Interview with Lily Valeen

28 Jan 2021

Get to Know Who’s Who At GLGX 2021!

In the run up to this year’s event, we are conducting a series of interviews with presenters at Great Lakes Game Expo. We hope to channel from all corners of game development to present you with the best experience possible. So please enjoy getting to know our wonderful speakers!

Who are you?

Hey there! I’m Lily Valeen, and I’m an independent game designer from Ann Arbor, Michigan. My goal is to make games that will make people cry, one way or another. I enjoy making action games that feel satisfying to play, and I really want to tell personal stories with some humanity in them.

What are you presenting at GLGX2021?

A few things! I’m putting up a demo and a trailer for Bossgame. I’m also giving a talk titled “Misanthropic Mechanics” focused on game design. And I’m also making a little contribution to a digital zine that I believe Steven is putting together.

What got you started in game development?

Honestly, whenever I finish playing a great game, I think… “I would love to make something that makes someone else feel that way!” And so I’ve always wanted to create stuff. When I was 10 or so, I filled up a notebook with a homemade tabletop RPG to play with my friends. We stole all the dice from Monopoly and stayed up late playing it. When I was a teenager I was really interested in webcomics. I tried to make my own, but didn’t have the patience for art. Then one day I found out about RPG Maker 2003 and immediately dove into it. I spent years trying to make big, epic RPGs, but of course I never finished them.

What games are you most inspired by?

Too many to remember! I know Link’s Awakening was the most awe-inspiring game I played when I was a kid. And in college, my professor had us play a small Unity game called “Sarah’s Run” by Sophie Houlden. That was kind of the moment when it hit me that a single person could create a really cool game. Nowadays I mostly get inspired by indie games, because that’s often where you see the weird twists on gameplay and also the most personal stories… stuff like Minit, or We Know The Devil.

Outer Wilds! Outer Wilds is one of those games that took a cool idea like a time loop and made it into this wonderfully unique space detective game. I love seeing stuff like that.

What has been your favorite game to work on?

It’s definitely my current project - BOSSGAME: The Final Boss is My Heart. I’ve done a bunch of game jams, and those projects are fun to work on in a burst of energy, but they’re super messy. Bossgame is such a bigger challenge to me, in a good way. I have to find clever ways to fix over the problems you can ignore in a jam game. It’s the first game where I’m really spending a lot of time writing characters and creating a mood. And personally I’m just really really proud of the controls! I’ve been playing it over and over for two years and I still have fun.

What do you think is the most important problem the game industry faces today?

Oh jeez, that’s difficult. I think the game industry has adopted a lot of horrible practices from older industries. A huge portion of the industry is very set in their ways and afraid of anything they consider a risk. I think that mentality leads to everything from crunch, to a lack of diversity in both audience and developers, to games & stories that feel flat before they’re even released. You see this all the time in AAA companies, but it’s still common in smaller developers, too. So if I had to sum it up… greed, or a fear of change.

Tune in for GLGX 2021 to hear more from Lily and our other presenters! We will be live from the 18th to the 21st of February on Twitch.