Temporary blogpost to announce that my third game, an Adult VN and gamejam game, Moonlight Duelists is out. I'd put a post-mortem down at this point, but nothing would compare to the wonderful Design Book I wrote that is also available on itch.

If you're interested in an adult, gorey, Utena inspired toxic yuri mess, please check it out!

I was, as is my normal way, not on the hype train for Silksong. I wasn't reading updates, I wasn't Silkposting. I wasn't desperately waiting for a release date. I had no emotional stakes in its existence.

I really liked Hollow Knight, but I didn't crave more of it. It genuinely helped remind me what the weird, vibey 'genre' we clumsily call Metroidvanias are actually about. They aren't about color coded doorway and breaking blocks, but exploration. Yet the tools that could be used to create a sense of exploration became the genre in peoples minds. Hollow Knight forwent most of those tools, most of the "Quality of Life", and let players get lost. It rewarded them for getting lost, by making sure there was real, substantial content in every direction. You weren't left struggling to find the golden path, because there was, at least relative to the rest of the genre, little sequence to break.

Hollow Knight... woke me up, in a sense. The first hour or two of playing it, I assumed it wasn't actually that great. The map just seemed wrong... the flow seemed wrong... areas seemed too samey -- how am I going to avoid getting lost, if you're designing like this? Isn't your invisible hand supposed to be guiding me?

... And then I actually got lost.

I didn't particularly care for the art style(I don't get why THIS is the thing every HK inspired game chooses to copy) (Though I respected it). I didn't really dig the whole bug thing(I wasn't a bug mother yet, okay?). I didn't enjoy most of the bosses that people swore were really good. None of that mattered. Playing a game that rejected 10 years of indie metroidvania "common knowledge" revitalized my mind.

Silksong revitalized my heart.

For reasons I don't even entirely remember (just generally musing about old RTSs), I felt compelled to load up Warcraft 2 and just... click around. Then I thought "No, I should play Warcraft 1". In my mind, Warcraft 1 is exactly like Warcraft 2, just without all the ships and boats, but my mind likes to lie to me.

Instead it is some weird Game Gear ass looking game with even less options, road requirements for buildings, and... surprisingly a lot of neutral units(Oh Ogres?? I g...

I try not to argue exact language much. I try to keep my approach to language as a descriptivist. Language evolves in terrible and funny ways. Metroidvania is an awful term, but it's a term with history I will use long before I use the term Search Action(a genre name that has the same appeal as calling hotdogs Intestined Scraps). Sure, some phrases like Backtracking are too misguided for me to tolerate, but Quality-of-Life isn't like that. So called QoL changes can mean a lot of of...

There was a narrow window for me and jRPGs(I know there is some argument over this term being used to other Japanese RPGs, but as a wRPG hater I only mean this as a term of endearment). From barely being able to parse Final Fantasy 1 by the end of the NES's life, to burning out on jRPGs on Xenogears. I tried to play Final Fantasy IX after that, but by that point I was burnt out and broken.

By the time, Final Fantasy 5 was available as a part of the PSX Final Fantasy Anthology(Trul...