No Charge This Month! (Patreon)
Content
Hey folks!
Just a quick FYI: There won't be a charge this month, as I don't have anything ready to release. Normally about this time I'm in the last throes of editing a thing together and getting it ready to ship, but I bit off a bit more than I could chew in a single month with the latest project and it's just not ready yet even if I pulled a few all-nighters or wanted to push it out a few days. I'm looking at the nature of authorship of player characters and where the line is drawn between player expression and developer plotting in the context of modern big budget games, and it has required some actual research into the history of player characters, RPGs, the magic circle, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff... but it isn't ready yet.
I'd fill the gap with something a little bit lighter, but A) We're basically up against the end of the month and there's no time and B) I... really haven't played anything all that exciting this month? Resident Evil 2 is cool, Apex Legends is great fun, and Tetris 99 is an enjoyable if shallow good time, but the most "let's talk about this" game I've played all month was Art Sqool. Which is cool, and has some neat things to say re: assigning art a numeric score based on metrics, what it means when the thing in your head and the thing on the paper don't necessarily align, and the sense of progression practice can give to a craft. But I don't know if I could wring 10 minutes of arresting content out of it, especially as someone who has an engineering degree and doesn't have nearly enough insight into actual art school. Still it's... pretty cool, if you like Kid Pix and non-violent creative games that sometimes fail you for no reason and that's the point? Oh I also picked up Devotion, but I kinda want to save that for October.
Anyways, I'll be back next month with content proper - I promise I'll make it worth the wait! And as always, thanks for supporting the show!
- Chris