Souls Like Strings

What went well

Projects

• Kept writing this blog
• Some minor progress on the spending tracker, mainly styling the transaction dialog and making it usable for editing as well

Games

Silksong continues to be incredible; now 70 hours in, not even done with Act 2 and still absolutely loving it. I even enjoyed the famously rough Bilewater boss & its accompanying runback (plus pre-boss gauntlet!). Every moment with Silksong feels special, and I'm going to take my time finishing it because once it's gone all that's left is a replay of the original.

In service of taking my...

2spooky4me

Why

• Seemed to have some creative mechanics
• Cool vibes, I definitely felt scared

Why Not

• Difficult (for me) to overlook the "checklist of stuff" gameplay
• You don't like horror

Impressions

Saw this on special for ~300yen and thought I'd give it a try to see if I'd like spooky horror games. Unfortunately it seems I don't; I definitely felt the tension and appreciated some cool ideas but overall it just wasn't an enjoyable experience.

Starting with the positives, there are some cool visuals here and it definitely nailed the spooky vibe for me....

We're all just flowers in a garden of her making

Why

• Book-quality story which wouldn't work in a book
• Every single character makes you feel something
• Respects your intelligence by giving you the opportunity to piece things together
• Always changes things up just in time to prevent getting stale

Why Not

• You absolutely need action in your games

Impressions

If you like story-driven games, or just good stories at all, stop reading and go play this. What a crazy journey, setting and incredible cast of lovable/hateable characters.

You're Watcher, one of many clones of...

• Sometimes you just need to rm -rf the repo and start over
  • but you shouldn't do this with a fair chunk of work on a branch that doesn't exist on remote
  • and you definitely shouldn't do it twice in the same week
  • to the same branch
• Vite handles styles in dev (at least the ones you import in your components) by adding them as inline style tags
  • this can lead to very annoying and confusing CSS issues
  • and if it does, that's probably a hint your CSS isn't very well scoped
  • should probably make a...

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.

What if the emperor was a decent guy?

Poor Maia is the 4th son of the elvish emperor, consigned to a remote manor with his abusive uncle for the crime of being born to a wife the emperor didn't like very much. Or at least he was, until the airship his father and three brothers were on exploded, making him the new emperor.

Growing up with no one to talk to other than a drunken uncle who beats you for fun is perhaps not the most standard training for emperorhood, but...