Hi Friends!

March first was way too warm only to pivot towards being way too cold. It was also the month of more kitchen appliances failing.

Gamedev-News

Virtue's Heaven was featured and might still be featured on itch.io's front page, which came as a bit of a surprise. In an effort to capitalize on the pretty significant boost in visibility I actually put the game on sale over there.

So far, while the page did get around 5000 views since last Friday, I sold a grand total of 1 copy over there.

As a comparison, during the Steam Spring sale a week prior, I sold 4 copies with around 1000 page views over the entire week.

This again shows how hard it seems to be to get people to buy something on itch, though maybe it also has something to do with the way the page is set up.

Anyways, the game is still on sale for a few days, and buying a copy also generates a free community copy. So technically you're buying two copies, one for you and one for someone who might be able to afford the game.

Virtue's Heaven by MOKKA

Available for Windows

Outside of that, I started a new round of playtesting for JRPG game, but I haven't really heard that much about what people were thinking, especially about the newer parts of the game, but that's okay. The game is a bit rude, but I did make some changes that should make general progress a bit smoother.

The big thing right now is building a pitch deck that I want to use to convince publishers that actually funding this game's development is a good idea.

Can't say that I totally enjoy the process, because I constantly have to fight through a combination of personal anxiety and the general frustrations about the entire business side of game development, but I think I'm on a good path. No idea if it provides a very convincing argument, but I think at least it will demonstrate what this game is going to be and what it currently is and that was actually a helpful exercise.

As a way to make sure that I don't forget what is fun about this project, I ended up making two new enemies for the game. Not for any specific purpose, or encounter, but as a way for me to have some fun and it is still fun to make enemies for this game.

Blogpost-Shares

Depending on how you look at things, I either wrote two blogs this Month, or one big blog that I split in two.

They both deal with the same topic, which is an attempt of mine to apply the concept of the "Deadzone" as it was described in Max Haiven's book "Revenge Capitalism" to Indiegames.

I'm quite happy how they turned out and you can read them here, if you haven't already:

A Deadzone of Living Games: Remake

Notes about the Deadzone:

Interesting things I played/watched/read

This first one is going to be a bit strange, but please bear with me.

You may, or may not know that I have the unfortunate hobby of watching sportscar racing. It started out because I needed something long and monotonous to have running in the background, but at some point I actually started to be interested in how that awful sport works and how it does manage to generate a lot of interesting drama.

Because it's a very niche field, the media landscape around it is very bad and you don't get a lot of very detailed interviews or stories that try to go deeper into the processes behind this.

However, there's a pair of brothers who are race car drivers who have a podcast and though most of it is bad, because the two are deeply ignorant of everything, they recently had the Race Director of the World Endurance Championship as their guest and that guy thankfully managed to never let those two speak.

The reason I'm sharing this, is because I actually found it interesting to listen to someone who seems to understand that creating a specific environment needs more than just an appeal to everyone's moral responsibility.

Regarding Podcasts by people who are definitely not awful:

A friend of mine has just started a podcast about the works of Georgette Heyer, who seems to be an Author of some kind. I do not know any books of hers and also have yet to listen to the first episode, but I do know that Eve is a cool person and that’s enough to link to it:

Libsyn Directory

Welcome to Making Heyer, a podcast about reading the works of Georgette Heyer in publication order with a critical lens. In this episode Devan and Eve introduce Heyer, discuss why it's worthwhile to talk about her books, and then chat about The Black Moth.   Content warnings: Misogyny, sexual violence, racism, anti-semetism, colonialism, classism

Beyond that, I recommend you look at Iro's "Tales from the Feed" post for this month, because I was about to share a bunch of links that I found there, but I think it's better you go and take a look yourself:

Tales from the Feed, 2026-3

Speaking of, Iro also recently finished a screenshot Let’s Play of “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: The 7th Stand User” that originally started back when Cohost was still around.

If you haven’t read it, or have followed and then missed that it kept going after Cohost went away, please go and take a look. It’s very detailed and I just deeply enjoyed the way the game was presented:

https://obsidianmoonshine.com/public/3-projects/let-s-play-jjba-7-su/lp-7-su-intro-post-and-table-of-contents/

See you in May!