because this place has existed throughout my life, it has changed drastically with me. i’ve always struggled to find a personal “brand”, not knowing how to represent myself to the world when i don’t fully know myself either. its changed themes drastically through the years, starting as an embodiment of my depression, shifting into more bland corporate blank slates devoid of personality.

as ive gotten older and transitioned, ive been soul searching and figuring out what it means to be me. this has mainly been an offline thing for me, with the exception of my coming out post. ive had too much work at snoozy to even think of myself as an “online persona”, and the state of the internet has only pushed me away from wanting to think about it for a long time.

recently, after feeling some doom about the state of bluesky and its not very trans-friendly ownership, i did the usual and look for a new social media to call “home”. i tried mastodon for a while, and while i met a few cool people on it, it fail to really catch my attention for long.

after i put the app down, i thought a lot about what that even means. mastodon didn’t provide me with a stead amount of dopamine for me to justify using it. is that mastodon’s fault, or how i have been conditioned after years and years of social media to think thats what i need in an internet space?

im not alone, there’s a large number of people who are just kinda, sick of it all. with the rise of ai slop, we’re really seeing it come to light. more people are quitting social media daily, returning to a more physical life.

i grew up on the internet. it gave me some of my closest friends, and hell i found my partner on twitter before elon burned it to the ground. a life without it honestly sounds… scary…

that being said, i knew i was missing out on something. i mean hell, how do normal people do it?

so last year, and more recently this winter, pearl and i flew to sweden to spend some time at spelkollektivet, a gamedev co-living and working space, because while we wanted to spend more time irl, i have a company to run haha

my time at spel has honestly been some of the most refreshing time i’ve had in the gamedev space. its nice to talk to people who share my interests face to face again at this scale, the first time since college. hanging out with people, adventures to the nearby town växjö, and even having massive hytale lan parties has been some of the most refreshing time i’ve had of late. i think the main reasons people look at it and think “it’s a cult” is because the people who go always wants to go back, and imo thats because it has a real, unfiltered, no bullshit community.

i feel like i had a taste of that in college, but it was heavily diluted by a massive amount of “professionalism”. my therapist is probably so sick of me talking about college lol.

the best way i can describe the vibe of my school is to paint a picture. its march, 2019, and im off with a large group of friends to GDC. the previous weeks, i have been incredibly anxious, as both faculty and my friends have been pushing me to find parties to network at. my school has beaten into my brain that i have to give as many people as possible my business card or ill never make it in the industry, and the only way to do so is to beg someone at a big triple a company to hire me.

anyway, i did train jam, and had an absolute blast making something. i get to GDC and proceed to basically lock myself in the airbnb or awkwardly wander around the show floor. i went to like one party that i fucking hated, and i ended up taking a day off and walked around the town where we were staying and made a box of kraft mac and cheese shapes (fight me they hold the cheese better). the ENTIRE time i was getting flack from my peers for not networking enough, not putting myself out there, not getting black out drunk at parties and waking up with puke in my mouth and 5 business cards in my pocket from people i don’t even remember. i hated my school’s idea of networking, and these days, my “network” are all a bunch of cool people that i befriended that JUST SO HAPPEN to also be gamedevs.

but to get back on topic, my website was poisoned by this shit as well. when i got to college, my website was a tumblr blog. one of the FIRST things i was told is that no one would care or read my blog, and that i should convert it to be a stock portfolio. i unfortunately did, and it took YEARS for my blog to return, which regularly gets brought up to me in random conversations (i think like 5 people have mentioned that they have read my posts to me, which is insane to me). i just remember it being so demotivating deleting everything i built, and for what? the idea of landing a shitty triple A job? one with almost no job security and massive yearly layoffs?

i continued to refine my website, making it more and more professional. i asked a ton of people for advice and feedback, turning it more and more into a soul-less site rather than a personal page. one change hurt like hell too. i remember i asked my mentor at the time for advice, and they told me to take my face off my website, because i “wasn’t a looker”. my pre-transition, depressed, and self-hating self cried when i went back to the dorm that day, and i took my face off my website.

for anyone who doesn’t know my story, (what a weird post to learn about me from) shortly after college, i started my indie studio snoozy kazoo, and for the last 5 years i have been making my own games full-time with an amazing team. anyways, this website has just been, sitting here. i refined it shortly after turnip boy robs a bank to make it slightly more personal, but it still had its professionalism baked in. i used it as a platform to post my coming out story, and its just been around since.

after putting down mastodon, i started working on a new version of my website. life got in the way, so it was delayed for a little to focus on our new game rizz dungeon, but i ended up sitting down during a free weekend and finishing up a small v1.

this version is important to be, because while it isn’t the coolest, flashiest site on neocities, its more ME than my website has been in a decade. its edgy, unprofessional, and fuck, it has a picture of me AND my girlfriend (who thinks i’m a looker) front and center on the homepage. im proud to be myself, im proud of the work ive done, and im proud of who i have molded myself to be as part of my transition. i dont fucking care about “professionalism”, i just want to be ME.

as time goes on, this website will change. i will be inspired by more sites to do weirder and put more things on here. i will redesign pages, rewrite descriptions, hell maybe put some games on here as playable html things. i don’t know what the fuck ill do next on here, but i will guarantee it will be incredibly ME, and no platform, mentor, or industry peer can take that away from me

After attempting to learn Monogame for quite a while, I ended up not having a lot of motivation to create every tool myself right now. While I have a lot of flexibility at Snoozy Kazoo (I mainly focus on business and production, so I don’t work on the game directly too often), and I wanted to really set us up in the future with an open-source engine that we could port easily with, Godot’s toolset is kinda hard to resist.

While porting is going to either be a bit harder or costly, the trade-off is kinda insane. Godot has a very solid editor, one that I’m already getting very used to, being an ex-Unity nerd. I also adore the Node-based editing, and found that building components that can almost be used as Nodes themselves is a very solid and fun workflow that basically turns the engine into complicated Scratch haha.

It also helps that several Snoozy Kazoo employees have used Godot in the past, or are actively using it for their side-projects, so I can slurp up that collective knowledge which speeds up development of whatever I’m working on.

That being said, y’all are probably wondering what I’m working on if not Hobnobbers, and to that I say, subscribe to the Snoozy Kazoo Newsletter to find out haha. It’s coming sooner than you would probably think, and won’t cost you a dime.

It quickly threw my life into turmoil, as a ton of expectations started to rain down onto me from seeming nowhere. Players became obsessed with the idea of a sequel, which equated directly into the business with it being the best course of action, much to my dismay. I have never been a fan of sequels. Ever since I was a kid making dumb flash games, I’ve always felt it was better to move on and do something newer than rehash what was already said in a slightly different way. That being said, not wanting to be a stick in the mud, I pushed myself to go along with it to ultimately create Turnip Boy Robs a Bank.

This post isn’t about the quality of the game we shipped, as I am incredibly proud of what the team managed to create without me being 100% there. Nor is this post really about sequels at all, but rather the strain of taking a next step when your head is screaming for rest, and you can’t think clearly.

For context, last year I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. To combat it, I have weekly therapy, and I’m currently taking Lexapro (my knight in golden armor). While my life has drastically improved because of those, I wasn’t always benefiting from it, which includes the time shortly after Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion launched.

I remember when the physical of the first game came out, and I got the once in a lifetime chance to see my own game on a GameStop’s shelf. I walked in, saw it, almost broke out into a deep sob, and instead muffled it entirely because of the anxiety of “what if I look weak in a random GameStop I don’t care about.” Ever since then I have barely processed it, and it feels like a sharp edge in my career and life to not be able to really enjoy that feeling.

This is not to say “woe is me,” but rather set the scene. I was not mentally healthy shortly after Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion launched, and it leads to many issues.

To be honest, my heart wasn’t in Turnip Boy Robs a Bank at the start, and it only really got a small amount of it total by the end. Around the start of Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, I had pushed the team to start three separate projects, with the idea that if we did one, we can do more and appeal to our audience while allowing us to do something new. We drastically increased the studio size, but that didn’t clog the holes I had created. The core team, the people who created Turnip Boy’s wacky world, were more diluted. We spent our time tinkering on new games and worlds, only to let the Turnip Boy IP be continued by people who were strangers to our heads in that way. They’re amazing friends, but they weren’t us, which made it hard for them to write as if they were. This not only slowed development, but hurt team moral as the leads were off doing whatever they thought important.

I remember a few months into the project, Jake hit me with “If the sequel sucks, no one is going to buy the next games” which absolutely floored me. It was the perfect way to sucker punch me at that moment, which both hurt but helped me regain control. At that point, Jen and I set up a plan to inject the “Turnip Boy charm” into the sequel, jumping on and majorly editing the structure of the game, writing a boatload of the game’s dialogue, and just being infinitely more present. While I believe this was a turning point for the game, it definitely took a toll on me. The stress of having to basically “do it again” was weighing down hard, and we ended up crunching to bring that vision to life.

This all being said, I feel like this whole experience still affects me today, almost a year out from the launch of Turnip Boy Robs a Bank. Thankfully, we put our foot down and completely stopped development of the game post-launch, as we didn’t want to over-promise after the most stressful development cycle I have personally ever gone through. That being said, the decisions we made are still affecting us today, which has ultimately shaken up my life more than I wish to admit.

This finally boils down to the point of this post, to talk about game engines. I know, it’s a shift, but hear me out.

Shortly after Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion launched, Unity announced their gross policy on cost-per-installs. This policy disgusted almost Unity’s entire userbase, including me. The trust that was lost, even to this day after they completely discarded the policy, has been loud to say the least. It’s the biggest reason why Godot has had such a massive surge forwards, but I digress. After reading about this policy change, I decided to completely disregard Unity as an engine, which threw me back about four years of engine experience as Unity was the engine Becker College decided to shove down my throat. It was easy to decide what engine Turnip Boy Robs a Bank should be built in, as my great friend Carson was taking the programming reigns, and he’s an amazing GameMaker developer. Plus, on top of that, before I learned Unity, Carson and I both mainly used GameMaker for personal projects anyway, so it felt like a good choice.

Throughout Turnip Boy Robs a Bank’s development, we learned the engine HATES larger games. Even to this day on my M3 Pro Macbook, it takes GameMaker several seconds to open an Object in the game’s project files, due to the sheer number of things the engine has to keep track of. Speaking of this, later in development, GameMaker would just lose our data. I remember one late night in particular where Carson and I had to go through all our NPC Objects to fix the dialogue that had just been lost. It felt like a blindsiding from the engine we both had grown to love so dearly.

Believe it or not, this isn’t a GameMaker hate post, but these reasons speak as to why I have chosen to walk away from the engine at a professional level, despite it still being my personal engine of choice. This being said, we had just eliminated two engines from the fray, and I was becoming more desperate to find an engine to call home so I could develop in somewhat peace.

To be honest, after the Unity fiasco, I have lost a lot of faith in using an engine owned by a massive company. Now, if you are a fan of my work, you might be thinking “bruh, you just announced Hobnobbers, a multiplayer co-op mall raiding game made in UNREAL ENGINE!!!”, and to that I say fair. Hobnobbers is another example of Snoozy Kazoo using an engine because the lead programmer being most knowledgeable in it, and in this case, it’s Alexis’ engine of choice. Also, funny Fortnite engine but that’s beside the point, LOL.

I have definitely taken a more relaxed approach at Snoozy Kazoo, where I’m more of a director/overseer rather than in the code myself. While I’m now known to jump into the fray whenever I’m needed, this has definitely given me more room to eventually want to start some smaller games by myself for fun. Starting an indie studio was always my dream, but what’s the point if you can’t enjoy it? I’m now at a point where I feel like the pressure is starting to disappear slightly. While I play a much bigger role in Hobnobbers from the start compared to Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, I’m getting to the point where I can see myself working on something else as well. It’s why I have been able to take time and flesh out the studio’s website, this website, and our new Discord bot, the Mascot, which has mini-games I’m fleshing out. This all being said, I want to start a new game for myself, but it brings us straight back to the engine question…

Ok, so I ruled out Unity and GameMaker, as well as Unreal Engine since its corporate owner. Next is some type of open-source engine, and look at that! Godot is trending! Let’s check that out!

YIKES!!!

The Godot foundation has a lot of cult-like behaviors? That sucks, but that’s just one Google search, and I don’t have time to really research it. But I mean; it’s open-source, so that doesn’t matter too much right? Wow! The porting situation is fucking awful! Never mind!

And I mean, to each their own. Godot seems to have a great IDE, and a large community that cares deeply. It just doesn’t make sense for Snoozy Kazoo since people expect us to port our games, and I want to do it ourselves if possible with support from the engine’s foundation itself, rather than a third-party company. Even if that third-party company is owned by the founder of the foundation, which is a little weird but whatever.

Thankfully, there is a large community of developers developing open-source engines. At this point though, I have been considering cutting out the IDE entirely and just trying MonoGame, since it’s a powerful framework, used within Celeste and Stardew Valley. Even better, it has porting tools created by the MonoGame foundation itself for Nintendo Switch and Xbox.

At this point, I’m pretty settled on MonoGame. I think I just need to jump over the hurdle of actually learning it, which was the point of this post. By writing this, I want to encourage myself to actually learn it now that I spoke my case out to the world, and that’s hopefully what’s next for me.

I think a large reason why I wanted to write this post was to simply show that behind the scenes, something as simple as choosing what game engine you will use in the future can be still extremely difficult to decide. When development turns your life upside down, and your mental health isn’t the greatest, it can make a seemingly easy decision impossible. I’m very thankful for all the people in my life who have helped make it better, whether that be my partner, my therapist, or my family, they’ve all been a wonderful support system.

Yup… I’m trans.

I’ve been non-binary presenting on all of my social media profiles (the few that are left haha) for a long time, and Snoozy Kazoo has always been extremely LGBTQ+ friendly, so I wouldn’t be shocked if some of you have already pieced this together, but I have been transitioning MTF (male to female) for about a year!

I knew I was trans throughout Turnip Boy Robs a Bank’s development cycle, and some people might have picked up on it through some dialogue or how nonchalant we were about our trans representation haha.

I created a little article section on my website so I could tell my story if it means it might help someone, or even teach them a thing or two! Without further ado, here’s my story…

Cracking the Egg

For anyone who doesn’t know, a trans person is typically referred to as an “egg” before they realize they’re trans. When you realize you’re trans, it’s referred to as your egg “cracking”, and through transition you basically shed the eggshell.

My egg cracked in February of 2023. One night, after playing Fortnite with my friends, I went on a random tangent claiming “why would you ever play Fortnite as a male skin?”, because OBVIOUSLY playing as a female skin is just, the objective best way to play. A few of my friends were like “is there something you want to tell us?”, and then laughed off the conversation and moved on.

After I went offline, I laid in bed staring at the ceiling. I was racking my brain as to why I thought that opinion. Surely it was just because I LIKE women right?

I’ve always felt there was something off when thinking about my sexuality. I was raised as a cis white hetrosexual male, and there’s no way I could be gay, as I like women, so why did it feel… off? It’s not like I was attracted to men after all, so I couldn’t be gay, right…?

That night I thought back to all my trans and nonbinary friends. I always held them in high respect, as if they understood something deeper about themselves. I never understood why I felt this way, but I just… did? Soon I eventually came to think;

Am I trans?

As soon as I thought that, I felt a clarity I can only think of as a massive wave of relief. I felt like I finally figured out what has been plaguing me for my entire life, and with that was a massive weight off my shoulders. I felt free, and then my heart sank deeper than it ever had before.

When I was a kid, I had REALLY long hair. I was always called a girl, and I didn’t really pay it too much mind. One of my great uncles eventually commented on it, demeaning me because I was too feminine. Needless to say, that one really got under my skin, and I ended up chopping it all off that summer, and slowly trying to build myself to become more of what I thought a man was (burying my emotions, growing a patchy beard, losing weight and building very little, but some muscle). I’ve always felt out of place, especially in school (both in and before college). I felt like everyone else who knew they were, and somehow I could never come to a true understanding of myself. I was just a shell of a person who made games, a hobby I BURIED myself into (if you can’t tell, check my archive. I made so many games haha), so that was all I was, and I just trudged forwards, regardless of the spiraling degradation of my mental health.

All that time, I was trans. I just didn’t know it. I had gone all that time, suppressing myself without realizing it, not allowing myself to become the person I actually wanted to become.

When I realized that, I tried to think of signs I might have shown when I was a kid, but I was always shoved almost into a gender neutral role. All my schools had unisex uniforms, I never got to play with fashion. I ended up burying myself in my work, not allowing me to really express myself physically. I was just, a shell, or a shell that made games.

No wonder it took me so long to figure it out. The year up to this realization was focused on finally battling my mental health and figuring out the person I wanted to become.

Ever since that day, there has not been one day that has gone by where I think “nah, I was wrong”. Being trans has been something that has just come to feel completely natural. I don’t think I could imagine a life where I’m not.

Coming Out (But Offline)

As soon as you realize your trans, one of the first things that you think of is “shit wait, I have to tell people this?” and trust me, it’s not easy. Thinking about all the ways it could go wrong is a mental battle that’s sure to lead you straight into a spiral, and that’s especially not fun when it’s about acceptance of you as a human being.

I started by telling one of my close transfem friends Lexy, because I needed someone to ask if these feelings I’m having even make sense from a trans perspective. She was incredibly nice about everything, led me through asking myself where these questions were coming from, and was incredibly unbiased through the whole process, not pushing me to be trans, but myself. This definitely led me down a research rabbithole, where I found tons of memes and like-minded folk who were also in an egg state (while most of these places were on reddit and shut down because of the protests, I can recommend r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns2 as an example). This increased my confidence around the whole thing, and I started to experiment with my style.

After that, I thought it was time to tell my best friend, Jennifer Kindl about everything. I knew Jen was going to be supportive, but I didn’t realize how supportive she would end up being. I told her on a car ride to a showcase event, where we would show Turnip Boy Robs a Bank’s demo for the first time, and she was extremely excited, and wanted to help me out with numerous things.

The first of many things Jen did was help me go “girl mode” for the first time. This was going to be a way to see myself as what I would basically be transitioning into full-time, so Jen took it incredibly seriously. She taught me her entire makeup routine (which I still do today), helped me find and put on a wig (I had SUPER short hair at the time), and brought me to the bathroom to see myself for the first time.

Let’s just say we immediately both started crying, as I, for the first time in my life, saw someone I ACTUALLY wanted to be. I remember saying to Jen “Well, I HAVE to transition now, because I can’t go back after seeing this.” I spent the rest of the day gawking in every mirror Jen has in her home, as I couldn’t believe how suddenly, with the application of some makeup and a wig, everything felt completely different, new, and finally right.

Jen continued to be a massive support, along with a bunch of my other friends (Pearl, Lexy, Joe, Gavin, & Savannah to name a few!) and family, and I can’t thank them enough for all the time spent shopping for new clothes, makeup and other girl tutorials, and the incredibly supportive and caring gifts I have received from them for birthdays and holidays. I seriously cannot thank them enough for everything they have done for me, so thank you. ❤️

There definitely were a few bumps in the road when coming out though. Not everyone took it as well as I wish they could have, but that’s kinda to be expected. I definitely lost friends, and in the end it’s ok, since I would rather surround myself with people who treat me with respect, and understand that I am what I am, and they can’t change me.

Toast

Shortly after I came out, my cat Toast passed due to her lungs becoming full of liquid. We didn’t spot it quick enough, and when we brought her in, she was past saving.

I felt the need to insert a little section about her in here because she truly was a support system of mine. I used to call her the ultimate ally. When I first put on a dress, I did it in-front of her, and she didn’t bat an eye.

I know that’s maybe a little silly, but with her just always being around me, rolling around on the floor or climbing under the sheets with me, she helped get me through one of the most turbulent times I can imagine.

Thank you Toastie, rest in peace. ❤️

HRT

For anyone that doesn’t know, HRT means “Hormone Replacement Therapy”. It’s basically the main (although trans peeps who don’t do it are perfectly valid!) type of transgender treatment. It’s basically when you replace the hormone your body defaultly creates with the opposite one. In my case, that means pumping copious amounts of Estrogen into my body.

I REALLY wanted to start HRT as soon as possible. I ended up waiting quite a bit, around ten months, to start. I really wanted to make sure I was making the right decision, so I ended up talking to a gender therapist along with my regular one. My gender therapist was incredibly affirming, and after I told her my story, she pushed me to make the decision with HRT that felt right (read as, put the decision in my court).

I started HRT in November, and I haven’t looked back since. I started with pills, but the whole “dissolving them under your tongue” wasn’t working for me, so I swapped to patches.

I got my patches on as I write this, so I’m turning more girl by the minute!

Moving Out

Right around the same time I started HRT, I visited my friend Pearl Slayton in her home state, Michigan. For people who don’t know, Pearl has made game art for Snoozy Kazoo, with them playing a huge part at the end of Turnip Boy Robs a Bank.

Pearl and I met on Twitter back when the logo was a bird, and ever since she started work at Snoozy Kazoo, we’ve hung out on the side, playing games together like Fortnite and Minecraft. Turns out after two years of playing games together, we learned we had feelings for each other! Crazy! Fortnite literally got me a girlfriend!

Pearl has been one of my best friends, and a MASSIVE support for me transitioning. They have showered me with love and affection, and have truly accepted me for who I am. They continue to help me everyday by showing me new makeup techniques, cheering me on through appointments and medication drama, and just being an amazing partner and friend who is one of the more caring, kind, and thoughtful people I’ve ever met. She means the world to me, and I’m so lucky to be able to call her my girlfriend. 💖

This is all to say that we decided to move her out from Michigan all the way to Massachusetts. We ended up driving the entire way and it was a ROUGH drive haha. We ended up stopping by and saying hi to Carson at Niagara Falls though which was pretty cool!

Ever since I’ve moved in with Pearl, I have felt truly free to express myself. It’s what has given me the freedom and confidence to finally come out publicly, and continue with my transition to the fullest.

Coming Out (Online this time!)

I’m not going to lie, I have been terrified to say this for the last year and a half, but…

Hi! My name is Yukon Wainczak, owner of Snoozy Kazoo! (my name ain’t changing, it’s too cool to give up)

I’m a transfem who goes by the pronouns she/her! It’s nice to finally meet you as who I really am!

I hope you enjoy our games! 💚

The Future

Snoozy Kazoo has always been extremely queer. From the start, I wanted to build a game studio that pushes LGBTQ+ representation by normalization. I believe that queer people should exist in our media, both in main cast roles, and side roles, and everyone should feel represented. While I was figuring out myself, I clung to any representation I could. I headcanon my Fortnite skin as trans, made the Blueberry Florist unapologetically trans, and I bought a bunch of BLAHAJs.

My existence is worth celebrating, just like everyone else! With our future games, I want to celebrate more and more people, as much as I can, and represent them in a way that makes them feel respected. That is what I want.

As for me personally, I’m just going to continue my transition, but without any fear about “what the internet will think”. I am who I am, I can’t change that, but I can sure as hell embrace it. I encourage everyone to be who they truly are, and to respect each other! We all live on spaceship Earth, and we have only one life. Be yourself, and let no one tell you to do otherwise!

Afterword

I would like to thank everyone who I name-dropped in this article, but also everyone who I didn’t mention who has been supportive of me through my transition. I want to extend a massive thank-you to everyone at Snoozy Kazoo, who have been nothing but extremely supportive and caring. Thank you! 💝

P.S. Turnip Boy is now a genderfluid femboy!!! Have fun!!!