It's been a busy two months here at Offy D corp, and now I finally have time (/have remembered) to tell you this tale. And I hope you're a sheet of wrought iron, because this tale is RIVETTING.
The most interesting part is that the world's greatest vidyeo gaem, Godless Tactics, has been released into the wild! With its not-at-all-influenced-by-fan-brigading review score of 97%, it is OFFICIALLY among the greatest games ever made. It also sold over a thousand copies, which may or may not be a good run, not really sure. But it is more than zero copies, which is roughly what the average person's game sale score is. I'm winning! Since release I even managed to get to the point when people stopped complaining about the game randomly softlocking, so maybe I ACTUALLY fixed that issue after a billion attempts.
Overall, 10/10, never again. Well, I might make another game sometime, but for now I'm going to use the hours in my schedule previously taken up by game dev to do some other projects instead. For example, right now I am using them to write this blog, thus dramatically increasing the chance of me doing it compared to the usual weekend slot. But I'm also using it to edit the huge Fire Margin script together into a book!
This is primarily just proof reading, retconning a few elements from the earlier chapters that conflict with things in later ones, and changing the formating to be novel-like. In places I've also added some basic descriptions of what things look like, since the whole thing barely spends any time at all setting the scenes. Really it has a breakneck pace for something that is so long, covering so much adventures one after the other that I'm not sure it entirely works as text alone. But we're doing this anyway! Yesterday I passed 100 pages edited out of about 6-7 hundred it will have in total. Bit long. Going to see how small a font I can get away with to save pages, since pages mean price! Although I will try to make an ebook version too, so that won't matter much there.
One day this will be the second piece of Offy D merch, and which point I should probably make an actual webpage for it and link it places AND STUFF. Only top tier marketing strats here at Offy D Corp, and our head of marketing, Offy D, is passionate about 'market penetration'. Or he said something like that anyway.
In other news, I am now writing a new narrative called 'For Them, Forever'. It's about my playthrough of sci-fi strategy thing Stellaris. It's nice to write sci-fi, since in this genre there is an unlimited amount of potential for hand-waving away things that don't make sense, but at the same time you can explore wild and wacky things as 'unknown unknowns'. Basically, you can write whatever trash you please.
Stellaris follows in the 'soft-sci-fi' traditions of something like Mass Effect, which as a distgusting academic-influenced space nerd, makes it hard for me to stick to the game's rules. For example, basic elements of the gameplay, such as human-piloted spaceships and colonising other planets, are dumb choices to members of the 'hard-sci-fi' master race. So a fair amount of the early part of the story is trying to justify why the humans essentially act as if the 'planet = city, space = the sea' tropedom of soft, weak, ABHORENT, sci-fi convention, is true.
In many ways, the fact the game is like this was a disappointment to me, but it's still quite fun to play, mainly because of the way the unexplained 'hyperlane' system creates chokepoints and key junctions in space that you can rush in to control. Where I am in the campaign right now, the humans are pretty much walled off behind a few chokepoints. Will this be enough to keep humanity alive forever?! Let's find out! I also found out it is possible to build space habitats instead of colonising planets, which is the hard-sci-fi choice for space civilisation, so I might be able to eventually twist the story into saying that everyone lived in space and the planet settlements were just mines, or something. OR SOMETHING.
SPACESHIPS SHOULD BE AS LONG AND THIN AS POSSIBLE TO REDUCE CHANCES OF IMPACT DAMAGE. TRAVELLING AT LIGHT SPEED, HITTING AN ATOM OF HYDROGEN WOULD BLOW THE SHIP UP. PHYSICS. Ahem. Reminds me of the time The Last Jedi didn't factor in conservation of momentum in that stupid spaceship chase concept. Disgraceful. And didn't that movie show laser shots visibly arcing downwards after being fired, in space? Gravity: what, when, how? GUISE DiD OYE TEL U U CANT HEER SOWND IN SPAYS?! One day I will create the most boring, clerical, engineering-based space opera of all time. With space laser samurai who are very concerned about evenly distributing heat across the hull of their space freight train delivering nitrates to orbital farming cylinders. STAR BORES: A NEW COPE. Excuse me.
Now that I have ranted about that, for some reason, the other recent bit of news is that I did a livestream on the Kings and General channel. I was even featured on CAMERA for the first time, which was truly a sight to behold. I looked back over the footage, and noticed how obviously OCD I appear. Usually I am either constantly vibrating my leg, chewing something, or twiddling something in my fingers (or all the above, please explain how to go to sleep please). In the livestream I seemed to constantly stroke the back of my head, poke my right temple, or pinch my nose. The weird thing is I don't remember doing that at all, so yeah, good to have no control over oneself.
As for the stream itself, it was just me failing to play TW Rome 2 while the K&G big boys took questions from the audience. Was it any good? I have no idea, as a stream-phobe. But, we're gonna do it again in a couple of weeks' time to play Ghost of Tsushima, which I feel like I've heard of in a good way, so that will hopefully be much more fun than my 800th hour of Rome 2. Tune in folks, and see someone who doesn't know how to host a stream hosting a stream!
I guess that's all the news. The channel carries on, and as it stands I have no future projects in mind, so when the current Stellaris narrative and two TW abridgeds end, I don't know what will happen. Feel like I should go back to doing a Total War narrative of some kind, but there is nothing I feel like doing, so... More on that in the future, I guess.
SEE YOU AROUND, YA SOFT-SCI-FI-LIKING LOSERS
