Hi Friends!

It felt like January went on for at least twice as long as it did, so I'm trying my best to remember what all happened since the year turned.

Gamedev-News

Work on JRPG game continues to be a delight. I finished work on the additional dungeon, and I also created what I hope is the final version of the game's "downtime/narrative scene" system. I have to keep reminding myself that much of what I'm building now is supposed to serve as a foundation not only for this particular game, but also for future projects. So a lot of time is spent on laying down foundations and tools, but also on trying to project future use cases.

It's a very different way of working for me, as opposed to how I did things with my action games, which were mostly based on me moving way too quickly and then having to repeatedly retrace my own steps.

With all that being said, I do have to actually write some narrative again, which as exciting as it is, is also very difficult for me to do.

I also made two little tabletop(?) games this month. Both very much on a whim and I think it took me longer to built their itch-pages than it did to actually write them.

The first is called "Lesser Chess" and is basically an attempt of mine of what Chess might look like, if you strip away most of its rules:

Lesser Chess by MOKKA

It's like chess, but just not as much of it.

The second game is called "Food is best Prepared in Twilight" and it came to me, after I saw someone else on bluesky talk about a David Lynch game jam that was/is going on. 

I don't know much about David Lynch, but I am aware of the video where he cooks Quinoa, and first I just found the thought of trying to make a tabletop game based on that video very funny, and then I started to get ideas:

Food is Best Prepared in Twilight by MOKKA

Cooking Instructions

What I really like about both of these games is how little I cared about how playable they actually are. My big problem with making tabletop games is that I very often end up getting lost on rules and systems and the need to explain them all to other people.

Both of these games are just a set of instructions that others can follow, and that rely on the simple fact that when people follow a set of instructions, something will happen because of that.

At the end of the rules for "Lesser Chess" I say: "Feel free to project meaning into your actions." and though it is meant as a bit of a joke, I also think that this is a fundamental truth about playing games. We move within a space and our actions and interactions within that space create something that we might then interpret as meaning.

Obviously this goes for almost anything that involves humans, but games in a way are a ritualistic space that specifically exists for this purpose, or something.

Blogpost-Shares

I did some cool things with the attack-spreadsheet for JRPG game and decided to dedicate an entire blogpost to explaining why I think it's cool:

Interesting things I played/watched/read

This Blogpost was what set me on the path that ended up with "Lesser Chess":

games pour rien

games pour rien

In videogames land, I finished Divinity Original Sin 2 and went straight to playing Divinity Original Sin.

I think the first game overall is a bit more interesting, because it's slightly less polished, but I'm also very much done with them. I'm close to finishing Original Sin, but I don't know if I'll keep playing it. I just started to get bored with everything it does.

I also played a bit of "Resonance of Fate", which I think is a 360 era JRPG where you can customize guns (remember when customizing guns was big in videogames?). Honestly, what I find the most interesting with this game is how it deals with overworld and dungeon exploration. The entire map is covered in a hex grid that you need to unlock, and you can then "power" different structures by laying down differently coloured hex markers. Dungeons are smaller hex maps, interspersed with sequences where you have to fight several battles in a row. In some way it is strangely similar to some of the stuff I'm doing with my own JRPG project.

In Books: I've read through "The Raven Tower" by Ann Leckie and though the main narrative gimmick feels very similar to what she did in the Ancillary series, but transferred into a sort of medieval fantasy setting, it still is a pretty good gimmick. I'm also a sucker for stories where the narrative jumps around in time, only to converge towards the climax. I think it's neat.

I started reading "Eye of the Heron" by LeGuin, and I'm once again impressed not only how dense she writes, but how within these very dense descriptions of places and people, she manages to describe something so fundamentally true about the world at large. However, the story itself is a bit hard to read right now, because some of the stuff that's happening is awfully close to the things that are currently going on in the US.

The last thing I want to talk about, is also the most recent thing I picked up. Last Friday, I ended up scrolling through the Anime that's been uploaded to the Internet Archive and I saw that someone put the entirety(?) of Legend of the Galactic Heroes up there and I proceeded to spend my entire weekend watching that show.

I'm a very sporadic Anime watcher. If I hear about a show that sounds interesting, I try to seek it out, but I'm also not that keen on digging around very deeply for it.

So Legend of the Galactic Heroes had been on my list for years now, but I also didn't really know all that much about it, aside from it being in space and one faction being Germans. I also occasionally saw screenshots of characters saying vaguely profound things about politics, but didn't really give it that much mind. I watched enough Gundam to not expect a lot of these shows.

Now this might all change, but I don't think I ever watched a supposed "anti-war" Anime show that managed to do so much right for over 30 episodes.

There are some parts in the overarching story, where I'm a bit unsure about where it will all go, but I definitely wasn't prepared for a character in an Anime show to actually have something to say about the nature of violence that isn't just the most basic "man I wish people wouldn't kill each other".

Also, I tend to be very slow in picking up romantic narratives in shows, but that show definitely knows how to deploy romantic tension between the Male protagonists to drive the story forward. The Blond Space German and the Tired Capitalist Admiral are clearly yearning for each other, and considering how important both of them are for their respective factions, it is so delicious that apart from the first few episodes, they never interact with one another.

I'm afraid of the moment where they meet each other. I hope it never happens. Some romances are meant to never be resolved.

Also, I love how the show uses the German language. I always love it when non-German media uses German words and Legend of the Galactic Heroes uses so many good German words. Personally I think German culture, especially of the last 150 years has been mostly terrible to boring, but the language itself is a treasure. It is awful to use, I hate the grammar, but it has so many nice words in it. 

See you in March!