Friday Rambles 2025-10-24

It's the Friday Friday Rambles, not early, not late. Right on time.

October is almost over! Where has the year gone! Where is Game 2??

Game Dev Stuff

Valve made a new landing page on Steam that shows up for "Steam Deck Verified" games and it looks pretty cool.

As for Game 2, I started writing dialogue, just so I can have something down to rewrite later. If I don't have anything written, how will I rewrite it? Duh. This is how I wrote most of Game 1, so it should work for Game 2, right? Okay, well, I was mostly busy with sticker shop stuff this week, so...

Merch Stuff

The Shop is open again! I dropped a couple new sticker designs, and people are actually buying them.

I keep the "What" Clear Sticker Bundle in the "New" section because it's still popular. Even though it's been almost a year and a half since those were released. Wait, what?

As I experimented with before my little Odyssey to Asia, I included doodles along with the usual thank you message I send with every order. Except I can't do a doodle for every order since it would take too long, so I just included one for people who bought over some arbitrary amount of stickers.

A small batch of Skye doodles. I also drew a bunch of Pennies and Tiger-chen. The first few I made looked kind of bad(der than the rest) but I sent them anyway. Sorry if you got a weird looking Tiger-chan. In any case, if you bought anything from the shop this week, you're very cool and I love you.

Anyway, I have enough sales to satisfy my budgeting spreadsheet for the month! I'm so happy I have an audience of sticker buying fans I can rely on to support me by buying my stuff, even when I'm busy not releasing Game 2 or drawing funny pictures. It gives me hope that when I finally end up releasing Game 2, I'll at least recoup my Steam registration fee.

There's actually been a bunch of discussion recently in the Game Dev Sphere about disappointing launches for indie titles and whatnot, which keeps making me nervous, but I also know that I'm fortunate enough to have a solid base of fans interested in my characters and art, and not just one particular game itself. Well, that's what I'll tell myself so I'm not laying awake at night or getting more gray hairs.

Let's see if I'm this confident after Game 2 is out! I'm so ready for my Sophomore Slump!

I should stop following game marketing newsletters.

Misc Discounts and Sales Stuff

Fanatical's "Build Your Own Story Rich Games Bundle" is still going on. A week later I'm actually pretty pleased with how it's going. I guess it's a good idea to have multiple storefronts after all!

The Nintendo Switch version is on sale right now, too. I didn't make a sales picture because it's too soon after the Fanatical bundle picture, and frankly I'm sick of that picture. Sick of it! No more!

The US version of the online Nintendo shop seems to have lost all formatting for linebreaks in the game description field. It's annoying me, but it's also every other game on the store, so maybe it'll be fixed at some point. Not that anyone's looking at the store page. lol

Well, at least they're buying the Switch version in Japan.

The End

Okay, if this week was getting re-situated after a long overseas voyage, the next week will be back to the old routine. I'm almost done packing orders and I'm definitely looking to make some progress on the game dev front.

Thanks for sticking around, as always! See you next week.