New to Narrative

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New to Narrative 2: Electric Boogaloo

Heya friendos! It seems that my newsletter bot malfunctioned a bit. Oh well! On to the real deal then. I’m back from my vacation and will thusly (after a short rest) return to action.

How Am I Doing?

So, I just came back from a 6-week trip to South Korea and Japan. It was quite an adventure and a lot of first times for me. First time long haul flight, first time out of Europe, first time meeting my partner’s family, first time for a lot of foods, the list goes on. I’ve had an enlightening time, but definitely need some space to process all the new information, so I will keep it brief in this newsletter. No doubt the following newsletters will be inspired by everything we experienced there!

What Am I Doing?

For now, I’m going to relax for a few days and play games in my pajamas. After visiting a bunch of temples in Japan, I felt the strong urge to replay Sekiro. I’m already a few bosses in now. I love the environment in this game so much, it really feels like a fantastical rendition of mythical Japan. A lot of you know I’m a simp for Soulsborne games, but I’m still surprised to see so much of Tenchu’s DNA in there. I really hope someone makes a stealth-focused game of that caliber at some point.

Left: Tenchu: Stealth Assassins (1998) Right: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019)

I also bought Pentiment on sale, because it seems like a good case study for the new game idea I have. I don’t want to give anything away for now, because it is still in its infancy, but I’m pretty sure I will hop on this idea soon.

So what else can be expected in the future? After my rest, and some potential prototypes for said idea, I will hop back on making videos and blog posts again. What’s in the works right now? A brief rundown of procedural narrative and an implementation of it and an explanation of emergent stories.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

I’m not going to lie, I was considering stopping making videos before I went on this trip. The ones I made cost me so much time and energy and I didn’t love the process. Only a handful of people were watching them and I didn’t see a reason why I would continue putting myself through that. Especially this video, took me multiple months of agonizing and in the end I still was hardly satisfied with the results.

But… it did great! As of yet, it has around 7k views and netted me about 700 new subscribers. Apart from that, so many people are vocal about how useful it was, and how it was exactly what they needed to learn about this subject. Of course, I secretly hoped it would blow up, but I would never expect folks to be so openly praising about it. It was a great surprise to come back to and immediately motivated me to continue after all.


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