The MOKKOGRAD Report: September 2024 (has it been really that long? edition)
Hi Friends!
frankly I’m a bit shocked to notice how long it’s been since I last did one of these. In my head I stopped writing these in early 2024, and not in December of 2023, but what is time, really?
Anyway, technically there’s a lot to mention, but given the sheer amount of time, I’m just going to focus on the most recent things and go from there. Just know that “things have happened” in the first half of 2024 and though things haven’t really improved materially, I at least now feel much more at ease with myself and where I am, than I did prior and that’s really cool.
Gamedev-News
Virtue’s Heaven is now fully playable from start to finish! I had a bit of a breakthrough in May, when during a walk I suddenly understood what I was making and how I could use the game to tell an interesting story, while also allowing players to launch themselves into various types of robots.
I spent most of August updating the game’s Steam page and making a new Trailer to go with it, all in an effort to restart my attempts at promoting the game a bit more actively. Something I noticed when I was looking at the game’s Steam numbers was that despite me almost completely seizing any promotional activities, the amount of views the page got was almost unchanged, compared to when I was still yelling about it on twitter.
It was a weird shock to see how inefficient promoting stuff on twitter already was back in late 2022, but it was also encouraging in a way. For me it shows that there’s still a lot of space for me to improve and I’m actively looking for ways to do just that.
Anyway, if you’re interested in learning more, here are some links:
August’s Devlog video that goes into much more detail about the current state of the game.
Blogpost-Shares
I’m still working on that part, but I’m generally happy on the approach I landed on. This post is also a good example of something I probably also should’ve put up on my personal website, instead of just putting it on Cohost. Cohost is nice and all, but stuff like this is still going to end up being buried over time, whereas it would be much easier to find, if I had it on my blog as well.
I found their approach pretty lacking and felt the first hour was deeply irresponsible in how they just allowed military representatives to make unchallenged statements. I’m kind of regretting posting this, because the few negative comments I got were incredibly frustrating to read. I don’t mind people having different opinions on this stuff, especially with a popular youtube channel. My issues were mostly that folks assumed that me posting a link elsewhere is a signal that I’m open for a debate, which I’m not.
As a general rule, I’m going to try and stay away from writing about youtube videos in the future, because I don’t need to have these kinds of experiences in my life.
Interesting things I played/watched/read
I can’t find the link, but at some point last Month I saw someone on cohost who recommended playing Wildermyth on its highest campaing difficulty, but have the battle difficulty fairly low and I can say it certainly makes for a much more interesting experience.
In previous times playing the game, I kept re-loading saves because I generally don’t like when there’s too much randomness in my strategy games and lowering the battle difficulty removed that part almost entirely. Still with a much higher campaign difficulty, it makes it much harder for you to manage every threat and even though the battles aren’t as tough, the game still feels much more like you’re a group of people fighting against impossible odds.
I played through one campaign to completion that way, but the second one kind of hit a big problem in the third year and I might have to reload an earlier safe, or just have to accept it going very bad. We’ll see.
Aside from that, I’m still deep in motorsport watching hell and currently in the process of re-watching the entire 2022 Season of the World Endurance Championship.
It’s interesting to see how much that series has changed over the last two years, but it’s also weird to see footage from early 2022, where a lot of people were still wearing masks and cars that were advertising crypto currencies and NFTs. Do we need to bring back NFTs so that people start wearing masks again? This and more will be something you can read on my future substack blog, called “The Swamp of my mind.”
See you in October,
Eric
P.S.: I actually don’t think there’s a connection between nfts and Mask-wearing habits
P.P.S.: I would never start a substack