The MOKKOGRAD Report: June 2025
Hi Friends!
Did you know that I released a videogame in May? As with the initial release date announcement, I totally forgot to use this newsletter as a promotional vehicle on the day of importance.
Anyway, Virtue’s Heaven is out and playable! People mostly seem to like it, which is nice to see. If by any chance you’ve already bought a copy on Steam, and enjoyed your time with the game, consider leaving a positive review! Right now it’s sitting at 5 reviews and it still needs at least 5 more to get a rating displayed on the page. No idea if this does anything for the SEO, but it sure can’t hurt.
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.
Also, if by any chance you cover videogames, or know people who do cover videogames and might be interested in covering Virtue’s Heaven, let me know! I didn’t do much press outreach before the game’s release, because I was busy with the game, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in coverage.
Gamedev-News
Aside from releasing Virtue’s Heaven, there isn’t a lot of big stuff to mention. I’m fairly happy how stable it seems to be (most of the problems I was made aware of were easy to fix and not completely catastrophic) and honestly the biggest issue for the last few weeks was to figure out what to do next.
This is the first time since 2017 where I don’t have a project lying around that I can pick up and finish. The big ones I had were GB Rober and Virtue’s Heaven and those are done.
I have a good idea of what I want to do next, which is to pivot away from action games towards more turn-based games, or JRPGs to be more precise. You may remember that I already did some conceptual work for some ideas back in December/January and I actually started to go back to those ideas last week.
Right now, I’m in the process of re-writing large parts of the battle system, because I’m not very happy how fragmented that version I made back in December ended up being. The idea is to have something where every type of action, whether or not it’s an attack, a special move, an item effect, or whatever else you might imagine, is governed by a unified system. This is mostly necessary for a specific type of interaction, but I also think that having everything in one place and following the same rules will help with expanding the scope, without getting lost in the weeds.
Most of the basic stuff is already working, right now I’m thinking about how I want to handle attacks, defense and damage calculations. You see, when I built that previous system, I hadn’t yet played Dungeon Encounters and I really like how that game has a very simple and predictable damage and defense model and yet manages to do a lot of interesting things with it.
The big problem for me right now is that I keep getting ahead of myself, trying to predict how certain systems would affect specific ideas for fights, or upgrades, when actually none of that is important. The system needs to exist and the interaction has to flow out of it, not the other way around. Let’s just ignore the fact that I build the underlying action administration structure specifically to facilitate a specific type of interaction.
Anyway, I enjoy being able to build this foundation right now, because it’s been such a long time since I last did this and I’m a much better programmer now than I was then.
Aside from JRPG game, I also managed to do playtests for my two tabletop games that I have lying around. My Dark Souls 3 Skeleton Ball For the Queen derivative is actually working well enough that I could publish it, I just need to make it look a bit nicer. My Car racing tabletop game still needs a bit more work, but the test session I did last weekend got pretty close to what I want an ideal session to feel like.
Blogpost-Shares
Prior to Virtue’s Heaven’s release I published two posts to talk a bit more about the game’s background.
https://mokkograd.net/posts/2025-05-06-The-90-Months-of-Virtues-Heaven https://mokkograd.net/posts/2025-05-13-Motion-is-Violence
Last weekend I also wrote a post about how I’m fed up with this constant pressure to keep marketing Virtue’s Heaven, when I really don’t want to do that anymore.
Interesting things I played/watched/read
I finished Banner of the Maid! I had a good time with it and actually started a New Game+ game, because I was curious to check some of the things that I missed. However, in a way New Game+ is worse, because you start the game with the entire character roster, but they are all at level 1, which means you kind of have to grind them up as you go through the story, because every now and then you end up with a mission where a specific character is required and you don’t want them to be at a low level at that point.
Horizon’s Gate
This is another game that I abandoned several hours in. Horizon’s Gate reminds me of a cross-over between a tactical RPG and Sid Meier’s Pirates!. You have a Ship that you sail around in and do stuff, but once you go on land it switched over to a top down RPG game.
It’s fine! What I liked the most was how each port you visit has their own local delicacy that you can order at a cafe and you get these short scenes where some of your party members talk about the food. It’s a nice, simple way to give the characters a bit more space to express themselves, while also giving each a bit more local flavour.
However, once I visited every port and did a bunch of exploration, I kind of lost interest with it. The game again is a bit grindy, because you need to have a fairly large crew of characters for the sea battles, that all need to be at least somewhat competent at something.
Dragon Quest 5
Now here’s a game that just doesn’t want its main protagonist to have a good time, ever. The game starts with the hero as a child who never listens to his dad. Then he gets enslaved for over a decade, escapes, gets married, gets kids, gets turned to stone for another decade and when he comes to it turns out that his Son is actually the chosen hero of destiny.
Basically every time something nice happens to the protagonist the game almost immediately turns around and does something evil, it’s actually kind of incredible.
For me, Dragon Quest always felt like the “standard” JRPG, in that from the outside it just looks like they’re very solid and… basic? But that’s not really the case. I think the stuff it tries to do narratively is pretty interesting, also considering that it originally came out in 1992.
Dragon Quest 6
I just want to say that I love this game’s introductory sequence. I’m about a third way into it, and though I do like the world and general premise of the game, I’m not sure if I can deal with how grindy its job system seems to be. You see, in order to level up a job, you need to fight a specific amount of encounters, but these encounters need roughly be around, or above your own character’s level. So it kind of discourages you from doing what you normally do in these games, which is to farm Metal Slimes until you run out of patience and then go through the game.
In general, if there’s one thing I don’t like about either of these two games, then it’s that the random encounters don’t feel very interesting, take too long and happen too often. So yeah, I don’t know if I'll keep playing it.
The Potato section
From the journal of Russet Wrinkle, Owner of the Upper Hills Potato Farm in the country of golden Hills. ??? days into what will be known as the eternal Spring, Year 492 of the Age of Hairs.
I think I remember a time where all I wanted in my life was an overabundance of Potatoes. I couldn’t get enough of them. Potatoes, Potatoes, Potatoes. Every single day. Breakfast Potatoes, Brunch Potatoes, pre-lunch Snack Potatoes. It was all so exciting, so new, to have my favourite food whenever I wanted. Now, as the land is slowly swallowed up by an ever growing forest of Potato plants. As the rain is thick with starch and everything smells of dirt, I wonder if maybe I wished for too much. They recently dragged Lamplight out of his hole, because he refused to share his last bag of apples with everyone. I’m so glad that I never dabbled in anything but Potato farming.
I wonder how the world outside is doing. There’s a thick forest of Potatoes surrounding our lands, no one is able to get in, or out. I wonder what happened to the Moon. Was this their doing? Or did they try to warn us?
Where is a Wizard when you need one?
Stats:
Destiny: 3
Potatoes: 9
Moon: 1
(Dice results: 4 - A knock at the door; 6 - +2 Potato)
Note: Technically the game ends when a stat reaches 10, but I didn’t feel like dragging this out any longer. There will be a new game next Month!
See you in July!
