I hope you all had a good winter’s celebrations. I am in holiday mode. I’m so chilled out that I haven’t actually been doing very much, instead catching up on some Gaming™. Conveniently this is my last newsletter of 2021 so I’m going to do a little year retrospective as well, but first let me tell you about some games I played very fast.
ANIMAL CROSSING - Holiday mode means spending an irresponsible amount of time catching up on my backlog [proceeds to ignore backlog in favour of ANIMAL CROSSING] oops! ANIMAL CROSSING’s Final Update happened which added things like Brewster and Gyroids and a load of new furniture so I booted it back up for the first time since Summer 2020. Inconveniently, this happened mere days after the Halloween event so I spent a few weeks catching up with a “Halloween speedrun” using the power of time travel. This was also an excuse for me to quickly refresh the shops and customise without waiting for a new day to roll over, which helped to put some fun back into the game for me.
Another motivation was that I discovered the “poster frame” item, which allowed me to spend ages working on little posters to decorate my rooms. In the main room we have a selection of horror films and in the basement we have recreations of the character icons from DEVIL MAY CRY 5. They took way longer than I expected because I hate to use the AC pixel editor. No pain no gain I guess.
AC’s greatest crime is that I build these nice areas and nobody uses them
(The DMC3 and DMC5 coats on display in the basement were made by “SEAN MA-3431-2211-4204” thank you “SEAN MA-3431-2211-4204” they look very cool!)
Anyway my island of animal people is once more hibernating because my interest began to wane, but more importantly a new speedrunning challenge appeared before my eyes.
SOLAR ASH – SOLAR ASH was pretty much my #1 anticipated game of this year. I love HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER to death – it released just as I was finding my footing in gamedev and was such a huge inspiration to me that it sits very close to my heart. Enter SOLAR ASH, a game from the same devs with the same vibe and palette that’s primarily about grief, clambering around on large enemy creatures and going very fast.
I could talk forever about the story and designs and visuals and everything that is so utterly perfect and casparcore but I’m not here to write a game review, I’m here to talk about how I fell into a speedrunning shaped black hole so deep that I didn’t manage to resurface until the game was wrenched from my grasp. I’m not even all that interested in speedrunning. I think it’s a cool and interesting way of playing and I have seen some great runs in the past, but it’s not a style of playing that particularly intrigues me. I have never intentionally played a game very fast, but SOLAR ASH did something to my brain.
Hanging out with my new favourite guy
The core gameplay is all about platforming across environments and enemies while attacking holographic nodes in a specific order, except that the terrain vaporises you if you take too long or misstep. It’s basically a collection of checkpoint races that ask you to get good at the movement and momentum systems and it feels very cool and stylish when you pull them off. My first run was a leisurely 7.5 hours long – I spent a lot of time exploring every single nook and cranny, repeatedly falling off of the bosses during combat and only occasionally being vaporised.
Unfortunately for me the time-until-vaporisation is incredibly lenient on the standard difficulty so I kicked things up a notch and started a playthrough on CHALLENGE MODE, shaving 3 hours off of my original time and finding better routes through the levels, but the timers were still pretty easygoing. I wanted true suffering.
HARDCORE MODE feels like a cruel joke at first. The timers expect near-perfect execution of button presses and it does not ease you into it. There is no recovering from a stall in your movement speed or jumping at the wrong moment. You will be vaporised. The first time I ran this I couldn’t get past the first puzzle and got scared. The second time I ran this I managed a speedy 2 hours and 48 minutes at 69% completion (nice). It was rough, but I persevered.
Along the way I found that my biggest timesinks were making mistakes on the boss encounters, as you were rarely granted an instant retry if you fell off – if I managed perfect boss runs I could probably get a pretty decent time. I repeated this run for over a week, learning and streamlining until I got my time down to 1 hour and 38 minutes. Despite using only two speedrunning tricks and still making plenty of mistakes, I was only around 20 minutes off of the World Record. (That was December. The WR has since gotten shorter.)
I know a perfect run is possible. I have a target: 1 hour and 30 minutes. I had to stop playing due to holiday plans but I will return one day to conquer this challenge I have set for myself. I will defeat HARDCORE MODE very quickly.
This is the only boss of my HARDCORE run where I’m not wearing the secret spoiler outfit so. here’s worm.
I spent a portion of this month lamenting the very small quantity of art I managed this year before grabbing myself by the shoulders and shaking vigorously in order to to remind myself of just how much I managed without realising. Like sure I didn’t do as much 2D art as I wanted to, but you know what else I did? 3D, pixel art and even some environment art, and while I’m still pretty wobbly with them I’m glad to have found some more confidence in those skills. So what did I do? Here’s a quick roundup!
3D - I learnt BLENDER! It’s not scary anymore! I spent like a month recreating a scene from ELECTROMA which was stuck inside my brain, only to spend the next month porting the robot models to VRCHAT for my own amusement. They’re pretty rough in places but for my first real foray into 3D since 2016 I’m pretty damn happy with them!
A few months later I ended up doing some modelling for a gamejam game called PSIFROST, creating chains, slimes and even a racetrack. Normally I do programming for gamejams but it was very cool and fun to step back from that and focus on these newly rediscovered 3D skills.
My friend Sid modelled the vehicles and some of the buildings here! Check out the project page for full credits!
My last 3D work of the year was FENTONWORKS’ HAUNTED HOT DOG MACHINE from DANNY PHANTOM, which I think I modelled and textured while in some sort of trance. I don’t know why I made this or why I wanted to make this, but it’s a funny haunted hot dog machine filled with evil hotdogs so I think it’s valid to not have an explanation. This was also an opportunity to return to a style of texturing I enjoy that creates nice linework and to make some updates to my old cel shader.
PIXELS – I’ve always been really apprehensive about pixel art and animation because I’m so new to it but my still-in-progress HALLOWEEN HAUNTED HOUSE project meant I had the opportunity to get good at them and experiment with what my style might look like. It’s also validated my love of horrendously neon palettes and helped me focus on things like silhouettes, lighting and framing, so honestly it’s just been a great boost to my art brain. Here’s some scaries.
It’s also helped me get over my avoidance of working with pixels on other projects too…(I needed a break from COSMO due to other work but I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things !!)
2D – Like I mentioned before, I felt bad for not having a bigger 2D output but honestly I’m still pretty happy with what I managed. I did some personal art of my OC Ghost, I did some BEETLEJUICE fanart, I did some environment thumbnails for PSIFROST and plenty of other little sketches and ideas. You can find all of these in previous newsletters, but here’s a quick sketch collage! (You can find polished versions of some of these in my main gallery).
This was a good idea executed questionably. I really enjoy having the space to ramble about things I’ve been up to and I fondly look back at the newsletters I did manage this year, but it’s obvious that I haven’t yet found the trick to writing these in a timely manner. Ultimately it is no bother. I simply move at my own pace. That being said, I want to try and find the right balance for these this year.
Anyway, all of my newsletters are up and available to read right here, and I’ll keep writing them even if they’re late.
Hey! I did Gameing this year! Here’s my game list:
A large focus on horror and FPSes this year…along with my increased interest in horror films it appears I’m just a scary media liker these days. I had a good time with all of these, but my favourites from this year were: SOLAR ASH and DELTARUNE CH2. My thoughts on SOLAR ASH are above and I feel that DELTARUNE needs little explanation – it’s just a fun little snippet of joy and I thoroughly enjoyed playing it. DEAD BY DAYLIGHT gets a special mention because I am still playing it a year later despite my usual reluctance to dive into multiplayer experiences. I don’t know if I can call it a fantastic game but it is very funny.
I mentioned most if not all of the other games in previous newsletters so I won’t dive into details, but there are a few exceptions. DEATHLOOP was a greatly anticipated and very enjoyable experience that I have yet to finish, while SUBWAY MIDNIGHT and INSCRYPTION were both games I played around November that I didn’t get a chance to talk about. I think they’re both great – SUBWAY MIDNIGHT is a short and colourful horror experience and INSCRYPTION is a narrative card-based game that’s very easy to spoil, so there’s not much I can say except that it’s good and you should give it a shot.
Not included in this list but still very important is VRCHAT, which I discovered in 2021 and had many great little adventures in. It’s not really a ‘game’ to me and more of a sightseeing/social hangout app where I get to dress up and explore levels ripped directly from PS1 games. It’s been a good excuse to get back into 3D and is the only real VR experience I care about. Maybe I’ll make some more stuff for it next year…?
At some point during the Current Global Situation I developed an interest in horror films. I like to blame it on DEAD BY DAYLIGHT but truthfully I was already leaning towards the genre some time before I started playing. But what DEAD BY DAYLIGHT did do was encourage me to check out slashers, which is what most of my watchlist has consisted of.
I’ve really enjoyed setting aside time to bundle myself up in blankets and sit in the dark until 5am so that I can have mini horror marathons and I hope to do this more in 2022. Maybe I will branch out from slashers. Maybe I will watch the hundreds of terrible slasher sequels. I will have to wait and see.
Here’s my current favourites:
SCREAM - I can’t not like a villain called ‘GHOSTFACE’, that would be against my contract.
HALLOWEEN 1978 / 2018 – I think these are a winning combo. I have nothing funny to say they’re just really good.
TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE – Pretty unsettling! Shoutout to my favourite subtitle: [chainsaw sound still going]
FREDDY VS JASON – I wish more films were willing to be like this.
HELLRAISER is next on my list so here’s Pinhead looking respectfully as I perish
Anyway, Happy Winter’s Halloween! Happy New Halloween!
I hope everyone has a nice holiday and a good start to 2022. Here’s a festive photo of my favourite little guy, Merlin. He likes to spy on everyone from under the tree.
Caspar 👻
