It's time to play new flash game from Gay Dreams series, which is called Pizza Delivery. The story of actions takes place after the Christmas party at home of the main character. So his fridge is practically empty but he really wants to eat right now! Then he decides to order a pizza rather then cook!

Two developers slave away in their respective home offices, working tirelessly on their indie games. The titles have a similar aesthetic (they feature hand-drawn cartoon animations) and both are defined as gay-themed.

In Melbourne, Australia, Luke Miller continually updates his sci-fi adventure gay game, My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant, in an attempt to pass the title through Steam’s Greenlight program. In Eureka, USA, Obscura is using a successfully-funded Kickstarter campaign to get her erotic dating simulator Coming Out on Top into the hands of gamers. Miller’s title is full of gay themes – “it’s a sci-fi adventure about love between two, maybe three guys,” he says – but aside from a character who likes to parade around in his underwear, there’s no nudity in My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant. On the flipside, Obscura’s Coming Out on Top is chock-full of man-on-man action – and lots of cartoon penis – for those who want “to play an adult visual novel”.

Despite their differences, the games – and their developers – are defining a new genre: the gay game. What makes a gay game?

Luke Miller didn’t necessarily set out to make a gay game, but he definitely wanted its characters to be homosexual. “I tried to make a game where everything was openly gay, from the characters to the vegetables to the aliens,” he says.

“And not just gay but unapologetically gay.” In My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant gamers are thrust into the shoes of Tycho Minogue (yes, named after the Singing Budgie). Clad only in his underwear, Tycho sets off on a point-and-click adventure to find (clothes, and) his seemingly evil ex-boyfriend. As he visits different planets, he develops relationships with several hunky men. “I grew up without many gay role models so [ Space Tyrant] was definitely in response to that, but also I thought it would make a fun game that would be unique on the market,” Miller says. “But is it a gay game?” He stops to ponder. “The aesthetics alone don’t make it gay, but I think Tycho, the main character, and his interactions with other people in the game make it gay.

Rukovodstvo po ekspluatacii mtlb mean. It’s hard to describe but as an example I think people intuitively get that the title is homosexual.” The main character isn’t just walking around in his underwear for show. “I wanted to do something dramatic and bold for an opening,” Miller says.

“Something that says ‘it’s gay, let’s have some fun with it’. It’s also a twist on the old ‘start off in a room with amnesia and no equipment’ opening that a lot of games use to introduce the setting and characters to the player. “It was one way the game design overlapped with a gay sensibility better than in straight games. Oh, you want him to start off stripped back to nothing, ready for an adventure? I can do that!” Miller says, laughing. “So those tighty-whities have a technical reason for existing as well as being mere eye candy.” “There was a bug in an earlier version of the game that meant you couldn’t unlock the underpants mode,” Miller continues, “and I got more complaints about that than any actual game-breaking bug!” Those weren’t the only complaints Miller received at the beginning of the game’s development. “Some gay men [say] that the game is too over-the-top and is making it more difficult for gay guys to be seen as normal,” Miller says.

“One fellow even suggested there shouldn’t be same-sex relationships in the first few gay games so as to ease-in community acceptance of gays.” Compared to Obscura, Miller got off easily. Obscura – a self-professed “dirty old woman who likes to write, draw and game” – is the happily married head of ObscuraSoft Games. She also doesn’t want to share that much about herself.

After all, “knowing too much about the person who writes your erotica is a boner killer,” she jokes. Well, that and her “neighbours would flip out,” she adds, laughing. According to its Kickstarter page, Coming Out on Top is a dating simulator with “suspense, humor, & erotic situations.” In the title, you play as one of four different men; the game’s hour-long demo features a university student who’s finally accepted the fact that he’s gay. You come out to yourself, your roommates, relieve some sexual frustration in your bedroom, hit up a gay bar in a nearby town and meet a mysterious stranger only to realise that stranger is also out and about on your own campus. It might be laden with sex, but Coming Out on Top could easily be a primer for coming out of the closet. Playing through the demo myself, I found the game’s writing to be spot-on to my own initial coming out experiences. After learning Coming Out on Top was written by a heterosexual woman, I admired Obscura’s talent for truly getting into the heads of her characters.