Aspeon ⁽¹⁸⁾

Offline project stuff was the big progress this month. The main thing I can share publicly is the metapuzzle blog post series. I'll probably post about that more broadly once I've done part 3, so if you're keeping up with this blog you've been getting a free preview. :)

I've had "try doing something in PICO-8" in the back of my mind for a while, but seeing Adam Saltsman's games lately have reawakened that itch. Maybe I'll give that a shot next time I have some gamedev cycles?

On the gameplay side, King Hesper's still looming large. I'm approaching the end of chapter 7, but the levels have gotten very difficult. I could maybe do a post about Nextfest demos too- the short version is Gentoo Rescue and Art of Reflection were puzzle highlights, and Angeline Era was intriguing even though I haven't played the games that inspired it.

If you're familiar with puzzlehunts, this one might be a little redundant. If you aren't, here's a pretty detailed post with an introduction to the sorts of puzzles you see there.

I'll be spoiling an old puzzle of mine: Wario, from the 2021 Microsoft Puzzlehunt. If you want to try solving it yourself, you can check the final answer here, or the individual minipuzzles at 9-Volt, Ashley, Dribble & Spitz, Jimmy T, Mona, Orbulon. There's a full solution here.

I've had some thoughts in my head for a while about drawing a line between puzzlehunt metapuzzles and puzzle game metapuzzles as a blog series or a ThinkyCon talk or something. Then a bunch of conversations about the topic happened on Discords I'm on at the same time, so that prompted me to start getting this written down sooner rather than later.

It's a hard thing to talk about because many of these things are late game or otherwise culminating, so there's a lot of spoilers. (and I haven't figured out how to do spoiler tags with Publii yet) So for now, I'll list spoilers before the break as appropriate.

This time around, vague and out-of-context spoilers for Fez, Noita, and Animal Well...

Not a lot to talk about on the dev front. Made a tiny amount of progress on the Meticulous Microbes update, including implementing a fourth mechanic that I think works nicely with the other three, but I haven't had a chance to do much more with it. This time of year is when some other projects with people offline that I don't/can't really talk about here spin up, so that's going to be taking up more of my creative energy in the next few months. Plus there's *gestures at state of the US*.

Not related to something I did this month but still cool, puzzle YouTuber Icely did a bit on Boarding Zone in a recent video. It's nice to see some more people finding it that way!

On a playing side, the behemoth taking up my time has been the new DROD fan levelset, The Descent of King Hesper. It's conceived as something that could be an introduction to the series, with a level introducing every mechanic the system supports. The catch is DROD has so many mechanics that the overall project took over a decade and is bigger than the five commercial releases put together. I'm making decent progress, I think- chapter six out of seven or eight, but only around half of the total number of puzzle rooms. That scares me a bit for just how much secret/optional content is in this. (And I haven't been ignoring that stuff either, just not prioritizing it)

I didn't make too much gamedev progress in December between holidays, playing Confounding Calendar games, and the year-end wrapup posts. So I'll do an overall year in review instead.