This Was March (Patreon)

On September 28, 2017, on my old account, I tweeted an idea. The idea went like this: there was a girl in the woods, and you used first person controls to take pictures of birds. It was supposed to feel like a happy-go-lucky walking sim that took a dark turn as you were murdered and followed the paths of another character, someone angry and drunk, someone who really needed to hurt somebody, to get justice for the murdered birdwatcher.

I thought it sounded cool.

I asked my friend Jess if she'd like to make it with me. She was interested. Over the next few months, we started working on some pretty cool stuff.

Here I am, posting some notes in June 28, talking about the game. Later, I changed it to "be seeing you, friendo," and at the last minute, someone on the team ended up putting it closer to the middle of the game instead of at the end. Things change during development. 

I'm not sure what to think about Paratopic. I'm proud of what we accomplished, and it was amazing to find out that we were up for both awards at the IGFs in both Excellence in Sound Design and the Nuovo categories.

Well, friendos, we won the Excellence in Sound Design category. I suspect that Paratopic, while it was doing a lot of small experimental things with first person design, still had a package that was fairly mundane compared to some of the other games that were up in Nuovo, and that's good.

So much of Paratopic is Chris, and nobody deserved that sound design award more than him. I try to surround myself with people who are more skilled than me, who can take my weird musings, like "can we get charlie brown adult voices but talking like art bell talk radio?" and turning it into something so much better than I could have imagined. Chris is a phenomenon, and he absolutely deserved the sound design award.

It's wild that the week after we shipped, I was in the hospital being told I had a congenital heart defect that was going to kill me soon if I didn't get medical intervention, and I ended up in the VIP section, two tables down from Cory Barlog, meeting all sorts of amazing new people and catching up with a bunch of old friends. GDC was exhilirating.

Now I'm working on something new.

But don't worry, I've been streaming Uncharted 2 and talking about it--I have most of those videos and will upload them when I can. I know I'm not a great speaker, but I did my best to be entertaining, and people said I had good Design Thoughts, so that's cool.

This month, I also got two articles finished, with a few more on the way. You can check out my take on Devotion and the function of horror and drama in video games here:

 https://medium.com/@DocSeuss/i-loved-devotion-until-i-didnt-or-drama-is-really-important-to-making-video-games-compelling-bc0efa424e5f 

Or you can read up on my thoughts on gun design in a shooter:

 https://medium.com/@DocSeuss/this-is-the-greatest-and-best-gun-in-the-world-92dd22023a7e

I had hoped to write more this month, but GDC was long and took a great deal out of me.

Living with disability still sucks. I'm still desperately seeking full time work, and a lot of people seemed impressed enough by Paratopic that I might have some leads. As usual, if there's a game you want me to write about, ping me here and I'll put it on the list. We've got some really cool games coming up, but some of them are gonna... well, they're gonna take a while (because they are super long, lmao).

I'm not super good at the Patreon thing. I try to give you all good content frequently. As usual, if you have any pointers, any requests, whatever, anything I can do to make this Patreon experience more compelling, let me know. I want to continue to give you content you find worth it.

I'm still trying to get my health circumstances under control, got two doctor's visits scheduled this weekend. Life is a challenge when you're disabled, but hey... at least now I've got a game under my belt, and it won an award! Super cool. Please look forward to more awesome articles coming soon to my blog on medium.

I'm going to be migrating my content over from Tumblr this month.