Weekly Vlog 9/25/23

A bit delayed of a vlog, but it's a long weekend for me so today already felt like a Sunday. Been pretty busy early on in the weekend so that's the story I'm sticking to. Besides I have some pretty big things to share, part of the reason I delayed the blog was to keep to true to my word, so let's dive right into it.

Golden Sun projects

I did it, I released a public release of the Golden Sun project I made for the Golden Sun game jam. Sadly, I didn't get around to making a video or any sort of fanfare to go with said release, but I'm not ruling out doing later quite yet. In fact, in fact it might make good material for future videos or streams. Let me get more into what it is and you'll see what I mean.

The Golden Sun Challenge pack is a bundle of patches all in one package to allow you to tailor your own Golden Sun Challenge Run. There is a variety of challenge types to choose from and some can even be combined together. You could run through the game with restrictions to your summons. Make your own limited party or even solo run with the Death Charm patch. Or run through the game with access to only one elemental type via the Mono Fire or Mono water patches. I would recommend checking out the release page on Github or itch.io for details on the challenge types on how to set it up.

Releases · JackitK/GS-Challenge-Pack (github.com)

While this challenge pack may not have the depth of a full blow ROM Hack, like Dawn of Djinn, it makes up for it with the wide variety of options. I even included a couple of community made quality of life patches to enhance the experience. Best part is that the Challenge Pack has room to expand to include even more options in the future. Probably not for a while since I really should shift focus back to Dawn of Djinn, but there's a few ideas I started that I'd love to come back to and finish someday.

With the variety of patches available, and the fact that some of them I'm polishing up more before releasing. Hopefully it's pretty clear now why I unintentionally stopped working on Dawn of Djinn for the past couple months.

Again, I'd like to eventually make some videos better showcasing the possibilities this challenge pack can offer. But I got much bigger priorities in the video making side for now. Like figuring out what I'm going to do for October's upload schedule.

Video and Stream plans for October

Long story short, there isn't a plan. As I constantly being stressing throughout the month, I've burnt through my video backlog and was too caught up in all my major projects from previous months to build that backlog back up. That's not saying I'm not gonna try to have something. I'm just cutting it too close to feel comfortable promising anything.

Worst case scenario. The last Pokémon XG video in my backlog along with the first two videos of the Lost Age Randomizer will take up the first week. I also just finished editing down the F-Zero stream I did yesterday into small videos that I can spread throughout the month if I have nothing else to share. However, the thing that's most up in the air, yet I really hope pans out the most is a little something called "Overseer of October", basically a video/YT short series, where I ramble on about my imaginary game series, Overseer of the Elements. I've been wanting to do something like this for my OC for years.

This is an OC that's been living rent free in my head since the release of Golden Sun and is constantly getting fleshed out and refined as I grow closer as a person and closer to getting into Game Design. Technically certain characters and elements existed even before Golden Sun, but being introduced to that game certainly changed the way the OC worked forever. Biggest problem is since I'm barely any closer to making the game, I haven't had a good platform to share the concept. For the longest time, I even wanted to keep as much to myself as possible because it's such a huge piece of my life that I would be broken if I were to ever lose it, keeping it a secret until the game was made. But if that never happened, I still want the concept to exist in some form, so I want to try opening up more about it.

Especially with doing zero prep, doing this as a series of shorts spread throughout the month of October might be the perfect way to do it. I could talk about the characters, I can talk about the gameplay, I can talk about its Golden Sun inspirations, or how I've worked to flesh it out into an original concept. While brainstorming Overseer of the Elements concepts and learning from Golden Sun's mistakes, I've brainstormed ways that Golden Sun itself could be improved in a sequel or remake. That could make for some fun topics in these shorts as well, since I want to learn from the mistakes of the Golden Sun series if I were to ever make Overseer of the Elements a reality...

...but we'll see how much of that pans out in time for October. I have done some voice-over so that's a start and if I do make them shorts that'll hopefully cut down on editing. But there's still so much I got to figure out and there's so little time to do it that I can't promise anything quite yet beyond the fact that I really want to do it.

Oh, as for other videos and stream. Playing that mostly by ear too. I did record a Game N Chill yesterday, so I'm shooting to have that edited this weekend. So there is that. Saturday evenings are still the better days of the week for me to stream, but I'm keeping which Saturdays I stream and what I stream up in the air for now.

That's all for now. As much as I want to talk about my weekend because it was going so well. It's starting to get late, I'm getting tired, and I've probably already talked about it in the Game N Chill recording. Maybe next weekend will be less hectic and I'll have the time to ramble on about my own life for once. Take care.