Smashing open a bottle of champagne on the corner of my monitor
...To christen this blog, or whatever. I'm not really sure how to start this with an appropriate amount of fanfare because I'd rather just get to posting as though I've been maintaining this blog this whole time.
But before I do that?
Onion Tax
This is the view I usually get of him. It's a little rolling storage cart I bought from Ikea with the sole intent of providing him somewhere to nap that isn't my keyboard. When he's not ruining my life by attempting to eat computer cables or break my mugs, he's usually cramming himself into the top shelf of the cart.
There's champagne all over my desk and I should do something about that
Anyway, I guess I should address the whole starting-a-blog thing. I've always been abstractly interested in blog-keeping but too self conscious to start Formally Posting in the way that so many blogs do. I don't think this will be particularly formal as I am incapable of taking myself seriously, but it'll at least be more (adjective) than how I use social media. That adjective is either going to be reflective, structured, or a secret third thing depending on the mood. Whatever.
I'm also generally interested in writing up my thoughts on various books/games/etc art things I encounter without the confines of Letterboxd or similar medium-specific review websites. I like reflecting on stuff, don't get me wrong, but I don't do enough of it for any one specific medium to really warrant the upkeep of various accounts. I currently have a vague idea of sort of daisy-chaining together things I read or watch with thematic through-lines that could make for interesting blog posts. I can definitely rack up a wordcount for a few of those and honestly have already written pretty lengthy drafts that I have pitched to a few different sites to no avail. So, self publishing it is. Eventually.
But for now, my main intention for blog posts is to write about the newest game at KO_OP.
Young Suns is out!
So the real driving force behind me starting this blog is the fact that the game I have been working on for almost 3 years now is now announced. And also out? In game preview/early access??? It's still pretty surreal. I started working at KO_OP to help get Goodbye Volcano High over the finish line, but it was announced before I started working there so I've never had a particularly strong sense of ownership over the work. Sure, I put a lot of myself into the game and the writing I did for it, but I was less a creator of GVH and more of a fixer. I came in to finish the job and address what needed additional work.
Young Suns, on the other hand, is different to me. We got it funded at around the tail end of my first year at KO_OP and optimistically thought Goodbye Volcano High was nearly done. It obviously was not, but that didn't stop me from attempting to phase off of my work on GVH and onto Young Suns pre-production, which was done by a team comprised of me, our creative director, our art director, and our tech director.
It is a very strange feeling to look at our team of nearly 30 people knowing that there was once a time where it was just 4 people spitting out ideas while another game hurtled towards an uncertain end. When GVH finally launched in August 2023, nearly the entire team took off a month of work to recover from burnout and launch stress. I can't speak for my coworkers, but I don't think I truly recovered from the experience until this year. 2024 was a very rough year for me, emotionally and creatively, and I've only recently begun to start thinking of myself as having recovered from it...just in time to find new things to recover from. Yay?
I'm mostly kidding, but not entirely. As a team, we've addressed a lot of the problems that made GVH a fraught production, but we've also discovered a lot of new ones, not in the least because our studio has grown pretty significantly. Young Suns is also fundamentally a very different game than GVH, so there's not a whole lot we can reuse. But our announcement + surprise launch has gone about as well as we expected it to, for which we are endlessly grateful.
Anyway, now that YS is out I am hoping to do some write-ups on what it's been like to work on the game from pre-production to the present. This game is a lot of firsts for me; my first game of this scale, my first early access game, my first time working on pre-production in a professional capacity, etc... So there's a lot to talk about! But I'll save it for future blog posts. I'm a yapper, so I could keep going, but unless I put Onion pictures between every other paragraph I doubt anyone will read that far.
I & the rest of KO_OP will be on holiday break after this week, so I make no promises as to when my next post will be. Here's hoping I can get it going semi-regularly!