You are a clown. You want love. Your explosive and mysterious clown powers could end the world if you date the wrong person, or you’re not in the right mindset for dating. You must fix yourself first before you attempt to date, and you must play your cards right. So it goes in Clownbaby, an in-development narrative dating sim from award-winning Melbourne game developer, T-Dog eXtreme.
During the first showing of this game at Freeplay: Parallels, Clownbaby had an enraptured audience. In fact, as we reported at the time, it wound up stealing the show for its unique premise, its bright sense of humour, and its charming spin on the world of dating. For T-Dog eXtreme, the reception was gratifying and motivating. It’s buoyed them in their experiments with the adventure, and in their hopes for the future.
T-Dog’s interest in games begin in childhood, through “edutaining” Learning Land CDs and demo disks, and eventually, titles like Age of Mythology, Tomb Raider, and Dragon Age. Pursuing a love for games led them to a games degree, and eventually, to experiences on game jam titles, freelance projects, and at a range of studios in Australia, and beyond.
Their big breakout came with the release of 2022’s You Will (Not) Remain, a critically-acclaimed narrative adventure about surviving in a strange, horrific world. It was initially created with a team, in 48 hours, for the Women’s Game Jam 2021, before being expanded into a fully-fledged experience.
“It really came out of nowhere,” T-Dog told GamesHub. “Just a lot of people suddenly being really drawn to this game, about isolation and anxiety and feeling withdrawn within yourself, based around dealing with COVID.”
You Will (Not) Remain led into narrative and game design work at EA Firemonkeys, on Real Racing 3, and then to systems and narrative work on Tales of the Shire at Wētā Workshop. Along the way, T-Dog believes the most important lessons for their own work was the importance of community and building rich relationships.
“You can’t quantify friendship and kindness and community, right?” T-Dog said. “It’s not about how talented the people around you are, it’s more about how you lift each other up, how you can work together, and what it means to have fun in game development.”
After a contractual renewal fell through, it was the bonds built with their community that inspired T-Dog to keep creating games, even amidst hardship. While they briefly felt frustrated by the industry, in how willing management was to disperse talent, and in the idea that developers were simple commodities to be disposed of when studios “aren’t quite reaching [particular] numbers,” it was these experiences that shaped their talent, and created a network of support for the future.
Read: Ghoulish is a new Melbourne studio with a drive for defiant art
“It was all of these experiences [that led to my current project]. These little experiences, and big experiences, of feeling so sad that things weren’t gelling together as they should be. All that frustration. And then having some friends that I’d made from EA encouraging me to apply to the Emerging Gamemakers Fund … I had a batshit insane idea for a game.”
“You’re just a clown, and you go on dates.”
So, the idea for Clownbaby was born.
The birth of a Clown(baby)
Per T-Dog, the idea for Clownbaby emerged from feeling sad about the state of the games industry, the insecurity of jobs, and the commodification of developers. That’s not to mention an indulgence in sad French poetry, which thematically and aesthetic informed the direction of the game.
“With all the frustration, I just wanted to make something where it’s like, ‘I’m just going to Yes, And… this entire situation.’ Rather than getting bogged down, I’m gonna think about ‘What does it mean, you know, for planets within the solar system?’ You can date the moon. Why is this a question? That’s kind of how it happened – it was just frustration, and why live it myself? You know when you have a dream, and you’re suddenly like, ‘I can fly?’ I can do whatever I want.”
So Clownbaby began gestating as a collection of bold, colourful ideas, with the ‘Yes, And…’ principle contributing to weirder and more wonderful inclusions along the way – including the idea of dealing with explosive clown powers, combatting existentialism, and dating the moon.
Tied up with these ideas was a firm desire to revolutionise the dating genre, and to overhaul how players are able to interact with their chosen beau. Racy dating sim HuniePop was a leaping off point for T-Dog, particularly in how not to design meaningful relationships in games. Within this game, you may date a menagerie of women, with basic dialogue and click-based mechanics defining the success of your relationship and intimacy.
“There’s a really funny mechanic. If you finish a date with one of the girls, you can almost have sex with them and you need to, as quickly as possible, get as many combos as possible [by clicking] … It’s this really visceral experience of, I’m not doing anything here that is inherently sexual, but that’s what this is, really intensely. I felt really inspired, in terms of, is there not some other visceral way to communicate the stress of dating someone?”
T-Dog aspired to better represent the dating process as akin to real life, with a focus on realistic emotions, feelings, and stakes – not to mention awkwardness. In analysing the dating formulas of other games, they’d swiftly come to the conclusion that while often fun, indulgent, and silly, video games don’t always do a great job of representing romance.
Read: Aussie studio PHORIA is using XR to share immersive Indigenous stories
“They’re so icky – when you think about the way romance systems happen in video games, particularly in dating games,” T-Dog said. “I really wanted to make something that felt genuine, and like a date.”
Stardew Valley was another example of where to pivot. In this game, you “romance” characters by continuously giving them gifts, with repeating dialogue indicating their happiness and acceptance. Eventually, they become part of your character’s life, but “they’re a shell of their former selves.” Their dialogue is reduced to a small range of answers, and they have no longer have a rich inner life.
“They’re just sitting at home, not doing anything they used to. It’s really sad. It’s devastating. In terms of mechanics, that also really inspired Clownbaby.”
Forging a healthy romance
What has been most complex about the development of Clownbaby has been balancing the onus on players to actually date. While the game revolves around a clown with devastating supernatural powers, looking for love in a strange and hostile galaxy, the game is not necessarily about dating.
“How do you create something where you have the option to date, but you have to think about how you’re doing it in a world of min-max relationships?” T-Dog explained. “You want to feel in control. You want to feel like you’re going to win … We talk about escapism in games, and it’s pretty reasonable that, given the world, sometimes you just want to play something and feel a little bit more in control of it. So how do you balance all the things, while also communicating that you need to engage with this healthily, and it’s difficult.”
It’s also, as T-Dog describes, about ensuring that even beyond its romance mechanics, Clownbaby is compelling in its own right. A dating sim alone is not made engaging solely by its mechanics – players must be invested in a story with real and multi-faceted characters. It’s everything that happens around the romance that makes it so memorable.
Rule of Rose is another example T-Dog pointed to, in describing their creative process. This is not a dating sim, but rather a horror-adventure that is brought to life, and endears itself to players, through a core relationship. Specifically, having a loyal dog by a player’s side as they encounter fear. In having a companion that felt so tangible and real, with mechanics to support a realistic and involved companionship, the true horror at the heart of Rule of Rose comes to the fore.
“There’s elements of finding ways to make a player care about something other than themselves,” T-Dog said. “How do you encourage someone to engage in romance healthily? It’s like tying narrative to the romance, so you’re not necessarily progressing by advancing the romance, but by advancing the story. It’s been months of figuring out a progression system so you can also advance the narrative without engaging in a relationship.”
Part of T-Dog’s work on Clownbaby also involves gamifying emotions, and working out the most realistic, engaging, and devastating ways to depict emotional breakdown – again, in a way that advances the player’s relationship with the game’s characters, but not in a way that’s tokenistic or shallow.
Importantly, while a lot of this work is taking place in a solo environment, T-Dog also works alongside other developers within their community, at Paper House and beyond, to iterate on their brightest ideas, and to ensure that level of finesse and realism. As always, it’s community that makes the difference.
“People offer me their free time, and I try to offer them my free time back,” T-Dog said. “Having chats with developers that I’ve made friends with over the past few years, and getting their thoughts on this … it’s something I’ve been really trying to push over the last six months.”
Recently, programmer Kirk Winner has come aboard to aid work on Clownbaby, and this collaboration has pushed progress forward, and allowed for a new perspective. With such a focus on player engagement, other voices have proved essential in shaping the game into what it should be.
Next steps in clown shoes
Taking steps in overlarge clown shoes, T-Dog eXtreme is slowly chipping away at the whys and what-fors of Clownbaby, carving out a wholly unique and big idea-minded game that forges a new path forward for video game romances. It’s a project that continues to excite T-Dog every day, and has allowed them to rediscover a passion for games, for experimentation, for bold new thought.
“I think people often forget we’re in game development, right? It should be fun,” T-Dog said. “We get really bogged down by some of the shitty industry things that are happening, or even wanting to make the best thing ever, that we forget that even the process, what you’re doing, you should be having a good time.”
In gaining the support of Screen Australia, and being allowed the scope and freedom to explore their wildest ideas, T-Dog has not only spent time indulging in their creative practice recently, finding the fun of video game development once more, they’ve also been able to learn valuable leadership skills, independence, and the pure joy of iteration.
“Based on all these things I’ve learned, I can be a good leader. I can run a studio. More broadly, am I someone that can actively push this? Sometimes, you can’t do that, and that’s fine. But I’ve learned, yes I am. I really get a buzz from this.”
As an ambitious project, Clownbaby is likely still far in the distance – “Let’s say 2030, and if it happens earlier than that, how great would that be?” – but T-Dog plans to forge ahead with a clear goal.
“When I played romance games when I was younger, I would think, ‘This is how the world works.’ You click Option A, that means the person likes you, because you get a +5. So that’s how the real world should work,” T-Dog said. “If I say something that this person likes, they should like me more.”
“But that’s not how it works, and it’s really devastating to find out there’s actually a lot more nuance when you talk to someone. It can feel horrible to fail. It can feel really horrible because you don’t know what people are thinking of you. But for Clownbaby, what I want is for it to feel real, in a way where you can fuck up, and it’s okay.”
“Sometimes, you say the worst thing to a character, and the aim of it is to learn actually, you’re endearing, people still like you, because you’re kind of weird. That’s kind of like real life – sometimes you say the worst, wrong thing possible, but there’s something about you that you’re missing. Of course you’re still likeable. You’re actually quite a fun person, right? So that’s the fun.”
“You’re allowed to be an idiot. It’s okay to be a clown.”
Clownbaby is currently in development. You can follow along with progress on T-Dog eXtreme’s social channels, including Bluesky.
