Summer and a Catchup

Saturday, July 22nd, 2023

It's summer! The UK has had some odd weather this year, super hot for a few weeks and now rain. We're off to Japan for a few weeks soon though (hence the header photo) so I am (not) prepared for the dramatic increase in heat and humidity...

The last month or so has been pretty busy for me! There's been a whole bunch of personal changes, some progress on my current projects and a few new things I've started.

The main new thing I'm doing is the indie game review 'newsletter' (I call it a newsletter but idk, it's not really that, heh) Byway, which I decided for the meantime to host over at Cohost. I think my introductory post is probably the best way to understand what it is. I haven't really talked a lot about it, but it's something I wanted to try out after my own experiences with how hard it is to find support if you're making 'certain' kinds of games, namely lower budget and self-published. So I set up a Google form, put a message on social media, and a bunch of people submitted games to it (thanks so much.) I've been having a lot of fun playing and writing about them - I can't do it quickly, mainly because I'd just burn out, but I try to review one game a week unless circumstances forbid it.

I honestly don't really know how many people read the reviews and/or enjoy them, as much as I appreciate 'likes' I don't really trust them as a valuable feedback mechanism. But I'm doing this as something I've wanted to try, I hope the game authors enjoy the reviews, and I like to believe that it might help get some people to play their games. I plan to keep going until it's no longer fun, or games stop coming in. We'll see.

One thing I did decide early on; I don't really want to attach my name directly to the project. As much as it's my 'voice' reviewing the games, and I think it's important that's genuine, I don't want Byway to function as a promotional device for me. Which is why it's more of an 'open secret' that I'm the author - I don't really mind if people know, but I don't want that on the website.

For my current projects, I've mainly been working on Scared Little Ghost which hasn't been ... extremely interesting to talk about, but the main gist is that I've been working on making it cross-platform. That was an interesting challenge, but it was important to do it early on so that I'm better informed about how the design of the code will be affected by the platforms I want to target. I think I have a good idea about that now, and hopefully I can talk about it more some point in the future, we'll see!

There's been a lot of 'social media meta' style posts recently, and I think that's kinda understandable given how much upheaval has been going on recently in that space. I also have thought a lot about it, mainly because it's been 'the done thing' as indie developers to self-promote on social media, #screenshotsaturday and the like. Honestly, I'm not really sure what I want social media to be for me, if anything. If I'm not talking about my work there, then what do I want to talk about there? I think the answer is, not very much? I don't think I'm the sort of person who wants to post opinions or personal anecdotes for people to like and share, and the continual need to post and re-share my own content in order to let people see it (the downside of the time-ordered feed) is just exhausting. It feels like Byway is a good fit for it (ease of sharing) but perhaps not my own work. What does this mean? I really don't know! But I haven't posted much to any of my accounts in weeks now, and I don't really feel that inclined to do so. I do still enjoy reading other people's things though, so perhaps I will just become the eternal lurker. I don't think that's a bad thing.

I feel like this was a very self-indulgent post, which I guess fits what a journal is, hah. I am looking forward to going to Japan again, and perhaps I'll post something about what I did there when I get back? We'll see!