I've been meaning to write this particular update post for about nine months! I've been swamped with a miriad of things last spring and summer that have prevented me from engaging with the blog, but I'm finally back at a point where I no longer feel like I'm drowning. I'm making regular progress on my dissertation prospectus again, and I've regained the time, energy, and, most importantly, good vibes needed to engage in more intensive hobbies such as blogging.
Hopefully the trend continues! Here's what's relatively new from this year.
Indiepocalypse Radio Episode #48
First off, I made a second appearance on Indiepocalypse Radio back in… gosh, December of 2021! Andrew and I spent nearly two hours talking about our respective Steam libraries, queer (sub)text in my games, my lack of attachment to Mario, millennial adult fans of children’s media, “wholesome” aesthetics, regretful Twitter takes, social responsibility and online speech, Team Fortress 2, games as a service, the usage of identity labels, and things that strangers online have said about Danger Zone Friends.
It was a fun conversation! You can listen to it here! Thanks again Andrew for inviting me back.
Comments!
I’ve slowly been adding stuff to this site as I find the time. Most recently, I’ve finally added a comments section to the blog! It’s been a longstanding goal of mine towards making this blog a more functional social media replacement, and I finally implemented a commenting service I like so far.
You can comment on each post anonymously, or you can log in with your email, Google account, or Twitter account, or whatever. Doesn’t matter to me as long as everybody’s nice and doesn’t spam things up.
The Site Museum
The second addition I've made to the site this year is the Site Museum. I’d been struggling to figure out what to do with some of the less playable games I have made, as well as any other content from this site or past sites that I don’t wanna hide but don’t want listed next to the good stuff either. So you can find that stuff in the Museum!
Right now, it includes some more personal, unfinished, or really old games - specifically Darcy's Yurt Adventure, Station to Station, IWSTRWDTSDWB, Apocolypse (sic), and the Blasterman series. I may migrate some of my old writings from Sassy Echidna Software before I finally take everything off of the old site. Going forward, any content on the site that I want to retire but someone might otherwise appreciate will find its way there!
I just think a good website should have lots of pages on it. I dunno. I’m a simple-minded person.
As far as what’s going on outside of the site...
Twitter Hiatus
Given that the first tweet I'll have tweeted in months will be a link to this post, I figured I should make a statement about my use of the platform going forward.
Last June, I decided to take an abrupt hiatus from Twitter and didn’t talk much about why. I initially wasn’t sure how permanent my hiatus was going to be, but now that it’s looking like a more permanent disengagement, I figured I owed some of y’all an explanation.
Without going into specifics: being on the site was consistently making me unhappy, and I felt like I was thinking, saying, and doing stuff that felt uncharacteristic of myself. While there are a bunch of folks on the platform that I miss talking to, the site itself made me miserable. Despite my best efforts to curate my feed and exclude myself from a lot of unhealthy, toxic, or downright depressing discourse I simply do not want to be a part of, the platform made asserting sufficient control over my media consumption nearly impossible. I’m a lot happier being off of the platform and entirely dropping any moral obligation to engage in marketing my personal brand to the masses on Twitter as an indie(?) game developer.
Starting with this post, I plan on tweeting links to my blog posts and game releases as they come only for the sole reason that friends and fans are more likely to actually keep tabs via social media than through the blog’s RSS feed (which I strongly recommend as an alternative! I love using my RSS feed reader to keep up with blogs, news, and other web content!). But beyond that, I’m planning on keeping any other engagement on Twitter to a minimum.
I’m happy to talk to folks in other ways! If you wanna chat, as mentioned above, comments are now live! You can also email me (check that “about” page) or follow me on itch.
Weekend Thought Dumpster Is Not Coming Back
On a related note: while the general lack of posting on this blog has not been by design, the lack of Weekend Thought Dumpster posts has been deliberate.
My initial intention with Weekend Thought Dumpster was to write the same sort of things that I once posted to social media – jokes, insights, analysis, and personal stories – with the same frequency that I used to post them, with the difference being that the words would be on a personal website that I could control instead of a social media feed that I could not, aggregating those bite-sized musings into larger blog posts.
While some people seemed to enjoy them, and I'm grateful for that, I’m not particularly proud of the writings that I published in those early blog posts. I don’t think this is because I’m a poor writer or am lacking self-esteem – I’m not ashamed of everything I write on the internet – but rather because what I published weren’t things that I would have otherwise wanted to say or share with the world. This feeling of regret isn’t new, but it was something that I often felt after writing most of my tweets and posts to social media, which were similarly rushed, lacking nuance, and even, dare I say, occasionally cringe-inducing. That I preemptively titled the series a “Thought Dumpster” was not coincidental. It’s not speech that I otherwise would have wanted to share were it not for the external incentives provided by social media - the likes, the retweets, and so on.
If the feeling of regret wasn’t new, then what was new was simply the context within which I published my words. Outside of the context of a social media feed and the feedback systems built into it, the absurdity of the production of online speech for production’s sake became apparent. Why was I ever writing any of this? Do I really need to talk about my swearing habits and my totally unprecedented assessment of the United State's healthcare system not being perfect? Heavens, no. Maybe somebody does, but I don’t. Not me. Nope nope nope. I don't need to do that anymore. I'm free now.
I hope I don't come off as dismissive of other people's social media and discursive habits. As much as I criticize social media platforms on this blog, they are, of course, accessible and useful tools to many people! But they are less and less often becoming tools that I find useful or healthy for myself.
Jailbird Nocturne
While I haven't been blogging much, I have periodically been working on games! While I've tweeted about them, I haven't written much about them here, except in passing.
Of those projects, my top priority is Jailbird Nocturne - formerly known as Starlit Jailbird Jam (yes, this IS the second time the title's changed). It's the sequel to Danger Zone Friends, although you (hopefully) won't need to complete the original to follow the story.
It's an RPG about a crow, a devil, and a cat monster who are institutionally coerced into slaying demons in the Interzonal Void when they really shouldn't have to. In a nutshell, it's my attempt to take a lot of the ideas, aesthetics, and mechanics explored in Danger Zone Friends and build upon them into a more substantial work.
I started working on it in October of 2020. Whereas a playthrough of Danger Zone Friends typically could be completed in 2-4 hours, Jailbird Nocturne is a much larger project, with a target playtime of 8+ hours. After nearly two years (already!?) of working on it on and off in my spare time, it's almost playable from start to finish, with 6 of 7 planned chapters playable. It is admittedly a little late for me to be formally blogging about it for the first time.
I have a lot I could say about the game and the development process, but that could easily fill a separate post! Like, y'know, a proper devlog. What a concept.
On a final note, I just want to give a quick thanks to the neat folks who've posted let's play videos of Danger Zone Friends over the past few months! It blows my mind that people are still discovering and playing the game nearly four years later, and it is really nice to see new folks enjoying it.