Earlier this year, I was watching JoJo Part 6 and had the idea of writing a game based on the wordplay of convict and conviction. It was also a nod to the common TTRPG advice to play one's character with conviction.

It started as a simplified version of Belonging Outside Belonging (BOB) system, with the rules:

Get into your trouble with your Conviction to gain a token.
Spend a token to overcome adversity with your Conviction.

It is basically how I describe BOB games to people who have not played them before.

However, as much as I love the simplicity of the two sentences, it is not enough as a game, and I still need to write the setting elements for a BOB games.

I was drawn to the butterfly motif shared between JoJo Part 6 and another of my favourite media—Life is Strange. The more I look into JoJo and Life is Strange, the more thematic similarities I find between them—the main character with superpower, the authority figure shepherding the vulnerable being the big bad, and the recurring theme of inescapable fate.

I knew I had to give the superpower a name. At first, I was going to name it CONVICTION(Power), as it is the CONVICTION that arises from CONVICTION(Belief) and CONVICTION(Crime). But then, I started looking into gender and identity, realising how one's gender is never fully one's own but a compromise between their internal self and social norms. I suppose I could have named the power PERSONA, but a popular video game franchise already does that, and I am not a fan of Carl Jung. I also drew inspiration from Avery Alder's Dream Askew, which imagines a queer utopia where genders exist beyond what is traditionally defined and established.

I wanted to do CONVICT-ION as a cheap zine. When I made Molotov College, I paid the artists and writers upfront, printed the zines on high quality paper, and priced the physical copies accordingly. However, despite the cost and effort put into it, very few people are willing to pay for a £15 zine (in which a retail store takes 50% cut). With CONVICT-ION, I am doing the layout and art by myself, hoping to sell it as a black and white zine for under £5. I started doing the sketches for my game (and have done many practise sketches in my notebook), but I got stuck after finishing one character, because I have so many ideas and I feel that I can never do them justice due to my perfectionism/executive dysfunction. For a few months, I was distracted by video game design and spent most of my time learning how to write and code interactive fictions and a simple Bitsy game. In mid-October, I decided to come back to CONVICT-ION and finish the first draft with a single scenario for Identity Jam. Despite having all the ideas in my mind and a lot of notes, it still took me a couple weeks to write them down in full (lots of ideas sound cool in my mind, but it is a lot of effort to make them coherent on paper).

My future plan for CONVICT-ION is to do at least 3 more pairs of characters (each pair being the Convicted and their GENDER). The art itself pays a huge part into the transformation of identity, as all GENDERs are going to take on the visual motifs of various larvae and nymphs, with the potential to grow into something more. I am not a proper artist, so it might take me a while to come up with something I am satisfied with and draw them the way I envision.

~W.H. Arthur