Tecgothica (styled ‘t e c g o t h i c a’) is a personal project beginning in 2016, with the unreleased conceptual ‘gothic-horror‘ game ‘LUST’ being it’s central focus. The project’s name is a portmanteau of ‘tech’ as in technology + ‘gotthikós‘ in its feminine form (‘gothica‘), quite literally (‘of-the-goths’) in early 16th – 17th century forms.

While the historical ‘goths‘ have a long varied history, it’s use here is contemporaneous with it’s middle age usages to mean ‘barbaric, brutal, rude‘ in reference to perspectives on what was deemed outsider culture and style. The same usage that led to the othering of 16th century artwork, 17th century architecture, 19th century literature, and was embraced by the gothic subculture in the 21st century. It’s use to denote the horror of the unfamiliar, an insult used to demean art that went against the norm.

But despite identifying with the modern subculture, the interest lay more in its 19th century usage: ‘Gothic Fiction‘, and tales of gothic horror. Gothic literature is full of interesting juxtapositions and non-traditional archetypes, themes, and story structures. From exploration of identity, liminality, the uncanny, psychological representations of the supernatural, body-horror, sexuality, and the ever-present Doppelganger, to its unique feminine focus, both in perspective, protagonist, authorship, and sensibilities.

Distinct from horror fiction of the time, gothic fiction focused on ‘being haunted by the past’. A psychological framework for horror, one of metaphor representing introspection and self-reflection on the monstrous parts of our own psyche – similar to how ‘Horror‘ is distinct in the gaming space from ‘Psychological Horror’.

One major theme that arises from the very forms of the Gothic genre is the exploration of the liminal experience, which often amounts to an exploration of the condition of the lost. Gothic characters, unlike fairytale heroes, are detained in the liminal stage, the victims of an incomplete or perverted passage.

A Grammar of Gothic

A large aim of the ‘t e c g o t h i c a’ project has been to explore similar frameworks from within digital spaces. A focus on the threshold and its internal and external guardians, on the passage from the mundane to the other itself, not as a path through a greater narrative, but as a transitional state of being. The transformation into ‘denizens of the limen – ghosts, monsters, demons’ to represent confrontation with the human condition.

A solo-project for the most part, ‘t e c g o t h i c a’ has had several developing works attached to it over the years, and predates the ongoing ‘Midnight’ universe by around six months, itself heavily intertwined since it’s inception due to similar and overlapping exploratory desires. While most of the projects were never released in a broad sense, many have been released in limited capacities to gauge feedback, or as temporary digital art.

A key aspect in many of the projects is also to incorporate explorations of queer themes and characters, themselves othered by society and stuck in a liminal transitionality of their own, within modern culture. A intersectional re-contextualization of the feminine gothic to incorporate existence as oppositional to the status quo, and the complex internalization of such an existence as monstrous, due to the nature of societal norms.

While most are digital, The Devil’s Bridge (2018) was a True20 TTRPG that featured the same universe as that depicted in Creatures of Sin (2019) and Specter of Lust (2020), themselves both traditional short stories in the horror-erotica genres. Mechanical genres have spanned Twine interactive, Visual Novels, Click-Adventures, Puzzle formats (like ‘Qix’), Card-games, and both third and first person Horror.

The current development focus for t e c g o t h i c a is ‘Mirrors of Midnight’, itself a part of the ongoing ‘Midnight‘ universe which to date has been the backbone of the projects ‘Daughters of Blood’, ‘Wicked Woods’, ‘Midnight Trials’, ‘Midnight Grove’, and ‘Midnight PSX’.

‘Riot‘, aka ‘RiotJayne’, aka ‘SlvtSammich’

I’m a solo-dev / mixed media artist, working in and around indie spaces – both digital and physical – since the days of high school. My first game project was ‘Last Dawn’, an unreleased RPGMaker adaptation that spanned a year of development when i was 12 years old, based on a short story by Christopher Pike in his ‘Tales of Terror’ collection (I’d still love to take another stab at that adaptation one day). I dabbled in DarkBASIC and early versions of Gamemaker and Flash, with a focus on developing my art and writing skills, before turning my eye to film in my mid teens.

I released around 6 shorts online and pursued a career in writing and directing, studying the former while landing commercial freelance work that culminated with an indie horror feature going into pre-production in 2009. The project shot for 2 weeks in 2010 before going on-hold due to inexperience, mismanagement, and budgetary issues, more importantly teaching me I didn’t want to be in a public leadership position managing dozens of people due to my social anxiety. I moved back into game-design shortly after, studying it officially and graduating with a BA in Interactive Entertainment in 2014.

Since then, I’ve drifted between several queer and horror focused online spaces and projects, developing hard skills via small studio releases, game-jams, freelance work, and personal projects. I’ve worked on dozens of small and mid-sized games, and while most have not received much in the way of mainstream attention, there is some small contentment derived from regularly having my work be discussed in academic papers on game design. It wasn’t until 2017 that I took to developing larger more focused projects with longer development times, which is when the ‘t e c g o t h i c a’ project was conceived.

During the 2021 lock-downs, I began streaming on Twitch under the ‘SlvtSammich’ handle with my partner ‘Hex_Init’, focusing on reflecting and breaking down retro/horror/indie works, while continuing work on my own projects off stream. Streaming has allowed me to stop drifting quite so much, developing roots in a community of like-minded passionate creatives, which I affectionately refer to as the ‘Goonmunity’. I’m the sort that will work creatively till death takes me, in whatever medium takes my fancy at the time, as it’s the only thing that’s ever made any sense to me.