Hi Friends!

It is a new year. May it be better than the one we just had.

Gamedev-News

First of all, a reminder that Virtue's Heaven is still discounted for a few more days:

Virtue's Heaven on Steam

The world ends tomorrow, your friends are imprisoned and those responsible for both have stolen the future. The time for deliberation is over. It is time to be reckless, irresponsible and beautiful.

In JRPG-Game land, a lot has happened. I've created my idea for what the overworld exploration element of the game might look like, though it is still in a very rough and rudimentary shape. I also made a bunch of new enemies and attacks. I once again noticed how much fun I have with this particular part of the game. I'm particularly proud of the concept for the second boss fight.

December was also the first month where my decision to be very particular about the way the various attacks and moves are set up really paid off. One of the things I want to introduce with this extended version is a system that lets you create item-versions of monster attacks (or any attack that's in the game) and it was refreshing to see how easy it was to create the most basic version of it.

I then got side-tracked a bit and did a big re-work of the game's stat system. I figured it would be best to do this now, because the amount of things I would have to change is still pretty minor.

I recorded an entire video about this whole process yesterday, that you can watch here:

Blogpost-Shares

I did a lot of blogs in December!

First I once again talked about the general state of small games coverage and a very particular kind of perspective that frustrates me:

I also posted some loose thoughts about recommendation algorithms and how they established themselves as some kind of unreliable replacement for actual real human connections:

And of course I had to write about 2025 as a whole thing.

Interesting things I played/watched/read

I really enjoyed this piece about Santa Ragione's Horses and the discussions around it:

~dreamcastaway~ - I Hope You Get To Live Your Entire Life As A Human...

I thought this was going to be a review of my time with Santa Ragione's Horses, the controversial art game recently banned from Steam and the Epic Store. To some extent, this will be that but after...

This kind of connects to my wider frustrations about small games coverage, but one thing that frustrated me a lot, is how the main reason why the larger games media sphere started to care about that game was because it was treated by Valve and Epic and not because of what it was.

I find it not very nice that basically the only chance for smaller and stranger games to gain any kind of serious critical recognition is when something awful happens to their creators.

Aside from that, I got Divinity Original Sin 2, because apparently eating the entire CRPG barrel wasn't enough. That game is too big, friends and it is shocking how much Baldur's Gate 3 is just Original Sin 2, but with D&D. It has pretty much the same problems, though at least the party members are not as desperately horny as the ones in Baldur's Gate 3 were (I still don't know why Gale thought I wanted to see him naked).

I got two big books full of Walter Benjamin essays and obviously the first thing I started reading was "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".

My main problem right now is Benjamin writes in that particular style that almost every German philosopher seems to write in, which is a style I always struggled with.

I feel it's the kind of text that really benefits when you read it in a context where you can talk about it with others, but either way it already gave me a bunch of new context for things.

2025 was the year of reading books for me. I hope I can keep this going in 2026.

See you in February!