Weekly Update 1/7/23

Happy New Year. Feeling a bit off this week so despite the progress I've made throughout the week, I'm going to be keeping this one kind of short. It is worth noting that if nothing else, I'll having exciting news relating to Paper Mario Sweet Expedition in the upcoming weeks.

Videos, Stream Art

I don't think I'm going to really be worrying about Game N Chill this month. I would have recorded it last week so it would be ready for today, but last week was real busy and don't know if I'll have the time or motivation to do one later on in the month. I might knock out the recording next weekend when I have a bit more time, but I'm not going to hold myself to it as I want to keep focus on the Paper Mario side project for this month.

As for streams, we're right at the end of Dawn of Djinn, as I kind of expected. Void Island was real time consuming, and I needed at least one more recording session than I thought. That being said, Pokémon Go Community Day kind of has me depressed and drained so I don't think I'm going to be feeling up to streaming tonight.

It's fine if I don't because I going to take streaming more casually for the rest of the month anyways. I do know what the next series I want to stream is, but I know I won't be ready to jump right into it. So between that and me being sad to see Dawn of Djinn go, I won't be too hurt if I put it off one more week... I just would feel bad if anyone was looking forward to seeing that finale.

Art

That being said, I have been doing some sketching in-between time I'm in front of the screen, so I at least share some of that. I had a random itch to do a few more Golden Sun characters and some OC sketches that foreshadowed something I guess I'll talk about a bit in the Mis section.

Golden Sun/Paper Mario

No new news on Dawn of Djinn. TBH I might be silent on updates with Dawn of Djinn for a while, if not the rest of the month because I'm currently deep into a side project tying into Sweet Expedition...

...before I dive deeper into that, I guess I should point out that a new video of the Sweet Expedition WIP did go live over the week and the finale is set to go live this Tuesday. (Maybe I'll actually remember it's being premiered this time. It's just hard for me to find a good time frame during the work week.) Can't remember the last one I shared in the blog, so I'll just share the playlist to all of them.

Paper Mario Sweet Expedition WIP playthrough - YouTube

So long story short, I was messing around with maps outside of Sweet Expedition proper to take a break and playtest animations for Rush and Chai. In the process of doing that, I came up with a real fun idea to let people demo mechanics of Sweet Expedition while creating a new experience that didn't spoil the plot and maps (at least for people who didn't watch the playthrough). Kind of like the Halloween Paper Mario mod, it evolved into its own mini mod the more I messed around with it.

Looking forward to sharing more details soon. It wasn't ready quite as quickly as I thought but the progress is still coming along so fast that I wouldn't be surprised if I was ready to share it as soon as the end of the month.

I got a feeling some people may be wishing to just play Sweet Expedition itself. But I think even if that was the case people will enjoy this just as much, if not even more because I plan to feature every battle mechanic I currently have completed for Sweet Expedition in this mini mod. From the new partners to the two new badges, I featured in the Sweet Expedition playthrough, to something completely brand new that you'll get to see for the first time in this demo/mod.

If it's not flat out done next week I'll share some more details then. So in the meantime enjoy a few random clips from my playtesting.

I have to stress, none of these reflect anything that you'll actually get to see in Sweet Expedition, this is just me messing around in Paper Mario for the fun of it and getting a better idea how my new party members look and feel.

Mis

So beyond that, only other thing to really note is that I finally caved and got the new Pokémon games. I saw just enough of the plot that I thought of a way to make my own fun in it, so decided to go for it. Haven't had too much time to play it yet, only just got my first gym badge. But what I have played has been fun enough, even found a new Pokemon I've never seen that I really like. That was real exciting, I thought I've spoiled myself on so much that minus the finale itself, there wouldn't be any surprises left to have. So that was assuring.

Overall though, I'm having the love-hate relationship with it that kept me so hesitant to buy the game for so long. I have warmed up to more and more over time though, so I'm holding out hope. It did leave me feeling pretty dirty that I bought a buggy game over any of the thousand indie/smaller developed games that actually run properly. So took advantage of a Steam sale to buy a bunch of games that have been sitting on my wishlist for awhile. There may be zero chance that I even touch them for several months with all the other games in my backlog, but at least I now own them and it'll help me focus on what's good when I'm not fixated about the fact I could of bought a much more polished game for half the price or less.

Plus I'm finally the proud owner of the Shining Force games. No intent on playing them currently. But as a hardcore Golden Sun fan, I've been meaning to get some of the older games from Camelot's library, back when they were better known as "Sonic! Software Planning", so I can better understand my favorite game series by experiencing the games that would eventually influence them. Who knows? Maybe they'll even have elements that I actually like from Golden Sun buried in them too.

Oh yeah, Pokémon Go Community Day also happened and that's ironically the only reason I didn't waste the entire day working on this Sweet Expedition spin-off project. (I kind of ponder if that was for the best but we're not going to focus on that. I need to do stuff like that otherwise I'd never go out to walk these days, so we're just going to leave it at that. Oh look! Pretty pictures!)