February will always be my least favourite month of the year. It’s cold, dark, contains Valentines day (which I’ve always thought was a crock of shit), and is invariably a month where I feel burned out from work. There just isn’t anything going for February. That said, I hope everyone else out there reading this had a better month than I did.

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Best performer: Fighting Games and Approachable Design

February was poised to be my worst performing month in a long time, but then I finished working on Mr MKL’s approachable fighting game design post. That turned out to be exactly the kick in the ass the blog needed to rocket over the previous record month for total views and visitors. I also think this stands as good proof that I should be sharing my work around more. I tend to not share my stuff around as aggressively as I ought to, but no one can read a post if they don’t know it exists.

MKL’s post was actually a bit of an interesting situation. We met via Fantasy Strike and have gotten to know one another over the past two years. He approached me and asked if I’d be interested in hosting what he’d written on my blog. The post started as a script for a video, but went off the rails and he figured it was more inline with the kind of content I post here. What makes this interesting is that, in my experience, normally you have to ask people for content rather than having them offer it to you freely. Either way, we spent several weeks combing over it and cleaning it up before it finally got posted for everyone to read. Editing someone else’s work is a lot more difficult than your own work, but it was a nice different experience to go through.

Other than that not much to report on for February.

Gaming

Superliminal

The first thing I tackled this month was Superliminal and I think that game is best played knowing as little about it as possible. What I will say is I really liked the core mechanic of changing the size of objects by manipulating perspective. The concept is delivered on really well and made for what I found to be a satisfying series of puzzles. If you’re in the market for a neat puzzler it is definitely one to keep a tab on.

The game is a little on the pricy side given the two hour run time, so if you’re not confident in buying it at full price grab it on sale. I promise it’s worth your time.

Huniepop 2: Double Date

You all knew it was coming, but I bought and played through the entirety of Huniepop 2: Double Date in its release week. If you’ve already read my post on the game then you know it was exactly what I was hoping for from a sequel: more mechanical depth. I know there are a handful of people who took issue with other aspects of the game, but I was quite pleased that the things I enjoyed about the first game were amped up within Double Date. It’s one worth checking out if you can look past the nudity and just want a really good match three game.

Slay the Spire

With the new stuff out of the way let’s dive into the stuff I dipped back into: Slay the Spire. I haven’t had a ton of energy the last several weeks and needed something I could easily drop in and out of while hammering away at other things. Thus I picked up Slay the Spire again and have continued having fun with it.

Despite the fun I’ve been having there is an observation I’ve made about Slay the Spire with my recent play time. Generally speaking, it feels like you can roll a Slay the Spire run where you have no, or very little chance of winnings. I should qualify that by also stating that on the default difficulty I feel like all runs are winnable, but things get a little hairy when you start to rise through the ascension levels. Certain strategies become entirely obsolete and failing to identify which strategy you can viably pursue based on your drops will invariably lead to a loss. By contrast, because Hades is an action game you can, in theory, win every single run regardless of what upgrades you get throughout the run provided you play well enough. It’s a small difference that is born out of the different sub-genres that both games reside in, but I thought it was an interesting observation.

Art

This was the month where I finally realized that I’d been drawing Fufo’s hair mirrored depending on what side I had her facing. No that was not intentional…I was doing it because I hadn’t thought about how her hair really shouldn’t do that. So this month I decided to canonize the bangs on a particular side and work toward drawing them from the other side. My first attempt at this isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either. Just one more thing to practice and improve.

I also spent a bunch of time studying other people’s art (again). There’s some thing I observed that I want to implement myself. I think the big thing I want to change is doing more hard shapes and lines with the highlights and shadows. I feel like that’ll fit what I’m going for more than the somewhat sloppy rounded edges I keep going with.

Community

As always, here’s five posts from around the community that you should read if you haven’t already.

Athena | AmbiGaming – Intimacy Issues: Game Lovin’

Quietschisto | RNG – What Remains of What Remains of Edith Finch

Ian | Adventure Rules – Spiritfarer Actually Satisfied My Desire for a Melancholy Farming Sim

AK | Everyhing is Bad for You – Fanservice Done Right

Genni | Ace Asunder – ACEapp: Choosing the Right Sugar Daddy (or Mommy)

That’s all I’ve got for this round. Thanks for reading.