Weekly Vlog 10/1/23

Hey everyone, welcome to October. Hope your day is going a bit better than mine. Just feel a bit down, partly because I'm still trying a bit lost with what I want to do with videos and streams at the moment. But I'll go more into that later. Just know, that there will be some videos this month. It's kind of a band-aid on the situation, but it does buy the opportunity to hopefully start fresh and get back into the swing of things in November. In the meantime a new Game N Chill just dropped. (I forgot that I had a video queued for Saturday, so I pushed it a day back so both videos had some time to breathe.)

I kind of got the feeling no one even reads these blogs. I'm I just wasting time writing these blogs to update a non-existent audience? Then again, with social media not really being a reliable place anymore with how widespread between platforms it is, how else am I going to update people? I had a passing thought of making these blogs a newsletter series instead, but I got no idea how TBH. Would anyone even bother with that? If you're somehow reading this, let me know. Discord is the most reliable place I can think of to update people at the moment, but I know it has a lot of barriers for some people so I feel like I got to think of a better alternative.

Game Projects

To be honest, I haven't really been able to get back into working on Dawn of Djinn or expand on the Golden Sun challenge pack this week. I got a feeling I might take a break working on Golden Sun stuff for a few weeks or so. Mostly playing it by ear, but there's a couple factors why.

1. Focus on making more videos and overall ways of promotion that help people realize these more recent projects even exist. I recently had an interaction with a fan of Dawn of Djinn, who didn't even realize I was working on a Version 2. That's probably a sign, that I need to be a bit more public with my progress on things. I just have to figure out how to do that. That's half the reason I wanted to do a stream of the "Water Only" patch yesterday, despite still playing through the Lost Age Randomizer, but I'll go more into detail on that in the video section.

2. I'm tired of being tied down by Sweet Expedition being in limbo. I've been afraid to bring it up because I really don't want to set any expectations, but past couple weeks I've probably spent more time playtesting and tweeking Sweet Expedition than working on any Golden Sun project. It's been in this odd state of releasable, but not to a degree I'd be happy with for months. To the point I regret not just releasing a patch of it when I made the WIP video series and being done with it. I don't think I have time to go into the details this week, but I've spent a bit of time refining the area from the Game Jam release. While I've sadly have no plans to make any new areas beyond what I've already shared, I have been working on rebalancing the mod around recent change I've made and there may or may not be a new move I added because I got distracted during those adjustments.

3. Lately I've been feeling I need a break in general. Not only do I feel the pressure to build up my backlog so I can actually upload something frequently, pass couple days, including today I've been fluxiating between feeling great and feeling terrible. I got a feeling I'll need to make some time to rest if I don't want to burn out completely.

Speaking of needing to do a better job promoting my mods, why don't I just remind you of a couple of them right now...

For one, I think I did a poor job at sharing the Dawn of Djinn V2 demo, so if you're interested in that, you can get a patch for it here. The demo ends at Mogall Forest, but it does give you a good taste of new features for V2, such as the new classes.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p4uceJQjSVmLuCCme8LZCx58F5eaBZSG/view?usp=drive_link

There's even a "hard mode" version of it in the Golden Sun Challenge pack that removes summons. TBH I don't know how doable it even is, it's just a quick little thing I put together when making the Challenge Pack for the Game Jam... speaking of, you can find out more about the Golden Sun Challenge Pack is. Long story short, it's a series of patches that add small little challenges to a vanilla playthrough that you can mix and match together. Such as playing with only Psynergy, classes, and other attacks of a particular element, or going through the game without the ability to summon.

https://jackitk.itch.io/golden-sun-challenge-pack

Videos

As I've mentioned before October is kind of a mess because I had no time to make the usual uploads for the month. The original plan would have been to start a new video series for the month called "Overseer October". In it I'd make a series of shorts sharing various details and factoids about my OC Overseer of the Elements. It's my birthday month and I figured it would be a perfect celebration of that. ...but that didn't pan out the way I was hoping.

I do have a backup plan as I did manage to edit down and split the F-Zero stream I did, and I'm happy enough with the commentary that I feel I could spread it out as videos throughout the month. I was just hoping to have something special to me for this month and even the usual uploads of Pokémon XG would have been way closer to that than F-Zero gameplay.

Plus, I do have a couple of those "Overseer October" videos/shorts in the works. I'll just upload them whenever they're finish rather than doing a short every day or every other day. The best celebration to myself might just be to take it easy. Lord knows, I got plenty else to do if I do get bored.

As you may have heard in the Game N Chill video. I originally planned to introduce the Lost Age Randomizer this week, but after some thought I thought it wouldn't be a good idea to start a new series just to immediately go on hiatus with it. So, I think I'm just going to wait until November to start up the Lost Age Randomizer. It'll buy me more time to edit more episodes, and with how much of a mess the second stream of it was, I think I'll need that extra time.

As for streams, after yesterday's stream where it got delayed so bad I wasn't sure I'd even be able to go live. I think I'm done trying to schedule them in advance, at least for the month. Likely will still do a couple around the usual time, but your best bet to know when I'm live is to follow and wait for notifications from either Discord or Youtube. I know that's annoying, but it feels better to not promise anything at all than to make promises that even I don't know if I can keep.

Oh. Here's a calendar of everything I do currently have schedule. It's mostly accurate, but don't be surprised if I sprinkle a few extra videos here and there as I make them....