Oh, you want him to start off stripped back to nothing, ready for an adventure? I can do that!” Miller says, laughing. “It was one way the game design overlapped with a gay sensibility better than in straight games. It’s also a twist on the old ‘start off in a room with amnesia and no equipment’ opening that a lot of games use to introduce the setting and characters to the player. “Something that says ‘it’s gay, let’s have some fun with it’. “I wanted to do something dramatic and bold for an opening,” Miller says. The main character isn’t just walking around in his underwear for show. It’s hard to describe but as an example I think people intuitively get that the title is homosexual.” “The aesthetics alone don’t make it gay, but I think Tycho, the main character, and his interactions with other people in the game make it gay. “But is it a gay game?” He stops to ponder. “I grew up without many gay role models so was definitely in response to that, but also I thought it would make a fun game that would be unique on the market,” Miller says. As he visits different planets, he develops relationships with several hunky men. Clad only in his underwear, Tycho sets off on a point-and-click adventure to find (clothes, and) his seemingly evil ex-boyfriend. In My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant gamers are thrust into the shoes of Tycho Minogue (yes, named after the Singing Budgie). “And not just gay but unapologetically gay.” “I tried to make a game where everything was openly gay, from the characters to the vegetables to the aliens,” he says. Luke Miller didn’t necessarily set out to make a gay game, but he definitely wanted its characters to be homosexual. On the flipside, Obscura’s Coming Out on Top is chock-full of man-on-man action – and lots of cartoon penis – for those who want “to play an adult visual novel”.ĭespite their differences, the games – and their developers – are defining a new genre: the gay game.
Miller’s title is full of gay themes – “it’s a sci-fi adventure about love between two, maybe three guys,” he says – but aside from a character who likes to parade around in his underwear, there’s no nudity in My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant.
In Eureka, USA, Obscura is using a successfully-funded Kickstarter campaign to get her erotic dating simulator Coming Out on Top into the hands of gamers. In Melbourne, Australia, Luke Miller continually updates his sci-fi adventure gay game, My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant, in an attempt to pass the title through Steam’s Greenlight program. The titles have a similar aesthetic (they feature hand-drawn cartoon animations) and both are defined as gay-themed. Two developers slave away in their respective home offices, working tirelessly on their indie games.