Local librarian, DJ, artist and game developer Nukes de Almeida Nuku-Graves is making waves in the city’s art scene by teaching others how to make video games while telling the stories they’re passionate about.
The American-born Brazilian-Ghanaian artist is hosting a free-to-attend panel at the Contemporary Arts Center this Sunday afternoon, where her students will present the video games they’ve made as part of a seven-week ‘game jam’ class every Friday. During the panel, three games will be presented for audiences to play, discuss, and enjoy.
For Nuku-Graves, who uses she/they pronouns, storytelling is a lifelong obsession. Coming from a rural Indiana town, she didn’t know many people growing up who looked like her or shared her same interests, so she spent the majority of her time creating her own fantastical universes.
“I spent all my time growing up on the Internet, writing stories I came up with in my head, because the idea of creating a story that could impact somebody else’s life was such a beautiful concept,” they said. “There have been so many books or movies where I was like ‘wow, I’m gonna hold this with me in my heart,’ and the intrigue of being able to write a story myself that people still think about is… my dream.”
In her childhood, she eventually discovered visual novels, the video game genre she’d go on to work in as an adult. As the name implies, the genre primarily involves reading text on a screen with visual and gameplay accompaniments. (Notable examples of visual novel-esque games are the wildly popular Persona and Ace Attorney franchises.)
“My parents were really strict, so we didn’t have a lot of video games at home. And so I’d get online and find—wait, you know that website GirlsGoGames? With the really shity romance games? Yeah, that was my introduction to visual novels,” they said. “I was like, ‘whoa, I can experience all these stories about people who are different than me, and I can access them for free on the web without having to download anything.’ It was really fascinating.”
Fast forward to college, and Nuku-Graves planned to be a software engineer—and “then I took one JavaScript class and realized ‘this is the worst shit I’ve ever done in my whole life.'” She transitioned to UC’s DAAP school with plans of becoming an animator, and then took “the class that changed my life.”
During her time at DAAP, she took an “Intro to Video Game Design” class, attempting to expand her horizons and take a peek behind the curtain of game development. Her final class project paired her with a group that made a game called ‘Hot Monsters,’ a dating simulator about Bigfoot and Mothman.
“The game was like 15 minutes long, I didn’t even care about Bigfoot or cryptids, that was all my groupmates. And I did the art and developed [the game] and I was like,” she said, pausing, “‘Why is this literally, like, so lit?’ I was shocked because I had played so many games like this growing up, and it was like, ‘Wait, I could do this myself?'”
Their professor, Katherine Castiello Jones, “loved the game so much” and encouraged her to pursue game development. She eventually signed up to do an independent study, where she’d have her own game to showcase by the end of the semester.
“I went home for the summer and played a ton of [games], trying to figure out what I’d do for my own,” they said. Over time, however, they became frustrated with video game storytelling in general, saying that “a lot of video games, regardless of genre, are not for black people, not for queer people, not for immigrant children. They’re for straight white guys.”
With her final project, they set out to change that and make a game that reflected the diversity in their real life. “And I was like, ‘well, what if I just did ‘Hot Monsters’ again but bigger?’ I really, really liked the design I created for the Mothman character. So what if I just made a game featuring them?”
Three months later, work on Cryptid Coffeehouse was completed. Set in an alternate-universe Cincinnati, the player spends time in a local coffee shop romancing the famous mythical creature Mothman while interacting with a wide array of colorful characters. It was developed in a Python-based programming language called Ren’Py.
Nuku-Graves posted the game on the website itch.io, which allows people to upload and distribute independent games for free, “just to have somewhere to easily host it and distribute it to my classmates.” But hours later, the game already had 1000 players. “I was like, what the hell is happening here?”
Four years later, Cryptid Coffeehouse has tens of thousands of players and still receives updates adding to the game’s story. It’s been published on Xbox and Steam, which makes her “a chunk of change every so often” as new people discover and purchase the game. (There’s even a spin-off game, titled Kurou Connect.) But what’s really impacted her life is the game’s rabid fanbase.
Fans of the game are writing fanfiction, drawing fan art, and creating new projects based on Cryptid Coffeehouse—in exactly the same way Nuku-Graves did with their favorite works of art when they were a child.
“People will tell me, ‘I’ve experienced something here that I’ve never experienced with another game, and these characters, I see myself in them and feel validated.’ And that’s what I make games for,” she said. “I wanted to feel that way while gaming [as a child], and now… I get to meet people who were just like me, in another state or even across the world, who feel seen. I was alone, but these people aren’t alone because of my game, and now I’m not alone either because I have these people, too.”
This past winter, the Contemporary Arts Center asked Nuku-Graves to headline the winter edition of their Co-LAB series, a quarterly class that is “designed to collaborate with the public, create change, alter perspectives, and think creatively.” She’s now hosting her own introductory game design class at one of the biggest art showcases in the city.
It’s a full-circle moment for her, as she’s achieved her childhood dream of creating a story that tons of people enjoy and is now inspiring that same dream for those in her class.
“I feel a sense of pride with [my students] because little Nukes, growing up in middle-of-nowhere Indiana, felt all alone,” they said. “Now, [my students] want to learn, and want to tell stories, and want to make games, and want to make a statement in their art… I’m living out my dream, and I feel like this is what I want to do forever.”