October 7, 2024

The MOKKOGRAD Report: October 2024

Hi Friends!

September was a Month of two halves:
The first half was dominated by me being fed up with it still being unreasonably hot all the time.

The second half was then dominated by my desperate wishes for it to be unbearably hot again, because cold and rainy fall weather is so much worse on my mood.
It was also the Month where cohost shut down which turned out to throw me off much harder than I thought. Cohost was a good place where I could sort of “use social media” without it actually feeling like using social media. I made a Bluesky account recently and that place is just 2021/2022 twitter with the problem that I have to block a whole bunch of jerks again.

Anyway, the demise of cohost does force/motivate to write more blogs again and also use this newsletter a bit more extensively. So I hope something positive/productive can come out of this still.

Gamedev-News

After doing the big re-announcement of Virtue’s Heaven, I went back to working on the game itself and actually spend a lot of time in September thinking about the game’s elements on a much deeper conceptual level. In a way it really feels like I’m only now able to see and understand what this game is and what it might need, with the problem being that I might not have the time, energy and resources to get re-do huge parts of it. However, I did manage to re-design almost all major boss fights in the game and bring them into a form that I think are much more interesting and in harmony with the tools the players have.
I did similar work on the level-design front, but I probably won’t re-build large parts of the map, but instead try and polish up a few specific areas and introduce some elements to them that I think will help the game at large.
Both of these things involved a lot of me thinking about the similarities between platforming games and rhythm games, but also motorsports/racing games and racetrack design.
I have a half-finished blogpost about this that I hope to get done at some point, where I talk a bit more about this.
When I’m looking at my process with Virtue’s Heaven, it really feels like I’m building the game in reverse, since I’m now working on the major conceptual ideas, after I’ve build all the system as well as an entire playable version of the game. Either way though, I’m glad that I’m at least able to introduce some of these elements into the final thing, because it will definitely lead to something that’s more interesting that whatever I currently have.

Blogpost-Shares

I know cohost is dead, but I wrote a little bit about my level design excursion with Virtue’s Heaven and the potential function of spikes/stage hazard can play in it over there:

cohost! - "A new way to think about spikes"

The current build of Virtue's Heaven and the playtests I did over the last few Months left me with a long list of things I wanted to improve/optimize, one which being the general room/level layout (not as much the map as a whole, because that would eat too much time and erase too much progress). Basically my goal is to have more rooms that are build in such a way that it's possible to get through them with a chain of specific movement inputs, while also leaving enough space for players to get t...

(I need to find some time to get some of these posts over to my regular blog over the next few Months…)

In an effort to get more comfortable with just posting random stuff on my personal website, I wrote a short thing about the 2022 race broadcast of that year’s 24 hours of Le Mans race and how it was that specific broadcast that kind of pushed me down my still ongoing interest for Endurance sportscar racing:

https://mokkograd.net/posts/2024-09-30-What-got-me-into-watching-sportscar-races

Interesting things I played/watched/read

I bought the remake of Live A Live on Steam in September and played through it over the course of about ten days. Friends, this is most likely going to be the best time I had with a videogame this year. Live A Live is an Anthology JRPG that originally came out in the mid 90s and it’s genuinely incredible. The trick is that even though it is a JRPG, a lot of the stories don’t really play like one. One story is a future space-horror story. Another one presents itself like a fighting game, then there’s a Kung-Fu movie, a Western, you name it. There is also a JRPG in it, and it’s pretty good one I have to say.
I want to do something in that space after I’m done with Virtue’s Heaven and playing Live A Live gave me soo many good ideas about how I would approach this genre and what type of stories I could tell.

Aside from that I played a lot more Wildermyth and I’m now in the unfortunate situation where I’ve seen most of the random story vignettes that game has, which takes away a lot of what made the game fun initially.

I think that’s enough for now. Because everything is weird now, here’s where you can currently find me on the internet:

blusky account:
https://bsky.app/profile/mokkograd.bsky.social

twitter account:
https://twitter.com/mokkograd

youtube account:
https://www.youtube.com/@MOKKOGRAD

itch page:
https://mokka.itch.io/

Steam developer page:
https://store.steampowered.com/developer/mokkograd

See you in November!

Eric