Week round-up: Mar 9
Here's what I've been reading over the last two weeks! It's not much. I was busy!! It's almost the end of 3/9 and I need to post this. Enjoy.
How to get into (or catch up with) the mainline Pokémon games - Bruno Dias
Bruno's writeup about which Pokemon games to play if you want to introduce yourself to the series was the inspiration I needed to get off my butt and finish my own post about how Pokemon trading works between a lot of these games in the Pokemon ecosystem. Bruno's post covers the evolution of the games over time and ends with a good breakdown of what each game is a good example of re: the Pokemon formula. This series has been around long enough to be its own weird litte world full of its own weird feature creep and its own slow approach to modern narrative design and open-world gameplay.
The Balatro Timeline - LocalThunk
Plenty of people have posted already about how LocalThunk, the Balatro dev, started a blog, but I do recommend checking it out if you haven't already. This post about the game's development timeline is a great read. I particularly enjoyed the very relatable moment where he just stops working on the game because he's not feeling it. It's also fun to read someone's timeline of how often they changed their project, what they did in what order, how many ideas they explored and discarded, and so on. The later half of the timeline also gets into the pressure and stress and straight up anxiety attacks involved in launching an indie game (something I am living through now myself :| ).
roboshirts - https://xixxii.neocities.org/
This is not an essay, but rather a gallery of clip art adjacent t-shirt designs that are completely incoherent and possibly generated by an automated system or two. Or three. Honestly I have no idea what's going on here but this stuff is desperately funny. I particularly like the "what sex is this fish" shirt design.