The learning curve on game development was why Duzan and his team decided to go with a visual novel as their game type. “I’m not a coder so I pretty much learned everything as I was going… I used this program called Renpy which is kind built to make visual novels in and that made things really easy but it was still a lot of learning and trying to figure things out, so I wanted to go with a game that was kind of easy to play but also easy to create.”
Despite criticism from some that too many queer games are visual novels, it can’t be denied that tools like Renpy have made development far more accessible for marginalized folks, allowing more queer folks and people of color into the indie development scene. Creating a diverse story was one of the main reasons Duzan decided he wanted to start making games.
“I got into game design because I didn’t see the games I wanted to see, I suppose,” he mused. “Like I didn’t see games that had queer characters, I didn’t see the plot lines I wanted to see, that kind of thing.”
The plot lines and characters that Duzan wanted to see are fairly different than what most mainstream games provide. In a world that’s home to the Fallout and Metro series, Duzan wanted to see a different, somewhat less bleak version of the post apocalypse. These stories often focus on survival in the face of irradiated, hostile environments and fellow humans who pose just as much of a threat as the terrain and mutants who inhabit it. Duzan wanted to create a post-apocalypse that was more focused on moving forward.
“I think for a lot of stories the post-apocalypse is a way to show humanity at its dirtiest and meanest, like you know in the post-apocalypse there are no rules so people are horrible to each other all the time. And I think that can be partially true, but I wanted to show how people can be good to each other and loving to each other even in a horrible scenario.”
Love is key to Duzan’s Who We Are Now, and more specifically, the love between queer men. “The other inspiration [for this game] was wanting to make a queer focused story that’s based around queer men and kind of explore those relationships and how they fall in love with each other,” Duzan told us. This is a breath of fresh air considering that most games, especially those in AAA space, actively shy away from depicting love and intimacy between men. Who We Are Now embraces these intimate moments, including, but not limited to sex scenes between the player character, Wes, and each of his potential love interests, with open arms.
This kind of representation is still few and far between when it comes to AAA, but that’s not the only space worth keeping an eye on. “Obviously games isn’t just one area. You have AAA games, you have indie games, you have games that are even smaller than that. And each space kind of explores different areas in different ways,” Duzan noted. “So while AAA feels almost glacially slow in that regards, indie games are moving ahead and being much more progressive and inclusive and smaller games have always been at the head of the pack.”
Instead of waiting for the glacier of AAA to ever so slowly move into the 21st century when it comes to representation, we should instead be focusing our time, energy, and money on the indie creators who are actually doing the work to create games for queer folks, women, people of color, and all the intersections in between. This Pride Month (and in the months beyond) stop by platforms like itch.io and buy and play games from diverse developers. We’ll never get better if we aren’t lifting up the devs who are doing the most to bring us the representation we want and deserve.
