The MOKKOGRAD Report: November 2024 (Potato Edition)
Hi Friends!
October was a bit nicer than September, though I realized how much I miss cohost as a place to quickly put down some longer thoughts. Bluesky is sort of okay, but it also managed to irritate me a great deal within the first few weeks of me using it more regularly. It’s still better than twitter though.
Gamedev-News
Work on Virtue’s Heaven went on really well. I switched my approach from around and decided to gradually work myself through every area of the game, and improving things along the way. In October I managed to finish completely re-designing the first boss fight of the game, as well as its surrounding area. I also re-did the game’s equipment menu and made it much nicer to use.
I also finished three more NPC portraits! So overall progress has been pretty good, though it still feels like I’m constantly outrunning a burn-out. There is so much work that still needs doing, or that I should be doing right now, but that I can’t really get to, because then other tasks would be left unattended.
I once again wish, I had the ability to split myself into several people, or had the means to get help from others. But since I don’t have either, all I can do is manage things as best as I can. It helps that I’m pretty confident in what this game is going to be, or to be more precise: I’m not concerned about that part as much anymore.
Blogpost-Shares
Haven’t really gotten around to writing anything this month, because I’m kind of at a loss as to how to approach this blogging thing now with cohost not being around. I also want to re-do my RSS feed to make it all a bit less fiddly to use, but that would require me to sit down and spend some time with it.
Interesting things I played/watched/read
Earlier in October I had a chance to play “Meet your End” with some friends. “Meet your End” is a mod(?), expansion(?) for the Tabletop Game “Fiasco, which takes the game’s basic structure and set up, only to then twist those into a slow moving horror story.
It was a really cool experience and I really like the idea of taking an existing Tabletop game and introducing a set of focused twists to it, to change the nature of the story you’re telling.
My regular Tabletop group also started a campaign of “Nova”, which is sort of a post-apocalyptic Power Armor game. The combat is pretty simple, but honestly what I enjoyed the most so far is to explore the very fucked up community we have created. We spend the bulk of our second session not actually playing the game, but roleplaying our characters brainstorming ideas, how to get more people to visit our doomed backwater community, in order to improve its dating scene.
I also started to play a solo game of “Grandpa’s Farm” alongside it, because I noticed how much our community resembled the starting setup of a cozy farming game.
Finally, I bought the new Dragon Age game and wow is that one strange. I’m only around six hours in, but so far it feels more like someone is skipping around in a fantasy novel, than a connected story. I do however appreciate that the game lets me drop kick enemies.
The Potato section:
Speaking of Solo TTRPGs, I decided to have some fun with this newsletter and started a playthrough of Oliver Darkshire’s “Potato” (unfortunately the only way to get this game seems to be via this twitter link).
It’s very likely that it will end up with our protagonist getting eaten by Orcs or something similar, but let’s just see how it goes:
From the journal of Russet Wrinkle, Owner of the Upper Hills Potato Farm in the country of golden Hills. Early Spring, Year 492 of the Age of Hairs.
Set up the Potato patch for this year and much to my surprise, found a large number of Potatoes that I seemed to have missed during last year’s harvest. Strange, because I’m known to be very thorough when harvesting potatoes. They also don’t show any signs of damage from having been underground for the entire winter. Either way, it’s free potatoes for me and who am I to say no to that?
Went to celebrate this unexpected potato boon with a drink in the local tavern and ran into Neighbour Lamplight. He mentioned how some kind “Moon King” has supposedly razed the Elven Kingdom of Ysegr…something to the West.
He made it sound like it was some kind of big deal, but I couldn’t see why I should care about it.
“That sounds like Wizard problems to me.” I told him.
I’m just here to farm Potatoes. Potatoes are real. Elves, Wizards and Moon Kings are not.
Stats:
Destiny: 0
Potatoes: 2
Orcs: 0
See you in December!
Eric
P.S.: I probably should put some kind of reminder that you can wishlist Virtue’s Heaven on Steam into these, huh? Anyway, here’s a link to it, please wishlist it and tell your friends!
