Meet the solo dev telling short, meaningful stories

There’s a reason we love “One Night, Hot Springs”. Its short, low-pressure experience leaves a profound and lasting impression, smoothly untangling complex issues around gender and culture in the process. It's clear there was a great deal of heart that went into its development, something you can feel in every line.

We had the chance to sit down with npckc, the solo dev behind “One Night, Hot Springs” and other heartfelt stories, to discuss the inspirations, how they approach self-expression, and the process of creating small but powerful stories that resonate with lived experience.

npckc: Hi! I’m npckc, or kc for short. I tell stories through games! I first got started in game development through jams on itch.io, and I still make a lot of games for jams. Most of the games I’ve released on Google Play were originally made for jams and then expanded on for full release.

For my games, I do the programming, story, and art parts solo, and the most challenging part about that is that I’m limited by what I myself am capable of! At the same time though, that’s one of the fun parts – the only limit is myself.

I do all the art myself, but music I usually ask my partner sdhizumi to do. I’ve made music myself before, but it’s definitely not my focus. For languages besides English and Japanese, I work with translators, who take my stories and make it so they can be read by people in languages I don’t speak, which I think is very cool.

Writing stories was always my passion, long before considering game development. I liked playing games as a kid, but I never thought of it as something that a single person could just pick up and do! But at some point, I found itch.io and all the jams there. I realized that many games are mostly just made by people like me, so I thought I might be able to make one myself too.

The inspiration for it was an experience described in a newspaper article from long ago that made me want to write a story where a trans woman could go to a hot spring and have a nice day – because I think everybody should be able to go to hot springs with friends and have a nice time.

While this may be a bit too optimistic, when I write stories, I like to envision endings and futures I myself would like to live in – so that’s what I was going for with One Night, Hot Springs.

I moved from Hong Kong to Canada with my family when I was very young, and then I moved to Japan after graduating from university. The decision to settle in Japan wasn’t made actively as such, but something that happened after I ended up finding my family here too.

It might be a bit greedy of me to say, but I think of all these places as my home, and I’m grateful to have family in so many places in the world. When the wave of humidity blasts me after leaving the airport in Hong Kong, that’s home. When I sit with my family around the dining table in Canada, that’s home. When I unlock my front door in Japan, that’s home.

I think since I was part of a visible diaspora while in Canada, and now part of a harder-to-see diaspora in Japan, I have a tendency to write stories about people who are also “other-ed” in various ways. Some are easier to see than not.

Even if I don’t plan on doing so actively, I think so much of that is part of my lived experience that it just comes out when I write. It would feel weird for me to not have stories about being “other-ed” and struggling with a sense of belonging because I’ve never found one physical place where I felt like I fully belonged.