Fleischstein is a
research
materialization in a larger process; a sketch as a method to
help me
researching my birth family's history as a history of perpetrators in the context of National Socialism and toxic masculinity, intergenerational trauma sharing, and thinking into documentary game mechanics.
🥒
The state of this sketch is unfinished, and I won't pursue any further development of this build as I encountered restrictions that are too fundamental for my ideological purposes. The object-oriented viewing mechanic, the low-poly 3D-dimensional space, and the single-player mode, to name only a few, produce a work logic contrary to what I aim to achieve. However, this sketch helped me understand the scope of my long-term research better while finding ideas like sex-positivisms as emancipatory practices and concrete as a material substance.
I produced Fleischstein financed by a Projektstipendium of the Hessische Kulturstiftung. Since the timeframe was tight, I used Unity as a game engine for the sketch – a decision based on economic pressure that contradicts my usual practice of supporting independent, open-source, and common-good-oriented tools. I see none of this in the structure of Unity: core functions are hidden and not modifiable for the average user, which prevents possible adaptions to personal desires, blocks acquiring insights on coding practices, and creates a dependency on the tool itself.
Luckily there are plenty of beautiful frameworks that support more sustainable use of game development tools. Haxepunk, for example, is a framework I used in the past, and Godot is one I am learning right now. You can find fabulous curated link-lists on game development in case you want to dive deeper.