Meet the 2017 No Quarter Artists
Each week this month, we’re featuring an interview with one of the four commissioned artists along with a behind the scenes look at their No Quarter game on our Twitter.
KITTY HORRORSHOW
Kitty Horrorshow is an independent game developer whose work focuses on ambiance, architecture, horror, dread, wonder, scale, and the uncanny. She is most known for her celebrated horror game ANATOMY, but is best known as the shape a murder of crows takes as it twists its way over an empty field.
Robert Yang (No Quarter curator): Hey Kitty! What are you making for No Quarter?
Kitty Horrorshow (artist): I’m making an island where players go to transcend, which ties in loosely with some of my previous games about mystical architecture in lonesome places. Quiet, mysterious places are like my favorite thing, and the idea of creating such a place for players to wander through in a shared way is exciting for me.
What’s your process? How does it feel to work on it?
My process was slap-dash as ever, because I’m terrible at planning ahead. However, the idea of a common place that multiple players explore in solitude has remained central. I’m used to making places that are very isolated, so opening that up to subsequent visits by multiple people has been an interesting challenge. It’s meant some rethinking of features and figuring out how to thread these shared experiences together, but it’s a challenge I’ve enjoyed.
Do you have any favorite No Quarter games from the past?
Loren Schmidt’s “Beads of Orange Glass.” Loren is a creator I admire a great deal, and that game is steeped in the kind of wonder and abstract beauty that are part of what makes video games such a wonderful medium. Plus the aesthetic is just too cool.
After No Quarter, are you staying around in NYC for a bit? If so, what would you like to do / what are you looking forward to doing or seeing?
I’ve got a dog here at home that I hate to be away from, so I won’t be staying past the event. I’m hoping my night at No Quarter will give me plenty of opportunity to meet some awesome, like-minded folks and draw a bunch of glyphs all over people’s arms and faces.
Thanks for your time! I can’t wait to walk your virtual island and transcend my fragile humanity.
Kitty is currently making a mysterious first person transcendence simulator “The Garden of Us” (working title) for No Quarter. To follow her progress, you can follow her on Twitter or visit her itch.io page to see more of her work.