Club PA Newsletter #104 (Patreon)

Good God.  Can someone explain what is happening with time?  I guess we'll get back to that in a second.  Anyway,

I think it's easy to look at Farlight 84 as an assemblage of fins, windows, and doors from other games, just sort of heaped up on each other.  I think that would be completely fair, judging by the things you're likely to see - silly Fortnite Skinz, some vehicle options, Apex Legends powers, it's all in the pot.  When I hear "Mobile FPS ported to PC," I begin to itch all over.  That's not a first choice pastime.  But somebody over there, in this Singaporean mobile game shop, has put together something that Steam still calls "very positive," and they don't like shit.  They'll get mad at free shit!  They'll get mad because you made a game that is like what you said, but not like they thought.  So consider how decent a mobile port, battle royale shooter would have to be to retain that type of street cred in that haunted space.

It has a couple twists - you earn XP as you travel around, and level up when you hit the caps by pressing V.  The rule in our group is that you have to say "ENHANCE" in a very serious voice when you do so, and I think that brings a special something to the proceedings.  One of the main things is definitely the fact what the vehicles in the game are really just weird toys.  Even the muscle car has big flamethrowers for some reason.  There's also a high-jumping robotic grasshopper, or literal transformers, or quat little battle suits.  It's got Mike playing with Randos for God's sake, Rando Calrissian, and the name from this month's strip is a real name a person chose on purpose.

I just got out of the Strategy Meeting, which is a fancy name for The "check in with everybody every two weeks and let us know what's going on" meeting.  I'd been writing the novel just before, so it was an opportunity to thank Ryan for agreeing to verbally abuse me every Monday if I don't type enough.  Now when I type I can hear the snap of his barb'd whip and the baying of his hunting hounds.  Only a certain number of words per day will keep me ahead of them.  In fact, I can hear them now - I'd better run (by which I mean type).

Writingly yours,