Weekly Blog 8/5/23

Hey all, going to keep this blog brief. Between how long I was out today and how busy I am working on the "second half of Game N Chill", I think I have all the reason to. Just uploaded a new Game N Chill earlier today, and if it seems shorter than usual... well stay tuned to the Video/Stream section of the blog for more details on that.

Videos/Streams

I dropped a new Game N Chill today. Hopefully no one minds too much how much shorter it is, but I thought it would be for the best to save my thoughts on Pikmin 4 for it's own video. Considering I'm about 3 pages into a script talking about my pre-credits thoughts and still not done writing said script, I think that was the right call. I might not even have it ready for next weekend like I promised. I think this is becoming big enough to actually be an editorial proper and I should probably start treating it as such. If I get the chance, I'll even share a bit of it as an extra blog tomorrow. Probably not the whole thing, but enough to give you an idea how deep this is going to go.

As for streams as much as I wanted to stream tonight and do anything special for Golden Sun's anniversary, even if it was just more Lost Age Rando, it really wasn't a good time. Had family plans today, and as expected they took up most of the evening. Even if that wasn't the case, I was feeling a bit ill for most of the day so I probably wouldn't have bothered to set up the mic for any recording today let alone streaming. I'm tempted to do a little something tomorrow, but it might be for the best to focus on other videos, especially with how deep this script of my Pikmin 4 thoughts is getting. As long as I'm feeling better next weekend, I don't see a reason to jump back into it though, and I'll take a rain check on the anniversary of the first game to see if I can come up with either a fun stream or video idea.

Dawn of Djinn

Still working away at the text edits and encounter changes I want to make for the Kalay section of the project. (Balancing the first Djinn mimic in particular has been a much bigger hold-up than I was expecting.) That being said, I did finally record a clip of the text changes I've been working on. This one isn't any drastic and the causal player might even mistake it for the same dialogue. But I figured I share it anyways to share an example of my attempts to address a common criticism of Golden Sun, though I definitely won't be doing this for every scene in the game.

A common complaint I hear about in Golden Sun how redundant dialogue can get. I can't exactly remove dialogue boxes, but I can attempt to rewrite each dialogue box to either shorten them or replace them with more relevant information. The tour group scene seems like a good place to start because while it's a fun scene, it can drag on a bit as many of the NPCs just repeat similar things in order to convey a larger group. Might still be a bit guilty of that even, in my edits but I feel it's at least slightly better while still conveying a similar message to the original scene.

Again, this is the most basic and uninteresting of the text changes I've been working on lately, but I think I want to save the more exciting stuff as a surprise.

Mis

... I got nothing to really add, I just accidentally clicked the "add tab" button. Well, family outing was nice, considering my stomach wasn't that great going into the day and I was a mess for most of the day due to not being able to sleep, it could have gone a lot worse. It was nice to hang outside, I'm sure people were happy to see me, and I got to help make and eat some nice food. So all well that ends well.

Stay tuned for a blog tomorrow with that Pikmin 4 review preview, in fact maybe I'll just wait to share this blog until tomorrow and just update this blog with a link to that review. :/

Edit: Here's that review preview I promised. Again, not even half of the entire review but I apparently had a lot more to say about Pikmin 4 than I was expecting.

Pikmin 4 Review Sample (jackitku2b.wixsite.com)

For now, I think I'm going to get ready for bed because despite how badly I want to make up for "lost time" to get caught up on stuff, I think I really need to head to bed early with how last night went. (By the time I finish writing this it won't really be that early anyways) So sleep dreams and see you tomorrow.