This one isn't gonna have any pictures or gifs since the thing I was making was a video which you can watch on YouTube. This will be more like a blog post than most, just covering thoughts I didn't in the video.
One of my major hobbies is finding interesting people online, and trying to figure out as much out about them as I can. It might sound like cyberstalking, but I like to think of it as more... Intense e-people watching.
Occasionally, you find someone worth looking into, and even more occasionally, you find someone worth looking into that actually produces interesting things. Derevotyan is definitely among the latter group.
I had been more or less studying this guy for a good month, honestly the video was just to act as a capstone to the whole endeaver, so I could finally stop.
I am admittedly... not very versed in 4chan/image board culture. I was a summerfag many years ago, but it all ended there; I never even made a post, just lurked.
I say this because I really have no idea how popular this guy is outside of Russia. I get the impression he is decently noteworthy on Russian imageboards, and is at least known of on some English ones (I know an avid 'channer who claimed to recognize the name,)
though I have no idea to what extent. This is my way of saying I may have embarrased myself by proving myself as an outsider- not getting the jokes and references, or just embarrasing myself by acting like I discovered something already well known.
It doesn't matter in the long run, guy makes interesting games.
I first heard about him through 'his' game Miracle Calamity Homeostasis. Some loser who claimed to not have any money but did have enough free time to review every free game on Steam in a multi-hour long video
mentioned it briefly -- among the endless schlock of Earthbound inspired JRPGs and abyssmal visual novels about "the human condition." It was the only game I had any
interest in trying which I hadn't already in the entire video.
You may notice I put extra emphasis on 'him,' there. That is because Derevotyan didn't make Miracle Calamity -- at least not on his own. For starters, it is made in Renpy.
He LOATHES Renpy. He is also a character in the game, not in his normal avatar of his namesake, but as MC Godot, in many ways the man behind the mask.
From my understanding of the story, there was a woman who went by Derevotyan (tree-tyan or basically tree girl.) She was an 'attention whore' who supposedly stole some aspect of our boy's game (which I believe tbh.)
As revenge, our boy mantled Derevotyan, stealing her name for his games and her likeness as his avatar. Very petty, but also very funny. Extremely funny.
So effective was his cyber-mogging that if you look up "Derevotyan" on Google my website appears before anything relating to the original woman (though if you searched Деревотян on Yandex you would likely get different results.)
I even play into this in my video, referring to him as a woman. Fun fact: I immediately regretted deciding to do so, and it made me feel sick to my stomach every time I did! Art truly is suffering.
Anyway, the games. Я не говорю по-русский, so I couldn't actually gather much about the man himself, but the games are just fasinating. Most are made in Godot, but a few were made in C with SDL (his are better than mine, though) and like I said before, MCH was made in Renpy by some woman.
He definitely at least helped, though. There are several decidedly Derevotyan-esque 3d models, footage from his other games, and visual design which I don't think a lazy Renpy shitpost game would get without the help of someone who can actually program a little.
Several of his games feature Derevotyan the girl as a sort of God arbitor over the world, and in at least one she realizes that she is not actually the God, and is but another plaything on a cosmic scale.
If I'm being 100 percent honest, I think this is a badass idea. I think this has so much genuine narrative potential beyond shitposts. It is actual, real genre breaking postmodern art. Not just character vs author, but character vs in-universe author vs real world author.
Unfortunately, it is just used in a shitpost.
Trying to think of a good way to review some of those games were hard. A lot of them were obviously reliant on inside jokes which I had to reverse engineer from their (no doubt very corrupted) applications. Multiple people are quoted as shoving bottles up their ass.
Was it Dimasik? Nikolai? Are these even different people? Questions I don't have the answers to.
One thing I find somewhat interesting is that you appear to play as the 'bad guys' in the game Kotel Ne Gori. You play as Kotel, who is an enemy in at least one other game, and on bad terms with Derevotyan irl, are helped by Dimasik etc, though you fight against Alice.
I assume Alice is also being made fun of, and I may just be looking into what is complete absurdism too far, but the teams seem interesting. They are also all working together in Zenith, so I probably am looking for meaning where there is none.
Another fascinating aspect of these games is the usage of Samozbor. It is a thing that exists in Russian internet culture, though I couldn't find a good resource on what it is in English. I did almost ask those teenagers if they could explain it to me, but I decided not to embarrass myself any more than I already have (besides, I don't wanna look like a groomer.)
Besides, whatever Samozbor is, I think the way it is represented in the games is far from the way that it is in other mediums. There is actually a Samozbor game on Steam not made by Derevotyan. I didn't play it, but I probably should have! I would have had more to say about it than a 15 second clip I stole from a Minecraft video. I attribute its usage as a
sort of social commentary: it is being sardonically tagged onto unrelated projects to give it a heightened sense of importance in the cultural dogma, the same way foods in stores are labeled as "wholesome" nowadays.
Some of these games made me question myself. A few of them seem like they may have some meaning able to be extrapolated from them, but I dared not even try because of how many of them were blatantly meaningless (or had a very obvious direct meaning eg. Narrator sucks.) I also suffered a very high fever once, and my ability to read between the lines for this type of literary analysis has been far far worse than it used to be ever since (I may actually have brain damage.)
If I could change one thing about the video, I would just be less whiny. I definitely think its a pretty bad video (to be fair, it was my first attempt at anything like that) but I felt the need to apologize for its quality far too much. I did really hate making the video, but I feel as this is somewhat a capstone for my capstone, I should cover my final gripe with the video.
This ended up being more of a rant than any kind of breakdown. I didn't have much to say about the process of making the video. I may actually add more to this later, if I remember something that I wanted to say.