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A few months ago, I read the House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. There isn't much I could say about the book that hasn't already been said, but if you're not familiar it's basically a book about a labyrinth inside of a house. It's written as an academic text on a fictional film with several footnotes/tangents from different editors. In one of those, the narrator talks about the Minotaur. He theorizes this: the creature was not a bull-human hybrid, but he was in fact the deformed son of King Minos. Because he was ashamed of his hideous progeny, the king decided to trap him in the labyrinth, and he made up the story about his origins. I also recently watched Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio. His films is often feature monsters whose monstrosity is a metaphor for deviance. In most stories, these characters would likely turn human at the end. But in Del Toro's works, they instead embrace their otherness, and are embraced by others who appreciate them for who they are. I was thinking about these two authors' works last week, and about my game. And I was thinking: is the story of Theseus really the one I want to tell? The same Theseus who abandoned his savior Ariadne on an island and abducted Helen as a child? When I worked on A Hero's Passage two years ago, I wanted to subvert fantasy tropes by telling a story about a "hero" who fails, and has to learn to move on. In the same spirit, I would like to shift my focus here to the "villain" of the story. In this new version, you play as the Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth. The only thing you can do is eating the sacrifices (two instead of the mythical fourteen, for the sake of convenience) who appear every year. There is no escape to be found; even after death, you get immediately restored, trapped in an endless cycle of punishment for the sin of being born. I am very excited about this new direction, which I feel tells a much more interesting story. I have thus decided to rename it henceforth: The Game of the Minotaur. 

Coming up with this concept and working on it has been a welcome respite from my fucking endless unemployed limbo. There's this thing that employers have been doing recently that has been really grinding my gears lately and makes me dread looking at my email inbox. Look at this website.

I made it last year. I spent like, a month working on it. There's a bunch of random stuff you can do: you can click on the letters in the background to make them light up, you can get garbage out of the trash, and you can even put all the icons in there. I also did this thing in the Games window where you can filter through to see only the games where I did x role, or with a certain platform or team size or time-frame, to make it easier to go through the relevant parts of my portfolio. Honestly, I'm proud of it. When I made it, I thought, for sure, this is gonna impress the employers. And it did! They're always like: "Oh, I love your website" or "I had fun using it!", but then they're like "your profile isn't quite what we're looking for", or "we don't have an opening for you", or "this is the fourth time you're applying for this position", and of course "good luck with your future endeavors". And I... This kind of shit just annoys me because it has me like, what was the point of me working on all this just to impress you if you're not gonna give me the time of day? If you really like my work, why can't you give me a small opportunity to prove myself, what, just because I don't know yet how to use Maya or I don't have 5 years of experience?

Okay. Whatever. Honestly I get that this is a bit silly. Skills aren't transferable like that. Just because I can make a silly website doesn't mean I can optimize a combat system. I get it. Maybe I should apply to Web Design jobs or something instead. Try to make some more websites. I think I'm not bad at it. I don't know. I just wish I could get more acknowledgement for my efforts besides a couple nice words. And I get that nobody owes me that but I just... I;m tired. I don't wanna improve my skills anymore. I'm tired, lost and sick of it all. Fucking trapped.

EDIT: Forgot to put up the gameplay video. Here it is below. As always let me know what you think and where you'd like to see the game go next!