Heyo new weeknote and this has been an eventful week.
The tides are turning against unemployment as we speak. I am getting interviews and take home assignments. I guess when you expect nothing you will be pleasently surprised.
Besides that the big and notable highlights of my week were watching my friend perform her drum performance for the first time, attending my first indie gamedev playtest meetup and also working on my blog with weblog an inititative started by Jatan to make a small and dedicated in person community around blogging.
I will elaborate on the Indie game playtest meet because this was my first one. I am not extrovert by any means but that day I had to extrovert out of all my pores which was quite exhausting and rewarding. I got to meet so many people working on such interesting projects. Let me share it in the order which I remember.
Firstly it was a game which has been tentatively titled "License to Kill" which is inspired by Hotline Miami and the works of Suda51. They are wearing their inspirations on their sleeves and I love it. I used to think that I would never run into people who loved hotline miami as much as I do or are familiar with the ouvre of Grasshopper Manufacture but I was happy to be proved wrong on this one. All the best to them and I hope that we can have a longer conversation about their game.
Next is a game tentatively titled "Project Gilgamesh" this was the one which had a huge queue for the playtest. It is a rhythm based parkour game which you have to play to get the feel for. The artstyle was very polished and my compliments especially to the person incharge of the level assets. If I had to describe the art it is something like the works of Heart Machine aka Hyper Light Drifter or it's more 3D counterpart Hyper Light Breaker.
Another game which I had a lot of fun playing was this co-op game called spook a boo which has a demo out now and will be releasing sometime next year. It is also really polished and super fun to play. If I had to describe it, it's artstlyle is Luigi's Mansion meets the gameplay of Overcooked. So a nice couch co-op ghostbusting session, which is fun for the whole family.
I also played a game tentatively titled "pen fight" which is still very early in development, and the Dev is actively seeking player feedback to improve the experience. I would say fans of the old Beyblade GBA games should be on the lookout for this one.
One of the more interesting games which I played was a physical card game called Brew. It is a four person deck builder where you draw potion ingredients from the deck and build potions from them to score points. The interesting mechanics come in the form of:
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The ingredients will decay at the end of the round, and potions made with decayed ingredients will lose points.
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There are player archetypes which have an effect on the play space for example I played the alchemist which lets me use the effect of one potion twice.
The player archetypes are unique and seem inspired by Slay the Spire, and I want to encourage the dev to make it more deliciously devious in the PVP aspects. Hopefully I can have another round when the next session happens.
There were also other games which i couldn't get around to on time but I had so much fun talking and feeling inspired by the devs who are working on their games. I wish them all a very multi-million dollars in their bank account.
The weblog session was spontaneous because I got to know that the session was happening 10 mins before it actually started. So I had to rush all the way across town to make it.
The session was great and I am looking forward to making it on time to the next one. I arrived unfashionably late but still in time to bang out a blog and have it be critiqued by someone with editorial intent. I love the idea of taking my writing more seriously and having it be read by someone with the editorial eye as it will only help me improve which is one step on my multi-step plan towards world domination.