Hey y’all! It’s me, Heather Flowers. You know, from school? Let’s talk TABLETOP GAMES.

Specifically, Crucible of Aether! One of my favorite TTRPGs in development right now, it’s a mystic-industrial fantasy game with an extremely cool and evocative character creation/building system that continues throughout the entirety of play. It’s got its Kickstarter prelaunch page up now — give it a follow!

I’ve played several games of CoA so far (I’m running a campaign for it right now, actually) and it’s a system that churns out compelling characters with incredible grace. I recently made a war priest from a drumming-based blacksmithing religion who’s on a quest for redemption after a war tore his homeland apart. He’s learned how to use his magic smithing drum to heat metal in battle, but can he use it… to mend what was broken??

Howdy!

Steam Next Fest ended yesterday! It was a great experience, learned a lot, made a lot of connections, got lost once or twice, only threw up in a few people’s laps. Did you like this bit where I pretend like it’s a physical event? Yeah, me too. Basically it was like a normal week, except I was paralyzed against changing the game at all in case a terrifying game-breaking bug or design problem forced me to jump in with a new patch. Fortunately, this only happened twice!

The demo’s still out, by the way. I plan on leaving it up until the game’s ready, so you have plenty of time to try it out:

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

Hey y’all! I’m excited to announce that the demo for FISH FEAR ME is out now for Steam Next Fest!

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

Please check it out! (And wishlist it if you like what you see!)

— Heather

Hey y’all. Welcome to the time of emails.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Nightjars recently — Modjeska¹ is an eternal favorite album of mine. It’s about (among other things) queerness, growing up with a thing-inside-you-that-you-can’t-ever-really-name, and leaving things behind whether you want to or not. It’s melancholy in a way that fits the present moment well. I really recommend checking it out:

NightjarsModjeska

Favorite tracks: Bird in the Nighttime, Genesis, Camp Pendleton.

Hey y’all! I’m extremely excited to report that the trailer for FISH FEAR ME is now live! Check it out!

And a request: because now is the time of emails, although you can share this on social media (which I certainly wouldn’t say no to), I ask instead that you send this video to just one person who you think might find it interesting and wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. Start a conversation, y’know? It’s genuinely more valuable than posting about it.

My friend davemakes recently introduced me to the phrase “Year of the Cockroach”¹ when discussing the current status of indie games: that a bunch of the big institutions are collapsing or about to collapse or were simply never that good to begin with, and that the best way to survive the present moment is by being small and indestructible. The idea’s been stuck in my head: there’s no such thing as being too big to fail, but if you’re little and well-carapaced, maybe no amount of chaos can stop you. E3 is gone, long live a million smaller conferences. Twitter is gone, long live a million Twitter clones. Making a newsletter in response to a social media shutdown may itself be a bit of a Gregor Samsa move, but I promised myself that in according with the first rule of social media² I would never write another newsletter about writing a newsletter, so I’ll leave the topic for now. On to what I’ve been making with my prothoracic legs!

Last week, I posted a gif of a book animation I was working on. Now, let’s look at where that animation (and its twin) ended up!

Part of making a fully-fledged metaprogression roguelike is having lots of menus to store and display the player’s growth over time, and part of doing that properly is having cool animations and framing devices. Also I was in a pixel art mood — can you blame me? These turned out great.

Here’s the skinny: social media is dying and the new internet struggles to be born. Someday someone might make a site that’s worth joining again, but you probably won’t find me there on account of I’m no longer in my early 20s and completely lack the spirit to join another social media platform. I retreat with coziness and splendor to the land of email: a beautiful world of bits and bytes that’s old enough to have birthed me.

I am currently making this newsletter because Cohost is going offline, but to be perfectly honest I’ve found myself tiring of social media for a while. It’s nominally the “top of the funnel” for indie games, to borrow a marketing term, but in reality I’ve found much better luck just emailing YouTubers game keys and letting them do what they will. I’ll miss Cohost, just as I missed Twitter, just as I missed old Mastodon servers, just as I missed the halcyon days of the Spore creature browser. Remember Galactic Adventures? God that ruled.

Anyways, it's still useful and necessary to give people an easy way to keep abreast of the stuff I'm working on, and there's no sturdier way to do that than by just making a newsletter. I'm working on a website, too, but the newsletter comes first.

As thanks for joining this newsletter, check out this exclusive animation I’ve been working on for FISH FEAR ME: