Happy Halloween...yesterday (Oct 2023 Newsletter) (Patreon)

Hey folks! I'm afraid I don't have anything spooky for you. Halloween has come and gone and all I managed to do was watch Coraline, which my wife has talked about for years and I'd never seen. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly recommend. Anyway! I've had quite a productive month. Mostly this was filled with the production of my RUN tutorial, which is live now and y'all should go watch it. Even if only for the intro sketch, which has me making this face for some reason.

I was trying something new with this one, where all of the backgrounds were generated using Unreal Engine, which is not something I've ever worked with before. I had heard it was easy enough to use for basic stuff and that was a lie that I was told. This program is not intuitive at all, but I was able to figure out their city sample enough to make a few backgrounds. Honestly, the helicopter was the hardest part. I'm glad I did it, and might even try it again some day, but for now I'm just happy to have finished it and be moving on to the next thing.

Speaking of, it took a while to get a hold of the Barrage publishers, but I eventually did and they're sending me a copy of it and the expansions. I'm looking forward to getting to work on that, but because of this delay and the fact that they're sending it from overseas, depending on how long it takes to get here, that video might not come out until a little ways into December. I'm hoping that's not the case, but we'll see.

Anyway, I played a few games this month, like Neotopia, shown in the header. I played that with the Murphs and you can check it out a full playthrough here. It's a fun and colorful pattern creation game with a cool way of selecting tiles and playing cards. I don't know if it would have the longest shelf life ever, but I thoroughly enjoyed playing it once and I'm sure I'd enjoy a second game at least.

I also got to play Undergrove for Rahdo (watch here). This is a highly anticipated game by Elizabeth Hargrave, and I thought it was really good. People are inevitably going to compare it to Wingspan though, and that might do it a slight disservice because they play so differently. This is much more of an area control game and doesn't really have the engine building that Wingspan has. Because of that, it's less explosively entertaining, but instead I think it's a more satisfying puzzle. If you like area control and nature, definitely check it out.

While I was at the Murphs we tried out the Landmarks expansion to Cascadia. This adds on landmark tokens that you can claim if you're the first to achieve some specific objective, and there are a ton that get put out at the beginning of the game. These will score points in different ways, but they also block the region, so you can't place animals anymore. If you wanted Cascadia to be a a little more crunchy, a little thinky-er, this does that really well. Though if you like it more as a chill experience, you can probably avoid Landmarks, because this version definitely asks more of you. That's about all I've got for you this month, so I'll leave you with a picture of my cats looking like they're gonna kick my ass for trespassing in their neighborhood. Bye!