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Apartment
＊ By Lily and Zoë ＊
Lily
in February 2025 we had managed to raise enough money to try and move again, after renting a couch in a neighbors’ crowded 1-bedroom apartment since the beginning of November 2024. as we were looking more seriously at moving, i wanted to create a memento which captures the the atmosphere of that apartment- to recreate its particular flavor of bleakness.
the windows were blacked out with trashbags- the air a smog of cat piss and stale cigarettes. every surface was encrusted with a thick skin of dead cockroaches- you could not even put down your food for a moment or roaches would crawl in. every time i went in the bathroom, dozens would scurry off when i turned on the light.
the only regular source of light came from the two large flat-screen TVs which they had at max volume blaring cop shows and the kind of thrillers where people scream constantly. when we first got there it was a few days before the presidential election, and sensational campaign ads featuring the Dangers of trans people punctuated these shows.
at various points anywhwere between 2-5 other people would be crammed in there as well, all just laying around on couches and beds watching tv or scrolling their phones. the mother and daughter almost never talked except when the daughter would get drunk- the one form of interaction they had was for her to enter her moms’ room to harass her. when she wasn’t drunk, they both just laid in bed, silent and motionless for days.
there’s a lot more i want to write about this eventually, but in short, it felt like we had left the world of the living and been reborn in some incredibly specific buddhist hell- a plane populated by themes of cruelty, repetitively played out over and over, between long silences- these vacant routines of violence and boredom. in trying to capture the rhythm of the life there… o’m toooo tired eh
Zoë
Lily and I worked on this game for a while during the tail end of our time at our last place. It’s inspired by the place we were staying before that, where we were renting two couches in the living room of a cramped one-bedroom apartment.
My two main fixations with this game have been to (a) produce the deepest and most responsive simulation of a roach infestation ever in videogames and (b) to try to capture the melancholic social atmosphere there, with like, the sense of figures each living in completely different worlds but alongside each other. Between many of the people in the apartment there was a feeling of like different sea anemones brushing against each other.
Part of the work I did towards these aims is present in the game, namely the roach aspects. Right now they’re still rather rudimentary compared to my ultimate plans, but they will continuously spawn and seek out food in a kind of complicated organic way using little sensing antennae organs I gave them. They have glowing lights above their heads showing their “mindstate” for my benefit as a programmer (although maybe you can enjoy this as well).
I also created a multifractal-based conversation generator for communication between the different people in the house. I tried to give it a really wide range of possible outcomes so that it could paw at the complexity of human socialization with the shifting moods of the participants and their efforts to accomodate each other’s speaking styles and all that sort of thing. I’m really pleased with the results I got in that regard actually, the wide-ranginess regard, but I need to go to sleep so I think I’m going to demo that multifractal text generator in another post this evening or something like that.