an interview with Yames

an interview with indie horror dev Yames

Yames is an indie horror developer whose games tend to build on themes of posthumanism, Lovecraftian and body horror, and religious terror. I sat down to talk with him about his game Growing My Grandpa! and his work in general.

Alex: Tell us a bit about your newest project, Growing My Grandpa!, which was recently released on itch.io and Steam.

Yames: Growing My Grandpa! is a narrative-driven point-and-click horror game with virtual pet elements, the virtual pet being your Grandpa, or the thing you know as Grandpa. It is now available on Steam for PC and available for PC and Mac on itch.io. Like most of my games, Growing My Grandpa!’s horror comes from the unraveling of a story and world which at its heart conceals a multivalent darkness. The game’s story is framed by a report written by a school counselor regarding meetings with one of their emotionally troubled students. The student, being quite imaginative, tells the counselor about growing her grandpa up from a hairy organism she found in her new home’s basement that appeared to react to her thoughts. Player action in the game takes place within these recollections where grandpa must be retaught how to speak and fed a healthy diet. The strange nature of grandpa and the creature is slowly revealed through exploration of the basement and conversations with grandpa itself.

Alex: Do you have an overall game design philosophy, or a particular kind of experience that you hope players get out of your different projects?

Yames: For me a lot of game design is narrative design and perhaps vice versa. Narrative design is dealing with how a story is told, the larger structures that shape the experience of the story. Game design is dealing with the experience more generally, but in my games there is usually an emphasis on seeking out knowledge or information, knowledge related to the immediate story of the game but also the world the game takes place in, and knowledge that develops the atmosphere I am trying to create in the game. The way that that information is delivered, the rate at which it is delivered, what is revealed and what is concealed is very important to me.

To focus more in particular in what I am trying to do in making a horror game worth playing, I think I am trying to create an experience that remains with the player long after they have finished the game. I mentioned the importance of structuring the flow of information the player receives because I think it not only creates interest in the player, but because that sustained curiosity goes so well with the evocation of a particular type of fear, a fear which is more nebulous than a game where there is a jumpscare or you are being chased by a monster, but which lingers because it is intriguing as it is scary.

Alex: Lovecraft has a pretty clear influence on your games, but you’ve also drawn from more obscure sources, like the eerie 1993 game Cosmology of Kyoto. What other works and ideas do you consider to be major influences, and how do you try to incorporate them into your work?

Yames: I played the game Inside a while ago and I really enjoyed my time with it. It’s not a particularly long game, but I finished it in one sitting as I was so enraptured by its atmosphere and its commitment to not explaining itself in a way that dispels wonder. Although, I think the things that really move me to create and want to be creative are not things that I myself would have liked to make but things which make me perceive something new, which give some new dimension to a medium I might be tired of. The book Steps by Jerzy Kosiński really made me fall in love with reading and writing again because it is so very effective at what it does, its a collection of mostly disconnected stories about sex and hatred and humiliation but they are written in this very clinical, creepy and hyper-efficient way that really transforms a lot of the transgressive stuff into something very affecting, something beyond just cruelty or shock or darkness. While its not the exact same thing Kosiński did so well, there is a sort of spirit of severity I try to evoke in what makes up my games. A textbox that contains dialogue from a character usually is big enough to contain one or two brief sentences. In that moment, all you have is that text hanging in the air, unsupported by anything else.

In terms of visuals, A lot of the composition of my stuff is some sort of figure standing against a black field or background. Again, severity, starkness. Usually the figure is looking right at you, the player. The figure, the text. The effect is immediate.

Alex: Your short game Via Negativa involves the concept of apophatic theology, a kind of mysticism of darkness. Can you tell us about the game and the core ideas you were trying to explore there? 

Yames: Via Negativa was a game I made for a game jam that was something like the “How Are You Doing? Game Jam” and so we were tasked with making somewhat autobiographical or self-reflective games. I sort of have had daliances with a type of mystical feeling now and again in my life, a feeling of complete emptiness, but not in a way like you might feel after having your heartbroken or when dealing with grief. A lightness but also a surrender. It’s sort of like ego death but not really. The more you surrender the more you approach God, to some extent, and I wanted to make a game that was about surrendering aspects of yourself to God before God took everything. I believe I was reading Simone Weil at the time, if I was not at that time then I would be soon because she has similar ideas about being “decreated” back into God, that God exhausted itself in making the universe, and only by aligning oneself with this idea can we ever come to know God, and even then, we cannot really know God, because knowing is lost in the decreation.

On itch.io Via Negativa is listed as “A Religious Comedy/Horror Game”. I don’t know if I can ever present the severity as being completely serious to myself, because while there is something there that is serious, the complete straightfacedness of it maybe demands some sort of alternate reading. I think the line between comedy and horror is very thin, I think, and I am definitely not the first one to make that observation, but the sort of thing that stands outside of your expectations and experience when seen in the light of day might be funny, when seen at night, it might be scary. Discover My Body started out as a joke I made to a friend about a game where you traverse the body of a naked old man with your eyes. But of course my games are often weighted towards horror through various decisions I make, like the music, the graphics.

Alex: I was a pretty big fan of your short point-and-click game Lips Like Vellum, which involved fairy doors, sacrifices to strange beings, and familial trauma. It’s not finished, though! Any plans to revisit that in the future? 

Yames: Yes, so the name of the sequel/successor to Lips Like Velum is Velum Children, and I am not actively working on it although I have definitely not forgotten about it. Lips Like Velum was one of the first things I managed to put together in the game engine I use, GameMaker, and on its own it is a fairly short point-and-click adventure game with a ittle bit of NPC-interaction in the form of monsters you encounter, but my plans for Velum Children would combine the point-and-click parts with a more robust and hopefully interesting system where you would establish relationships with the monsters, make deals with them with resources you have, come to trust them, and perhaps be betrayed by them or betray them in turn. There would also be some magic to learn from them, but the core of it would be a conversation-focused game where you speak with monsters. The idea is very much inspired by fairy tales and media inspired by fairy tales like Pan’s Labryinth, where you have children interacting with these weird and powerful beings with their own arcane intentions and aims and they might help you but they also might be leading you to your doom. I think out of all the games I have ideas for Velum Children might be the one that has the potential to be the most mechanically interesting because I feel like there are games made about conversation and trading information but they are often abstracted in such a way that is more mechanically safe but is perhaps ultimately less interesting.

Alex: Lastly, can you reveal anything about upcoming projects in general?

I have a lot in the works! Currently I have a Patreon where I release small-to-medium-sized games to my patrons, the latest of which was Growing My Grandpa! I call them Yames’ Secret Games and the goal is to release one every couple of months to have a steady drip of smaller games coming while I work on the bigger stuff. I’ve got a game called Ruins Of The Human Temple coming soon which is about post-human robots doing undersea archaeology on a strange and terrifying religious monument. I’ve also got the sequel to Discover My Body which is called Discover Our Bodies, it’s a game about speculative medical science and studying transhuman procedures performed in a near-future world that has made big advances in biotechnology.

You can follow me @stretchamstrung on Twitter and also check out yames.itch.io for my catalog of games not on Steam.