January has come and gone, a new start for a new year, and also a bunch of free articles that are either retrospective, or update you on things that have been happening for a while. It’s also something like a holiday month for me, a month of preparation for the new semester and a time to refocus on important, big projects.
Like, you know, a PhD, or games.
It’s also a time when I would have, hypothetically, been heading down to Canberra, to be part of CanCaon, which after much agonising, we decided to abandon, because of panini concerns. More on that later.
What did we see in the Game Pile? I’m trying to make sure that the non-theme months get to talk about a lot of different things, rather than long trends – seems I hit that goal this time. We got a retro 80s platformer, a physical flip-and-write game, a tabletop RPG and an indie shooter game!
- Zeliard, where I got to talk about a videogame that I technically discovered as a Sierra game that was absolutely not developed by Sierra.
- Brinkwood: Blood of Tyrants, where I presented a video about the systems in Brinkwood but also, how it teaches you rituals to share in a gameplay experience.
- Silver & Gold, a delightful little small game that I played almost as soon as I got it.
- Cobalt, a runny jumpy shooty gunny that I thought was an interesting and charming game, but also a great object lesson in the scope of player engagement.
January starts us off with what I think of as some chunky Story Pile articles:
- The Unpiled of 2021, where I discuss the games I didn’t talk about in the Story Pile in 2021, and had no intention of writing about going forwards.
- Violet Evergarden, a four thousand word chonker of an article about an anime. This one started out as a video script – think you’d like to see it as a video?
- Crackerjack, a delightful classic sports movie, as extruded through a template of a country and sport nobody respects.
- Star Trek Prodigy, a show I really like, which I think makes me a bad fan of the franchise
- Are Columbo A Bastards?, which, well, I mean as you read this you have no idea what that’s about, but you’re smart and cute, I’m sure you can guess.
Which you know, that’s a movie, an anime series, a TV series, and a kid’s cartoon, so you know, that’s some interesting variety there as well, huh!
The other articles that came up this month were largely stuff I consider ‘maintenance’ – things about how to write, about the organisation of the blog, and about maintaining your mental diet to make writing better and easier. Still, there are articles I found myself revisiting for ideas, and to talk about them with people, and here they are:
- First They Must Catch Us: I look at halflings in Cobrin’Seil and decide that I want them around, because of a really cool idea inspired by a friend.
- The 2021 Magic The Gathering Mechanic Toybox: 2021 brought a truly strunning amount of Magic product,
- 3e — Challenge Ratings Are Hot Garbage: I vent about a bad system from 3rd edition, and the week I do that we see someone trying to resuscitate that system in 5e!
- 4e — Dwarfeons and Dragons: I talk about the problems I see with the Dragonborn and the Dwarf in 4e D&D, and how that’s a problem I’m going to need to confront.
- Asset Brainstorm: Kenny Sci-Fi RTS pieces: I looked at some tools for a particular type of game, and talked about using them for another, completely unrelated type of game!
We got a new t-shirt/sticker design, which combines a Simpsons referenc to Guy Icognito and Quagsire, from Pokemon, because that’s how we do shirts these days, we just think of two things and make them the same thing..
This month featured my first time getting SMS’d by the government to know that I was in the same place as someone with a confirmed COVID case. I spent the next five days looking for symptoms in me and Fox, and we got no signs, so we seem to have gotten through things okay. It’s also the month where I had to do a lot of ‘I’ll get around to it’ things on that front, like getting my medical certificate to prove my vaccination status, which involved things like negotiating with people over the phone to prove that I was the real meat human I said I was. I had to bust out my birth certificate this month – wait why was that.
Oh shit, I actually got sick this month! Yeah, I got an infection over Christmas, and that meant I had to go to a doctor and talk to them and take a course of antibiotics. That was easy to forget. Hell, that was a whole ass month ago.
There was Games Done Quick, that was fun to watch, but I forgot about it, so I didn’t schedule a speed week theme to go with it. That was a fool’s mistake on my part, I like talking about GDQ.
Also, and I say this as someone who hasn’t actually done it yet, but one idea I’ve been trying to work on is to release a game a month again. Not necessarily a full-blown whole game because production schedules are still extremely hard and weird, but in this case, instead, a monthly print and play prototype.
I don’t know if I’m going to get it done in time. But if I did, this post is going to be mentioning the prototype release of Adventure Town, a print-and-play game of competing guilds working on improving a town that adventurers pass through.