The MOKKOGRAD Report: November 2025
Hi Friends!
September and October were very much a wash, as I've been put into another welfare office mandated program that once again tries to figure out why the hell I just can't get a job. The program itself is fine, the social worker I'm working with seems to be genuinely interested in working with me, instead of pushing me into something, but it is still draining and has really disrupted everything.
I'm trying to do things here and there, but the amount of time it takes me to get from "thinking about what I want to do" to "I'm doing the thing I want to do" has steadily increased.
Gamedev-News
I don't even know where I was in my last email. I've sent what currently exists of JRPG game to folks who have kindly offered themselves as playtesters (get in touch if you too want to take a look btw.) and I did also submit the project to the experimental game showcase for GDC, despite knowing that it won't be picked up. In a similar vein, I submitted Virtue's Heaven to the IGF.
In more happy news, Virtue's Heaven finally got past that silly 10 positive reviews threshold that Steam has, before it displays a rating on your game's page. Getting past that number always comes with small, temporary boost in visibility and I was lucky enough that it happened at a time where I was able to put the game on sale.
I also posted the graph of the game's pageviews on bluesky and that post is now my most succesful social media post ever. I'm not particularly happy about that, because I would much rather people look at the game itself, than a graph related to it, but that's social media for you.
Blogpost-Shares
I wrote about JRPG battle systems and more broadly about how we tend to talk about Game Design on the internet, back in early October.
Interesting things I played/watched/read
Since the last Newsletter I've kept playing through almost every non-Bioware Computer Role Playing game that I own.
I think I was in the middle of playing through Pillars of Eternity 1 when I last wrote this Newsletter, since then I finished:
Pillars of Eternity 2
Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
Tyranny (that one I actually finished for the first time)
Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader
I talked in the last Newsletter about how Obsidian games seem to like the idea of their protagonists being wounded in some way, or another and I've since broadened that idea out into a larger thematic taxonomy for CRPG games.
You can split almost all of these games into one of two categories: "Wound" games, or "Soul" Games, though often they're about both:
Baldur's Gate (1+2): Soul
Planescape Torment (from what I remember): Soul
Neverwinter Nights 2: Wound
Mask of the Betrayer: Soul + Wound
Pillars of Eternity: Mainly Soul, with a little bit of a Wound
Pillars of Eternity 2: Soul & Wound, but still more about Soul
Pathfinder Kingmaker: One major actor has a wounded Soul, but it's not the protagonist
Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous: Wound & Soul
Baldur's Gate 3 changes things up, by being a "Wound + Worm" game, which then made me wonder, if maybe this spells some kind of shift in thematic focus, away from the Soul, towards putting some kind of Worm into your game's protagonist (or having the worm BE the protagonist -people should hire me to write their games btw.).
Tyranny doesn't fall into any of these categories, though I did hope it would let me play as a Worm in a more metaphorical sense.
Rogue Trader however is kind of a Worm game. I wanted to say more about the game and how it's situated in our current political everything, but I might actually write something longer about this instead.
Anyway, apologies for not having a Cartograph session, or any kind of replacement for it. That game actually ran into a bit of a dead end and my confusion about whether or not I should continue, or pick another journaling game was another cause why last Month's Newsletter didn't happen. I'll try to do something about this for next month.
See you in December!
