The MOKKOGRAD Report: February 2025
Hi Friends!
There were things that became painfully obvious for me this month, despite me kind of knowing them already. First, I don’t think that we can fight this current, international pivot to fascism by just trusting in parliamentary democracy. I have nothing else to offer, and I’m a certified coward, but I really don’t think that just hoping that the next election will somehow go differently is going to work. Speaking of elections, Germany has some in February and it is very likely that Germany’s next Chancellor will have the same last name as I have. This too was on the horizon since at least 2022, but I really didn’t want to confront that. You see, the guy used to be a somewhat prominent member in the German conservative party about 20 years ago, but was then shuffled away by Angela Merkel (the one good thing she ever did). After spending the next two decades working at some investment company, he’s now back and committed to kicking open the door for the fascists.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this. There’s no relation between us aside from a coincidental sharing of last names, but I still feel like I have a responsibility.
Either way, especially in times like this, it’s really important to openly and shamelessly care for the people and the world that you want to see. Solidarity, self-expression and a genuine interest in life beyond profit are currently being attacked and erased. In order to at least weather this onslaught, we have to keep caring about these things, or else it will all be swept away in favour whatever currently strikes the fancy of those that proclaim to own the world.
Gamedev-News
Virtue’s Heaven’s work continued and went through a bit of a roller-coaster earlier in January. I abadoned huge parts of the redesign I started back in September 2024 and went back to an earlier build of the game.
You see, I basically had an almost complete game already back then, but felt like I should go, re-do the entire map (even though I only wanted to touch up some areas) and all boss fights.
Well, I re-imported the new boss fights (those that were done that is), but completely abandoned the attempt to remake the entire map. I then went and actually made the final scenes for the game, added a credits sequence, changed the tutorial and within two weeks the game was done.
I then picked two dates, one to release a new demo, as well an updated steam page, and another to release the actual game. The Demo will release on February 20th, mostly to potentially benefit from the Steam next fest that is going to happen by the end of February (Virtue’s Heaven was already part of a next fest, so I can’t officially enter it again, but I can at least try and ride in its wake). I’ll also announce the release date on that day as well.
I wanted to get rid of any uncertainty, be it about the size and shape of the game, or about how much time I still had left to keep working on it. Now I know how much time is left and that also means I know how much work I can still put into it, before there’s no turning back.
I have no idea how well the game is going to go. I wildly sway around between “this is really cool and unique” and “wow this a big mess!”, but I’m going to try my best to put as much of myself into it. With the way things are going politically in Germany and also personally, I don’t know how long it’ll be until I’ll release another game, so I want to make sure that I make the most of what I have right now.
Blogpost-Shares
Just going to share that RPG system post again. It was a January post after all:
https://mokkograd.net/posts/2025-01-01-Powered-by-AbstractionInteresting things I played/watched/read
(cw for descriptions of physical injury in the link) In the wake of another series of people talking about Kobe Bryant’s death (he died in January 2020 in a helicopter crash), I stumbled over this re-telling of the last few weeks before he tore his Achilles in 2013. There’s a part where he talks about the moments after it happened and how he tried to find a way to play through the injury and all I could think of was: “Now here’s someone who was at war with his own body and has been violently made aware of the fact that humans are material beings.”
I also finished reading “A Desolation called Peace”, the sequel(?) to A Memory called Empire and wow those were good books. I like how the second one plays with character perspectives, especially as a way to show the differences between people who grow up as a part of an empire vs. those that grew up on the outside of it.
I also read the entire Broken Earth trilogy. Speaking of “things that have my last name”, that book’s world has a Desert that with the same name. Anyway, I had a much better time with those books than I had with Dreamblood, mostly because it didn’t involve the redemption of an asshole prince. It also does some interesting things with perspectives, but more on a temporal scale (at least in the first book).
I’m currently about two thirds through “The Dispossessed” by Ursula K LeGuin and it’s a bit more dense than the books I’ve read prior to this.
The Ponder section
This Kobe Bryant piece made me think about how on a societal level, Capitalism is constantly at war with nature and like Kobe Bryant, can’t deal with the fact that there are limits that it cannot transcend. And because Capitalism is vengeful, its only possible response to this is punishment.
The next question for me then was “yeah, but what about trans people?”, because the moment you talk about bodies, limits and transcension, you are talking about moments where people are at odds with their physical bodies and desire to change them. However, one’s gender is not like a tendon. It’s a set of social expectations and images that are learned and it’s those that create the conflict. Someone re-shaping their body so that it fits their own identity is in fact a step towards harmonization, whereas violently putting oneself into a social category that doesn’t fit is the opposite.
At least that’s how I try to explain this to me, as someone who has been in conflict with various parts of their own body over most of their adult life, who is occasionally asking themselves very specific questions about gender and is too scared to definitively answer them, and who also still has internalized a lot of biology with all its reductionist tendencies.
The Potato section
From the journal of Russet Wrinkle, Owner of the Upper Hills Potato Farm in the country of golden Hills. Very Very Late Spring, Year 492 of the Age of Hairs.
Didn’t sleep well last night. Maybe eating the entire bowl of mashed potatoes wasn’t that good of an idea after all.
Had strange dreams. Tall people standing in a circle somewhere, the screams of something harsh, old and angry.
Woke up covered in sweat, turned around and stared directly at the full moon shining through my window.
Couldn’t shake the feeling that it was looking at me.
Took my things and spent the rest of the night in the basement.
Stats:
Destiny: 2
Potatoes: 3
Moon: 0
(The world got darker, reducing ‘Moon’ now costs 2 Potatoes)