The MOKKOGRAD Report: April 2025
Hi Friends!
March! Wow! Apologies for the slightly delayed email, but I was very busy this week and I hate April 1st, so I didn’t want to do a newsletter on that particularly cursed day.
Gamedev-News
Virtue’s Heaven is going really well! I’m also now in a state of almost constant excitement and anxiety about it, because even though I’m pretty much ahead of schedule, a part of me insists that actually I’m way behind and should be working on it all the time.
I already had a small Episode where for two solid weeks I had trouble sleeping and did the thing where I kept doing work on it until late in the evening. I’m still skirting around the edges of this and trying my best not to fall into this trap, but it’s hard to resist, when your evenings are incredibly boring.
That aside, I love how the game’s coming together now, which is a really weird feeling, considering that I pretty much hated it all for the vast majority of the time that I worked on it.
The Biggest task that is left is to get the game’s writing in order, as well as finishing the last pieces of music that it needs. Both things that require me to basically let all of my own emotional guards down, which is hard to do on command.
It also doesn’t help that I usually have these moments at times where I’m supposed to take a break, so it’s difficult to balance it all.
Blogpost-Shares
I’m reading “Society of the Spectacle” right now and I had a lot of thoughts about the role of Culture under Capitalism, because of it, that I had to write a short blogpost just to collect them somewhere:
https://mokkograd.net/posts/2025-03-30-The-Capitalist-State-Human-Culture-and-the-inevitability-of-HistoryInteresting things I read:
As I said above, I’m working myself through Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” and though it’s a bit of a struggle (as it always is with me and non-fiction books) I think it says some very interesting things about the role of culture under Capitalism and how we live in a world that wants to sell us on an illusion of constant change and progress, while actually being violently opposed to the idea of substantial, material change.
What I like about the book is how it’s structured in short, distinct sections that each contain a specific argument. It makes for a very nice, contained reading experience and it also surprised me in that I had no idea that you could write a book like that.
I also started to read The Lord of The Rings again, for the first time in 20 years? I ran out of fiction books in early March and felt like I needed something lighter to spend my evenings with.
I used to be very into Tolkien when I was a teenager, but pretty much stopped after the first movie came out. It still annoys me how much the movies have warped how I imagine the characters and locations in the book to look like, because it’s fundamentally different to what I imagined before they came out.
This Essay about videogame mechanics (or “Gameplay”) is really interesting and touches on a lot of stuff that’s been rolling around my head, but I personally have problems putting to paper:
Your connected workspace for wiki, docs & projects | Notion
A new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It's the all-in-one workspace for you and your team
The Potato section
From the journal of Russet Wrinkle, Owner of the Upper Hills Potato Farm in the country of golden Hills. Four weeks into what will be known as the eternal Spring, Year 492 of the Age of Hairs.
Completely regular day today. Pleasant temperatures and a light rain in the afternoon. Dinner was nice, the garden is in good shape. Everything was normal, aside from the fact that every time I looked outside my window, it felt like there was a cloaked figure standing right at the edge of my field of vision. I could never get a clear look of it, so maybe this is just my imagination getting way too excited.
I think I’m going to sleep among my Potatoes tonight, to ground myself.
Stats:
Destiny: 3
Potatoes: 5
Moon: 1
(Dice results: 3 - A knock at the door; 6 - +1 Destiny, +1 Moon)
See you in May!
