Hi Friends!

It's official: I hate Summer. I went to Glasgow in early July to give a talk (more on that below) and they had a pleasant 20-25 degrees Celsius over there. I arrived back home on Monday the 13th at around 10 pm and it was still 30 degrees outside.

I want this to stop, please.

Gamedev-News

As I mentioned I was in Glasgow from July 10th to the 13th for the Glasgow Independent Games Festival to give a talk about "Evil Game Design". It went really well! I mean both the talk and the trip. I think this was the first time I went to any games related event where I actually knew people beforehand, and it was nice to meet some people who I have kind of known for years, but never met in person.

It's funny, before I went I decided for myself that this is probably the last time I'm going to travel to the UK, because I just don't enjoy traveling there (flying is annoying and so is entering the UK), but I might have to go back on this, because it turns out there are still a bunch of very nice people living there.

Aside from that, I'm still slowly working myself through pitching JRPG Game to publishers, but most of my time is spent on "other RPG". I'm still trying my best to stay quiet about it in public, but as a proof of its existence, take a look at this screenshot:

I also released a small Tabletop RPG for One-page RPG jam. It’s called “A Wizard with an Agenda” and it’s supposed to be a journaling/letter-writing game that you play over an entire year:

A Wizard with an Agenda by MOKKA

Blogpost-Shares

Both Blogs from this Month are related to my trip to Glasgow. 

First my initial impressions and thoughts from the trip itself:

And here's a transcript as well the slides of the talk itself. There might still be a video of it coming at some point, though I don't know when.

Interesting things I played/watched/read

I forgot to mention in June that I started playing through the "Trails in the Sky" games and I have now finished the trilogy and I had a great time with all of them.

One thing in particular that I really like about these games is how much the sequels re-use environments and enemy designs from the first game. Most of the second chapter has you traverse the same areas and towns and explore the same Dungeons, and yet it doesn't feel like that at all.

In fact, I think spending so much time in these areas and repeatedly interacting with the same NPCs establishes a much closer connection to them. These games really take their time in establishing places and character arcs and I really wish more games would do something similar.

It's also a great example of how you don't really need to make entirely new games every time you do a sequel. You can just re-use assets and re-contextualize them and still make something incredible.

I kind of want to play through the entire series now, but while looking up information on the next Arc, I learned that the PC version of those games (Trails from Zero & Trails from Azure) seemed to have some kind of AI-based texture upscaling going on and I'd rather not want to support these kinds of things. I might have to try and figure out how to get the PSP versions and play those instead.

I might also just skip those for now and start playing Trails of Cold Steel, which seem to be free of these things, because they were ported to PC earlier.

While in Glasgow I somehow managed to read through "Translation State" by Ann Leckie. It's set after the Ancillary-Series, so it's not something I would straight up recommend to anyone who hasn't read those books, but if you have, Translation State is an interesting extension on some parts of that series world and its people.

Don't ask me how I managed to read an entire book in a day, while also being at a games festival. I don't know, it just happened.

This conversation between Shigeru Miyamoto and Kenji Eno has been shared around a bunch this month, and it's an interesting thing to read.

I specifically find it interesting is Miyamoto's distinction between "well-made" and "interesting", where "well-made" games are those that mostly work as commercial products, and "interesting" are those of a more experimental nature. Obviously the implication that an "interesting" game can't be "well-made" is very strange, but I guess it just shows how much more product-oriented Miyamoto was/is in that sense.

Also given that this conversation happened in 1996 just shows how debates in videogames never really resolve.

Nathalie Lawhead was also in Glasgow and it's really nice to see how so many people who went there came away with similar thoughts. 

The groundwork for resilience – musings from The Glasgow Independent Games Festival – The Candybox Blog

I enjoyed reading this Blog by Michael Brough about his own previous work and his current perspective. I also found it interesting to read as I was working on my talk that was kind of about related issues.

I said this last Month already, but especially after the conversations I had in Glasgow, I really think we're approaching some kind of cultural upheaval within Indiegames. What shape it takes I don't know, but I hope it's going to be loud, vibrant and personal.

See you in September!