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Great PC gaming moments are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
There’s a bit of a chill that comes with that little publish button. No work of art is ever finished, but as soon as you hit that button, you pledge to call it done — and leave your footprint, no matter how small, in the great ongoing canon of gaming history.
In 2019, we released Can Androids Pray in collaboration with author and PC gamer Xalavier Nelson Jr. (Skatebird, An Airport for Aliens Current Run By Dogs) and musician Priscilla Snow (Patrick’s Parabox, A Good Snowman is Hard to Build). (opens in new tab)– a short game about the final moments of two doomed mech pilots. I’d released games before, small experiments and student projects, and I already had credits for Alien: Isolation (QA) and Minecraft (level artist) from summer concerts at college, but that was the big one. The first that felt real.
Making games is a messy business. Even a game this small took months to rewrite the narrative, grapple with visual scripting languages, and tweak the UI rendering to work at different resolutions. Our marketing was nothing other than me showing up at festivals and museums across Europe with a laptop and too much coffee. Xalavier texted me about a possible collaboration with Xbox, and then an hour later a guy from Microsoft showed up at my booth on the other side of the world.
For a game to get published at all is a miracle, let alone when you’re trying to work as a full-time games journalist at the same time. But I’m sure everyone who’s ever picked up a gamepad (I’m not sure what the keyboard analogy is here) at some point expected they could try it — even if it was something as small as Changing the balance of theorizing is for your favorite MOBA character or pondering why that one corner on a CS:GO map isn’t quite working.
Nowadays it is easier than ever to try it. Mainstream engines like Unity and Unreal are free and come with a wealth of documentation, but also tiny web tools like Bitsy (opens in new tab) or cord (opens in new tab) will give you the thrill of cobbling together something playable in an afternoon. Put that stuff on Itch and you’re a game developer, no ifs or buts.
Can Androids Pray hasn’t set the world on fire or even really paid more than a few months of rent. But we’ve received rave reviews in print media, brought the game to consoles, given some kids an existential crisis, and even spawned a sequel. Can androids survive? (opens in new tab). Most importantly, we’ve created something I’m damn proud of.