Catmilk is a digital artist and solo developer who has been building a game called Gossamer Matrix for about four years. It's a first-person shooter set inside a corporate tower in a climate-flooded future, where cities have condensed vertically, and private militaries defend shareholder value floor by floor. The premise is deliberately hyperviolent. The color palette is, improbably, pink.

What caught my attention was the texture. The game looks stitched. Woven. Like something pulled together one color at a time. Catmilk cites the Impressionists and Zdzisław Beksiński, the Polish painter behind a generation of heavy metal album covers, as visual touchstones. You can feel both.

We talked about designing for something other than fun, about how working an IT job in a university basement quietly shaped the game's level design, and about what it means to make something you're calling a "digital object" that exists as itself, optimized for nothing.

• (00:00) - Pink Corporate Violence
• (01:35) - Beach Town Origins
• (04:38) - From Painter to Games
• (08:15) - Impressionists and Metal Dreams
• (10:42) - Playtest Push and Unfun Design
• (17:04) - Building the Corporate Tower World
• (26:41) - Office Job Level Design

Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com

Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★