dailyrandomwriter

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 774

So yesterday was the Christmas meeting/brunch that my department at work has every year. In past years we would have a White Elephant gift exchange, but this year a few people who set up had gone out and brought a bunch of items for a Christmas game prize and everyone would get one. It was just the order of who got the pick the prize was in order of who managed to complete the Christmas game first.

A lot of these items were what you’d expect for a group of adult women. A charcuterie board, crocheting kit, a large cookie jar with cookies in them,... the sort of thing you’d buy at Homesense or a similar house goods store. Most of those things were things that I, myself would not end up using.

And under normal circumstances this would include a set of papermate felt tip pens that smelled like perfume and a pink notebook that had the face of some pop star on them? Who knows, it looked very weird, but also from the picture, clearly, I chose this.

Why?

Infinity Nikki is why, and that was something I wasn’t expecting out of myself.

Infinity Nikki is a free to play fashion dress up game with platform puzzle exploration, a combination of genres I never thought I would ever have to say. Normally, a game like this I wouldn’t be into because games like these have a gacha mechanic, meaning that the really fancy clothing can only be won by lottery by paying in-game currency. In-game currency that you can also buy with real money (you kind of see the problem there).

I originally agreed to play Infinity Nikki because @wereah asked if I would play it if she did. 

What I wasn’t expecting was an actual really fun game, that so far has made the gacha portion a side feature rather than the whole point of the game. A fact that is very surprising because this is also the Nikki franchise’s first foray into a game that allows movement in a 3D space. The puzzle platforming aspect of the game is not what this franchise has been known for.

And yet the movement and level design of this game is really well done, which suggests that the company has hired experts and listened to them when making this game. So I wanted to continue the game, but Infinity Nikki, for better or worse, is also an overwhelming game.

Because it is a free to play game, one of their main metrics is how long players play their game. So these games tend to be designed to keep the player playing. Infinity Nikki has done this by designing large open maps with a lot of little things to explore, play and discover. On top of the main quests, the side quests, map quests and event quests. And on top of that the sketches for clothes that require resources to make (or evolve in the case of the ability outfits). So there are a lot of things to do, and get distracted by.

Coupled by poor short term memory, this game is both a dream and a nightmare for a person with ADHD.

So I wanted a notebook to write down points of interest for myself so that the next time I hop into the game I will remember what my thought process was. Now I have a lot of really nice journals, but honestly, for all I love this game, I don’t want to dedicate a really nice journal to it, especially because I still have pages in my gaming journal that I have to finish.

A gaming journal that seems to be taken up by Santae at the moment and is kind of a mess.

As a result, when I really thought about this silly (kind of ugly) journal at the Christmas get-together I thought, this is something I can write in, and not be precious about. However, it is not the nicest journal, so I took time to cover it with white paper and decorate it with stickers from my collection so it at least looks nicer.

It’s a weird thing to do, but it works.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 773

When I talk about knowledge in video games and the ability to navigate them, I’m often talking about tutorials, because as time has gone on tutorials tend to not run under the assumption that the person playing has never played that genre before.

It didn’t occur to me though that could also include information the game gives you to just play the game. That is, if you’re a new time player, there are calculations or considerations that you might not be used to keeping in mind when playing the game. While it doesn’t make it impossible to play the game, it certainly increases the difficulty. 

This thought occurred to me when I was playing the demo game Squeakross. Squeakross is one of many games that has tried to add to the puzzle game Nonograms, or also known as Picross for those who are familiar with the most popular digital Nonogram brand to exist. The idea behind the puzzle is that you have a grid with a series of numbers along the side and top of the grid that tells you how many boxes are consecutive to each other.

If you’ve never played the game, here is a free online version of it to give it a go.

I tried the demo just because I like Nonograms, it is one of my favourite types of puzzles next to Bridges and Sudoku. That’s right, Sudoku is only my third favourite type of these sorts of puzzles.

So I wasn’t expecting much from Squeakross, because what it was, was a Nonogram game dressed up with home decorating mechanics with cute little rats. Rats, not mice, because I think they’re based off of the fancy rats people keep for pets.

However, Squeakross surprised me by opening up with a very, very good tutorial. While I am very familiar with Nonograms and have a few tricks to solve said puzzles, Squeakross put those tricks into concise wording and demonstration. Meaning if you have never played Nongrams or aren’t very good at this puzzle, the tutorial provides knowledge to help the player solve the puzzle.

And then, it provided me with something I didn’t know I needed, a grid user interface that gave me more information. Most digital Nongrams, if they offer any additional information, keeping track of when a player makes a proper block length is cross off the number that block length is associated with so you don’t lose track of where you are.

Squeakross takes this a step further. When you look at their grid, the numbers that indicate the number of blocks and how long a block has three states. The first, are blue numbers with a white outline, this indicates there is enough information for the player to add blocks or Xs to indicate blank spaces. The second, is solid black numbers, to indicate there is not enough information for the player and anything they put on that grid would be a guess (which the game strongly discourages). Finally a grayed out number indicates that the block formation fits what that number clue.

The first two states are incredibly important if you are new to Nonograms or have difficulty parsing information. This allows the player to just focus on the lines with blue numbers, instead of having to comb through all the lines they’ve done so far. It doesn’t actually remove the difficulty of the puzzle, it just removes some of the frustration and lowers the chances of making a mistake.

Combined with the in-game counter tool (which I wished the tutorial had mentioned) it allows the player to just focus on the process of eliminating or adding to spots on the grid. Which is the whole point of playing a Nonogram. 

Going through these puzzles has also made me more confident in playing Nonograms, though I don’t know if I could do other Nonograms in other games without depending on these tools, it has improved the way I read and solve these puzzles. Even if you’re not interested in the home decorating aspect, if you like this type of puzzle, this is a very good game to play.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 772

So… it seems that I’m losing my mind, or at least my memory. Another old friend of mine who also got diagnosed with ADHD and is in therapy (because she lives in a place that makes it easier to access public funding mental health services), told me that it’s very easy to lose your routine with ADHD if something changes.

It’s… a piece of advice that shouldn’t surprise me. I’m already well aware that it’s dreadfully hard to maintain new routines when something goes awry. Like getting sick or badly scraping my knee. While my ability to maintain an exercise routine has been like fighting an uphill battle, the fact I can more or less maintain 20 to 25 minutes on average is a huge win.

However, it never occurred to me that my attempts to remember all these new routines might affect my very old established routines. Like antibiotics… that I’ve been on since the establishment of my own memory. 

Actually, as a side note, growing up, my father would ask me no less than three times after dinner if I remembered to take my antibiotics. And this habit of his always annoyed me, because the routine as a child was that when dinner was over, I would get up and walk over to the large cupboard that was beside the fridge and take my medicine from that cupboard. This meant that my parents, while cleaning up the kitchen table, would have a clear view of me, taking my medication. So it always annoyed me that my father would ask me at least three times if I took my medication.

However, knowing what I know now, and because my memory of my childhood is a bit wishy-washy at the ripe age of 40, I wonder if maybe he always asked because I would say yes without thinking. Now I don’t know if I tended to say yes without thinking back then, but I do know one of the issues with short term memory is thinking you did something, and you did not. So maybe he knew I had a history of that? Who knows.

The point is, at some point in the past month or two, I started to mis-remember if I took my medication or not. I have probably in both equal rates, forgotten to take my medication and double dosed myself. An issue I have not had since first leaving home and attending university… over 15 years ago.

Now, I’m aware that I am constantly trying to improve my own routines. This includes doing the things I want to do, instead of doomscrolling on social media, and do things in a timely manner so it’s not ass o’clock at night when I’m done doing the important things. I’m also well aware in the past month and a half that my routines had to also include looking after my parents’ place and plants, which interrupted my usual routines, so maybe this isn’t a surprise.

But it did mean I had to do something about it. I’m not sure what I would have done in the past before journaling or recognizing I needed extra supports to live life, but probably not what seemed to be the most logical course of action. That is, I walked myself down to the pharmacy and brought myself another pill holder to keep upstairs, on my desk, where I can see it and made a medicine tracker in my journal.

It is a simple solution and straightforward one, but one I don’t know that I would have thought of last year.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 771

Steam had a sale so I brought games. A lot of them because most of them were under ten dollars… all of them were actually under ten dollars and a lot of them were under 5 dollars, because of the type of games I like playing and Steam sales are wonderful.

One of the games I had been playing (until I got it out of my system) was Lost and Found, and the genre is… weird. It’s one of those games where you realize that genre is a really strange way of labelling games. Lost and Found is technically a mixture of hidden object and time management, but it doesn’t really hit the mark on what you look for in those genres. After all, the point of a hidden object game is to find an object that is hidden, and time management is a genre where you’re asked to do a series of tasks in the most effective way possible to manage your time.

Even the other user-tags on Steam don't quite explain what Lost and Found is, but to explain why it is weird, I should explain what the premise is.

In the game Lost and Found, you’re a person who runs the Lost and Found area of an airport and people come up to you asking for their lost items. People who will tip you money if you give them their items back, and with upgrades, they will give bonus money if you give the item back to them quickly. Those items come on a conveyor belt every once in a while, and you take them off the belt and put them on your table before the conveyor takes them away (as it would deduct money from your savings). There’s a bunch of minigames you can play that help earn more money as the day progresses.

And here is where the two genres of time management and hidden object exist, but don’t quite exist at the same time. Technically, you are looking for the object someone is asking for, on the table of stuff that keeps collecting as the days progress. Technically you’re managing time, as you try to give items as fast as possible, take items off the conveyor belt and do mini games to earn the most money possible.

But where it doesn’t quite meet traditional standards of those genres has to do with two important mechanics in the game. The first, is that, where you put the item on the table, is completely up to you. You have control where that item on the table goes. The second thing is, at the end of the day, instead of booting you out of the play space immediately, the game requires you to click your journal to end the session even when the day is done and no customers come in.

This is important, because it means at the end of the day, you have all the time in the world to reorganize your table as you see fit. The act of reorganizing your table, makes it less of a hidden object game as you organize in such a way that you can find items quickly. 

Like I actually put lost boarding tickets in groups of four in as close to alphabetical order as I can. This way if I don’t remember which image belongs to which country, I can quickly guess which group it is in and check by hovering the mouse.

I put electronics, small accessories, large accessories, travel items (like items that would go into a bag), entertainment items, food items, shirts/coats and large bags/luggage into their own groups so I can find them quicker. 

Between that and the fact the items more or less always look the same, the game becomes more about strategy and memory. This is a very different set of skills than what traditional time management or hidden object games require. 

It doesn’t make it a bad game, it just means if you’re recommending this game to someone else, you might need more explanation than its genres, because the genres will tell you shit.

That being said, if you want a fast paced game that you can play for a few minutes at a time (or an hour or so), I do recommend this game. This sort of game I really like, it provides a different kind of challenge than what I’m used to.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 770

Unlike retail workers, I do not hate Christmas music… primarily because I do not work in retail and therefore do not have to hear Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas by Frank Sinatra over a dozen times within the span of a few days.

However, I will say that I am very apathetic to Christmas music; specifically I am apathetic towards radio Christmas music. A large part of this has to do with the fact Christmas music played over the radio has not changed that much since my living memory. Take the Frank Sinatra song for example, Sinatra recorded that in 1957, and it is still regularly played on the radio at Christmas time, at least once a day.

The most popular modern Christmas song played on the radio is now 20 years old (thanks Mariah Carey). While there have been other Christmas songs such as Where Are You Christmas (2000) or DJ Play a Christmas Song (2023), they don’t get played all that often. In fact there are even old Christmas songs that don’t get played that often such as Last Christmas (1984) or Happy Xmas (War is Over) (1971). 

As a result, I treat radio Christmas music as white noise when I hear it. It sort of… doesn’t exist in my brain space at times. However, I love Christmas songs, I just love other people’s Christmas songs.

Such as Voiceplay’s version of Christmas Don’t Be Late, or the Christmas Medley that was put together by a bunch of Youtubers five years ago.

But what I really, really love are Christmas themed songs in general. They’re not “Christmas songs” because Christmas songs tend to have a melody flavour that makes them memorable and cozy. These songs I would probably never sing aloud to myself because it would take much more work to remember them, they’re not designed to be followed along in the same way.

Also some of them are very strange… like the Stupedium’s Christmas Fright series, which is a series of four songs about Stupedium playing Christmas host (willingly or not) to horror game characters. Or this year’s song by Karliene who decided celebrating Christmas was singing a spooky song about Krampus.

That being said, there are plenty of songs that wouldn’t look out of place in a good Christmas playlist. Stupedium, the same person who wrote the Christmas Fright series, also wrote a thoughtful and warm hearted Christmas song called Lights on a Truck. 

This year I have been horribly obsessed with a pirate themed Christmas song of all things called The Christmas King, which sounds like a war song for Christmas.

In which to say, I have a very strange Christmas playlist, but it’s far more enjoyable than anything I hear on the radio these days.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 769

Even though I’ve been playing a lot of demos, I actually don’t talk about all those demos. Even the ones that I end up wishlisting. Primarily because they do their job but they’re nothing really unusual or amazing.

Nom Nom: Cozy Forest Cafe would normally be one of those games. A cozy cafe game that uses rhythm mechanics for baking, while unique, isn't that interesting. There’s nothing special about the rhythm mini game and the music isn’t anything memorable. However, I would argue that the game mechanics are just set dressing for the thing that Nom Nom was designed for, to allow the player to customize every bit of their cafe all the way down to the food that is being served.

This game is everything I would have asked for over a decade ago when I still played mobile phone games. Mobile games that allowed you to customize food and other items were very popular, but they were also predatory in that they were free but you had to purchase different decoration packs so you could have more opinions.

Nom Nom, is the game I would have wanted way back then, and I would have only had to pay the developers once. In fact, funnily enough, a lot of the controls in that game could be easily ported to mobile, and the rhythm game has the simplicity to make it good for touch screen. However, it is not on mobile, because unfortunately price perception would have made selling this game on mobile very, very difficult. It is stupid hard to convince people to pay for a full game on mobile, compared to a computer game. There is a reason why many of the first mobile games that took advantage of the touch screen can now be found on Steam, because people will actually pay for the game for what it is worth.

Anyhow, I really do want this game but more for nostalgia reasons than anything else. I recognize I will not be challenged by this game, and the likelihood of me getting a good feedback loop from this game is low, but I want to see all of the customization abilities in this game. That is what I really want out of this and it looks like it’ll deliver.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 768

Now that November is over, I can talk about the writing that I was doing for Chimera Academy. Since making comics is a long process, I primarily have been focusing on fleshing out the characters as it helps with my own writing and Were-Ah’s character designs. However, every once in a while (November especially) I sit down to write as many chapters or scripts as I can.

I had actually hoped to write five chapters (three of which were to be rewrites of already existing chapters). Unfortunately I didn’t manage that, but I did manage three chapters, two of which were re-writes and I consider that a large win.

Even though I keep saying this, I’ll say it again, it’s bizarre to be so comfortable now with doing rewrites, even though I had forced my own hand into doing so. See, when I first came up with Chimera Academy, there was a certain order in which Salron and Emmi would meet one of their professors, Sullivan, which was before classes started. This is because Chimera was based off of a tabletop campaign that never finished, and that was what had happened originally.

However, the more I thought about it, in terms of the flow of the story, the more I became unhappy with it. Especially, because the chapter previous was the four getting to know each other and promising to help each other with the stupid that is Chimera Academy’s education system. 

Yea that’s right, I’m the writer and even I know that this system is dumb as rocks, and I know why.

At any rate, I decided to change my own timeline, and the chapter after the one Were-Ah and I call Intermission, will introduce (sort of) the professors and one professor whom the readers will have already met by then. This did mean however, any chapter that would come after this point would have to be rewritten.

Which is what I spent the rest of November doing, but it was worth it, and I’m glad that hard part is now over with.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 767

The last few days I’ve had trouble focusing outside of work, and just getting distracted easily. This is not a surprise to be honest. It was the first week of the month at work and right after vacation too, so it was very busy with deadlines and being very busy with deadlines means I tend to be better focused.

It’s later on in the month that becomes a question.

But in my own personal life it has been too easy to get distracted by fanfiction, games or just doom scrolling on my social media platform of choice.

Yesterday was the worst because it has been a long while since I’ve taken forever and a day to get chores done. Frankly it was amazing that most of it got done yesterday at all.

Today though has been much better. I don’t know if that’s because I kicked myself out of my home to attend the game meet up and then walked around the Christmas Market (that I forgot that was happening today). Or maybe because today was actually a good weather day. You know it’s winter when you think 4C (39.2F) is balmy weather.

It was balmy weather, I could just wear the caplet, most of the snow had melted and I wasn’t at risk of falling (again).

Now that I have written that aloud, I realized the fall from Tuesday was probably what had sent me into a tizzy for the rest of the week. My knee is still sore (probably bruised) from that incident.

Whatever the case, I managed to come home, do chores, play only the game that I wanted to play, do two pages of journal setup, write this and still have a bit of time leftover. I also managed to use up enough energy that I will probably sleep like the dead tonight.

So hopefully, next week will be better.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 766

I make Christmas cards because I have too much stationery and need to use it somehow. However, two years ago I bought a lot of kraft paper cards. The reasoning behind this was two fold. 

The first, was that I couldn’t find white cards in smaller sizes at the time, and I wanted small cards because designing Christmas cards (or any cards) takes a lot of work. The second, was because blank space looked more interesting when it wasn’t white. 

This was a good idea at the time, but the thing about washi stickers is that their colours show up the best when the background is white because they’re kind of translucent. While PET stickers fare a lot better, they still sort of run into the same problem.

As a result, the first card I made was made by placing stickers onto white paper, cutting it out and then gluing it onto the card. It gave me the bold colours I wanted, but it does limit which items can be made into cards, and more importantly that takes longer and this process was already going to take a long time.

I should have started this in November.

Anyhow, this is going to be an experience, especially since I realized belatedly perhaps the best cards are the ones that I don’t have to write a greeting on the front. A lot of cards are like this and I don’t know why it took me so long to realize I could do this.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 765

I remember watching last year all the content creators showing off their notebook lineups and I had thought at the time who would have time for so many notebooks?

Why would you use so many notebooks?

And the answer is, one, you don't use all those notebooks all the time, two, if you're better suited for analog it's easier and three, you can design what you need exactly.

When I started my gaming journal last year, I didn’t really know what I was doing (and I still don’t), but it gave me a place to write down my thoughts about game mechanics as they came to me. I also discovered that escape room style puzzle games are easier to play if you write down notes. In fact most narrative puzzle games by design are easier to play if you write shit down.

I’ve also discovered in complex farming games, no matter how good the user interface is, the barrier to look things up is much lower when opening up a notebook. While my game journal is a hot mess, I will continue to use it until the pages are done, and then make a new one with hopefully a better setup.

When I started my work journal, it was more of an experiment in organization and motivation. At the time I started that journal back in September,I had been on ADHD medication for 8 months; I’ve also spent those previous 8 months learning how to work with ADHD. This included recognizing that I have shit memory, and that I have to find ways to make my own motivation. 

I remembered a few years back when I was trying to prove that I was being overworked (pre-Covid) that I used to keep tally marks of every time I did a particular task (specifically calls and emails). However, I did those on the computer, and that required me to flip back and forth between software, but I remembered how much I liked making those marks for every little thing I did. So, I designed the work journal to do that without taking the extra time to flip between software. I also decided to put my to-do lists in there so it was always in front of me, instead of out of mind, out of sight. 

This, it turned out, worked very well. It also taught me about what things I could do that would truly only take a minute or two when I was getting close to the end of my workday. One of the things I did was idle for the last five minutes as it was hard to find anything that wouldn’t take me over my working time (by 20 minutes). It also taught me a bit more about how to break tasks down, and reminded me constantly that I was doing work even if that work was fighting my never ending emails.

Which brings me to next year’s journal lineup, because I’ll be working out of two journals. An everyday journal and a daily log journal. This was an idea that had been brewing in the back of my mind for a while because again… I have shit memory outside of anything that is of my interest or my work. Ask me anything about Chimera Academy and I can talk about that all day long, ask me about my day and that might take awhile.

The daily log journal is going to be kept in a smaller journal so it can be put into my purse, So a traveler notebook style or smaller. It is both a place where I can keep track of what I am doing for the day, but also a place where I can write things down as they happen. This can include just every day happenings to how I am feeling, to any new tasks or information I need to keep for the future that might pop up. This will solve my parents’ on-going issue of just telling me to do stuff verbally and not emailing it to me, and me never remembering what happened during my day.

The bonus of this is that my daily logs are no longer in my everyday journal. This will allow me to keep an everyday journal for 6 months instead of 4 months, reducing the amount of information migration that I have to do. This will also give me an opportunity to rethink how my weekly logs work as well.

Is this a lot of journals? Yes, but as I’m discovering, it’s what I need to keep my life in order.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 764

Video games as a storytelling medium are fascinating because a game does not necessarily have to be fun to be compelling, or to tell a good story apparently. Mindhack is technically a text adventure game, something that is easy to forget under the veneer of wonderfully animated graphics, fitting musical score and a typing mechanic that makes you feel like a hacker.

But let me be honest, after playing the demo, I can’t say I had ‘fun’ in the typical sense. This isn’t a game I would play because I found the mechanics ‘fun’ but rather I would play this because I find the storyline fascinating. 

In Mindhack you play the character only known as Doctor, who lives in a world where a person’s soul is a source code that can be hacked and changed. Their job is to seek out BUGS, errors in people’s source code that causes them to be aggressive, violent and all sorts of evil in society. The Doctor is one of the best Mindhackers seen in their generation… a genius, whose job is to get rid of these BUGS and turn these individuals into happy, functioning members of society.

And if this sounds kind of dystopian, it is.

The game does not hide the fact that there is something very uncomfortable to the audience about the premise of this society. A discomfort that grows when you realize the Doctor lives and works at this facility, they do not leave. The AI that oversees their well being, often comments on their genius and in the extra section even refers to them in a possessive sort of language. This opens up the possibility that the Doctor is as much of a victim as the people they reformat.

A victim who is not okay and might even be developing a BUG themselves, if such a thing actually exists, and isn’t just propaganda to justify what amounts to brainwashing.

It is a fascinating game that certainly deserves a playthrough once it leaves early access. Not because I enjoy the game mechanics (though I will always say yes to a good typing game), but because I want to experience the growing psychological horror that is Mindhack.

At least that’s where I assume that storyline is going.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 763

I maybe shouldn’t have started Noiramore Academy so late at night, but to be fair, knowing it was a puzzle adventure game, I didn’t think it would have taken me over an hour and a half to finish the demo, but that’s what I did last week.

This particular demo game actually ended up on my list due to the visual style first and the storyline second. Puzzle adventure games are a game genre I like, but I’m generally pretty bad at them, so my interest in buying a game depends on some sort of concept or visual design to catch my interest first. The visual style of this game is a combination of Monster High, old storybooks and noir detective films, which just made it really fascinating from the outset.

But the reason why I really enjoyed playing this game was the writing. The writing was very well done, so well done in fact that I realized after the fact that adventure games with a lot of voice acting isn’t an issue for me. I had thought, back when I played 3 Minutes to Midnight, my issue with the voice acting was my attention span. After all, it was much faster for me to read it, than to listen to people talk.

However, Noiramore Academy probably had the same amount of voice acting, but instead of a lot of short lines for everything that I clicked (and there were plenty to inspect), there was longer dialogue for only a few things to inspect. And while there were sassy quips (because Judith, the main character has opinions), it was there to temper any tense moments or provide the player with more information. 

It was also just far more delightful to watch these characters move and emote as they spoke their lines. The animation in this game was top notch, and gave each of the characters so much personality. This game is definitely on the list of games I want to experience more of, because the mystery was solid and the world was just fun to experience.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 762

In the list of demos I’ve been playing while I still have time to play them was Out and About, which is an exploration game with an educational element to it. It’s a game that teaches about foraging, using exploration, cooking (and possibly farming) mechanics to make the learning fun. It’s really a game first and an educational tool second. Though it’s clear that this is a game about a topic that the developer is passionate about.

It’s a fun game, there’s nothing about the game that really stands out to me, which isn’t a bad thing. These types of games I tend to buy because I want a particular game mechanic or vibe for a few hours. From the gameplay, it’s clear it will be the type of game I will enjoy. Games that have a larger focus of exploration are one of my favourite things. 

As for the educational piece, it’s clearly a game that is trying to take advantage of tangential learning. I doubt, knowing myself that I will research more on these plants beyond the game, living in the city I have no interest in foraging. However, as a writer, this information is probably something that will sit in the back of my mind for some weird use or another.

The only downside to this game, is the fact I won’t be able to play this game for longer than an hour or two a session. This is not the fault of the game exactly, I’ve found the older I get the more likely I will get motion sickness in a 3D space. Especially a game that requires me to look around to find things. I had this problem with Été over the summer which made me really sad because that is a very beautiful game that I would have loved to just spend hours on. Another game, Eastshade, I just didn’t finish because the motion sickness was particularly bad in that game.

Most of these games do have accessibility options that can lower the amount of motion sickness experienced but your results may vary.

Still, I would like to play this game, but it would not be an absolute must for me. 

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 761

One of the other reasons why it’s been taking me a while to get through my game demos (besides journal set up) is the fact Santae, the virtual pet website, had a community event release just as I was going on holidays.

Great, because I had time to focus on that event. Terrible, because I had other things to do, and the fear of missing out was strong.

Which was highly unnecessary because the developers had always made it clear they didn’t want community members to suffer from FOMO. In addition, from past experience, their community events have been really testing grounds for new features and the introduction of those features. So there was no need for me or anyone else to rush, but dumb brain will do dumb things.

While I appreciate the team always working to make sure no one feels like they’re going to miss out, I don’t think they’ll ever be able to remove it completely because it’s just a dumb thing that we as human beings seem to fear even when it's unnecessary.

Besides that little hiccup, I adore what the folks at Santae are doing. As they add more and more features to the site, I am slowly seeing the vision they want for their virtual pet site. Specifically, what I assume they’re trying to do is try to make their website self-sustaining, providing enough self driven goals for a player to work towards and annual community events so that the team does not burn themselves out trying to constantly provide updates. The goal after all, for any virtual pet site is to ensure the players keep coming back to play.

Neopets did this by providing a lot of flash games to earn and play, and then providing high costing items that players would want to buy to keep them engaged. Santae seems to seek to have players earn wanted items by fulfilling mini events that could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days (depending on play style).

And as a writer and a daydreamer, I really like this style of play because it inspires me to imagine what this world would be like if I found myself frolicking among the creatures of Santae. In fact, I already wrote stories, just for myself of course.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 760

At my age, there is less of a feeling of awe and more of a cold practicality when the first snow of winter happens. There isn’t that excitement that comes with the hope of playing out in the cold and making snow forts.

Instead, when the first snow fell, I wondered if we would get enough snow to re-teach drivers how to drive in snowy weather (the traffic is always bad on the first major snowfall as people remember how to drive safely). My next thoughts turn to the type of snow that was falling.

It was dusty small snow at first early this morning, the kind of snow that runs the risk of being more ice than anything else. Later on though it became fluffy and soft, which combined with the gloomy gray clouds meant this was as warm as it was going to get during snowy weather. Ironically the perfect weather for walking outside in my opinion. As bright and cheery as a sunny winter day could be, bright and sunny days in winter are ridiculously cold compared to the days that have a blanket of gray clouds.

My next thought was a question if I had to switch out to winter shoes.

A thought that was immediately forgotten when I went out grocery shopping. Fortunately the snow didn’t stick, and it wasn’t quite cold enough to freeze anything, so it was safe for walking.

I would like to say that I was sad for no longer seeing snow as a moment of excitement, but honestly it’s only exciting if you still like to do winter activities, of which I do not. For all I can take things pretty cold, I no longer take joy in sitting in a snowbank playing with snow.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 759

Because of… things… (journal set up) I hadn’t gotten to my demos like the way I wanted to this week. Though I did eventually get to some of my game demos so that’s something! One of the demos is actually for a game that already is out, and that is Magical Bakery, which currently has mixed reviews on Steam.

Though I suspect those reviews were the result of possible mechanical glitches when the game first went to demo and then full release. There is also to note there are only ten reviews on Steam, so that doesn’t say much.

I actually liked this game, but like Garden Trills, it was a game where I thought one thing and then got something else. Most cafe games that I’ve played recently tend to be auto simulators, in that you make sure to have the ingredients stocked and customers just come in, enjoy a bit and then leave, slowly draining you of your resources as they order drinks and food. 

This is not the case, this game is actually a time management game that reminds me a lot of Lemon Cake, a time management bakery game from 2022, which funnily enough was also a game with a bit of magic to it. In fact, there’s quite a few mechanics that this game shares with Lemon Cake. Which means for me that I wasn’t thrown completely out of my element despite not realizing this was a time management game.

And now that I’ve really thought about it, it shares a lot of mechanics with Lemon Cake. It makes me wonder if the developer had played Lemon Cake, but it’s not a bad thing. Especially if the mechanics are built upon.

One of the similarities between Lemon Cake, the bakery’s day does not start until you open the bakery. This means the player can bake things ahead of time in preparation of opening up. Especially if you have a lot of upgrades that allow you to store baked goods safely, which then allow the player to serve more customers within a work day, thereby earning more money. However Magical Bakery takes this one step further indicating that the player must discover pastries by actually making the item. Having time stop at the beginning and end of your day allows time for that experimentation.

While I think Magical Bakery has a better storyline than Lemon Cake, it’s not the strongest storyline. It’s very cheesy and the antagonist is Sunday cartoon levels evil, but that also doesn’t bother me. Time management games generally are geared towards people who like that game mechanic and so often the story plot is just a thin excuse to play that type of game. If you like time management games, I do recommend game and probably at some point I will buy this game.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 758

When the game Garden Trills came onto my radar the trailer showed a little bird planting seeds into giant pots and window beds. The idea that you were a little birdie planting flowers around a town sounded very cute (though why a little birdie would be doing that was beyond me).

This demo had actually been sitting in my library for over a month, because I just never got around to playing it. Between getting a cold, work, and then doing a writing challenge, there just wasn’t time.

While I really like this game, I’m glad I played the demo because I would have been caught off guard otherwise in terms of expectation. A lot of the initial talk around this was that this was a gardening game, which is… only sort of true. 

Garden Trills seems to be (so far) an exploration game in the same vein as Little Gator Game, where you’re just fulfilling a set of objectives while collecting, and exploring your way through the world. It’s unique mechanic though is that the flowers can be used to help your little bird navigate a large world. Pansies can be bounced on, tulips will spit your bird up vertically for more height and lilies will spit objects or your bird out like an aimed cannon to just name a few.

At first, I was thinking this is a puzzle game, because sometimes you need to plant flowers to help you to get where you’re going. However, while each flower has a different mechanic, they all do the same thing, they move your bird further than they can go themselves. While there may be the most effective answer to getting from point A to point B, there isn’t necessarily a wrong answer, hence this is more exploration than it is puzzling.

This one is probably higher on games I am most likely to buy on my wish list, simply because exploration games like this aren't that common. Little Gator Game and Short Hike are both exploration games that I ended up playing through more than once because I found them that engaging. I hope that Garden Trills will also be the same way, because these types of games are fun to play on a short weekend.