I introduced Lucy to Tunic and now it’s 2am and she won’t come to bed
Joel Auterson
Hello! My name's Joel and I'm a software developer. No, not that one.
I run a tiny indie game studio called Bearwaves. I'm also a published poet.
I'm part of the Rare Mammals collective, and am an alumnus of Southbank New Poets and Barbican Young Poets. I work in carbon emission reduction at a company called Emitwise.
Everything tagged with 'Games'
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Hell yeah new Pope
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God damn, they already got the garbage fake mobile games doing bug killers
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Very pleased to discover several games recently ported to the Epic store are using eos4j!
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The challenge with putting an action sequence set to a musical number in your game is that the action has to be really good in order for me to justify listening to the same song for double-digit minutes. Control earns this. Alan Wake 2, sadly, does not.
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Might ship a game tomorrow
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Rolled credits on Yakuza 0. What a wonderful, brilliant, stupid, incredible game
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game pretty
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The last game I touched professionally - excited to finally play it
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Just submitted the final build of Feud 2.0 for review to the stores. It’s real, it’s happening, we’re doing it
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cool guys don’t look at explosions (except us)
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A bit buggy but I now have Lua scripting inside Growl’s debug UI!
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Rolled credits on Witcher 3 after playing off-and-on for about eight years. Just outstanding, sad it’s over.
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First Warlord’s Ruin clear!
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Not sure yet if we’ll get any kind of boost from visibility on Steam when we leave Early Access but here’s hoping.
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I just realised that Feud has crossed the 70,000 players mark! Very pleased
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Working out who to contact for press stuff in games now seems so much harder than it did five years ago. How does this work? Who do I talk to? Aaaahhh
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Actually just not finishing the demo to not spoil myself for launch
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The inventory screen is inspired
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Really very impressed by the Pacific Drive demo
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Any games press types On Here who would like to try out a prerelease build of Feud 2.0? Get in touch if so!
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Quite a nice day of Feud polishing and bug fixing. Still got a couple of localisations to review and import but other than that I’m feeling good about the release on the 23rd!
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Trying to explain mastodon to this guy
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Also the little tribute to Super Mario Sunshine in the cassette levels made me cackle
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Celeste 64 is just wonderful. They could have so easily made it into a throwaway gag but it’s a tough-as-nails retro 3D platformer with typically beautiful music.
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Not sure if I always get the Best Dressed commendation at the end of a Destiny match because I’m the best dressed, or because I’m actually quite shit at the game
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Trying to see how far I can get with NieR Reincarnation before it gets pulled offline.
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Jusant is just stunning
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Ultra Sun was the last good Pokémon game. My mind will not be changed.
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eos4j v1.2.0 has been released! This new version adds support for the Ecom
interface in Epic Online Services. It also fixes a bug with conversion from
timestamps to Java Date objects.
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The games of 2023
As many have written, 2023 was a great year for the games themselves and a pretty dire year for the industry and the people working in it. Let’s hope things improve in 2024.
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Just saw the Wide Ocean Big Jacket devs have a new game out - instant buy for me.
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Well, there’s still a fair amount of work to do - bugs to fix, translations to review - but as of today Feud is feature-complete for graduating from Early Access. It’s nearly eight years since we started working on it - longer than my professional game development career lasted!
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Just played a tiny prototype of what might well become the next Bearwaves game and I am very energised.
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Sounds like my computer might actually be able to run Alan Wake 2, which is a relief.
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Rolled credits on Signalis last night and haven’t been able to get it out of my head, so it’s good this excellent video essay from Sam Greer exists.
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eos4j v1.1.0 has been released! This new version features support for the Leaderboards interface in Epic Online Services.
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Been playing Chants of Sennaar and it’s really something special.
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Had my first report on eos4j this weekend from someone actually using it in their game! Very exciting.
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I worked at Improbable in 2019, when Unity tried to change their TOS to screw us over. They ended up backtracking and put their TOS on GitHub, saying they would not change TOS retroactively.
It appears to be gone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_silently_removed_their_github_repo_to_track/
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lol, lmao
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Turns out immersive theatre isn’t video games
I went to see Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City the other night. In the bar on the way in, I confidently said to my partner, “immersive theatre is video games”.
It isn’t.
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Since launching on the Epic store a couple of months ago, Feud has had something like 28,000 new players. That feels significant!
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Alright, I caved. I have a Steam Deck. I also have £45 of store credit to get nice games for it; recommendations please!
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I will admit it irks me slightly that my application for a Switch developer license was declined when the eShop is full of shit like this.
https://kotaku.com/nintendo-switch-eshop-aaa-digital-clock-release-1850205218
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Rolled credits (well, you know what I mean) on Lightfall. I actually quite enjoyed the action movie vibe of the campaign as a whole but every complaint about the narrative is valid; it feels like we’re back to the bad old days.
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The games of 2022
I had a really great year in 2022. I also played fewer games in 2022 than maybe any year previous. I don’t necessarily want to think about what that might mean, thank you very much.
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The games of 2021
I’m genuinely impressed that 2021 managed to be a generally worse year than 2020, for a variety of fun reasons. It had some high highs but also some very low lows. It was a year in which I mostly quit social media (a positive change!), which means I was out of The Games Discourse for the last third. Do I miss it? Like hell.
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The games I played in 2020
2020 has been hot garbage. It has had very few redeeming factors and I am not appreciative of it at all.
Some great games, though.
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The best days of my life
I finally got around to picking up Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC. This was a very big step for me. Let me explain.
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one-fifty: What Remains of Edith Finch (2017)
In my early teens, after experiencing my first death in the family, I developed an odd fascination with the preservation of spaces.
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one-fifty: a new writing project
I love games. I love playing games, I love reading about games, but I’ve realised that what I love most is talking about games, as anyone who’s spent time around me can attest.
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Joel's Top 5 (2016)
What a great year, eh? OK, so 2016’s been fairly appalling, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some great films, games, albums and a bunch of other stuff. Here are my top Things this year, from as many genres of Thing as I can be bothered.
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Pokémon Go
This isn’t really going to be a game review. Taken purely as a game, and ignoring its wider impact, Pokémon Go is not very good. It crashed frequently before a recent update, there’s nothing to do outside populated areas, the drain on battery and mobile data is high, and it’s incredibly hard for new players coming in to the game a few weeks late to catch up.
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It's time to stop pre-ordering
It’s been a little while since I was really excited for the release of a game. The last time was probably Halo 4’s release this time three years ago (for the record, it was disappointing), and the last time I pre-ordered a game was, I think, Mass Effect 3, six months earlier.
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Pixels Are Evil
The game development landscape has changed significantly over the last few years (understatement of the century, but whatever). One of the most significant of these changes , especially for game developers - though it’s one that often goes unnoticed - is the rise of screen resolution and aspect ratio fragmentation.
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Review: FIFA 15
Anyone who knows me will know that I’m not really a huge fan of the beautiful game. I am, however, quite into gaming, and so thought that it was only fair this latest upgrade get a review. I’ll look at a few different sections. Without further ado…
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Uplift: A Postmortem
Before I begin, I should point out: Uplift isn’t dead. The Kickstarter for Uplift is dead. Sensationalist title, I know. Let’s pretend I’ve been learning how to be a journalist. Because having a blog definitely makes me a journalist, right? Ahem.
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Review: FEZ (PC)
Polytron’s XBLA hit (and personal favourite of Mojang’s Notch) has finally made in onto PC in the last couple of weeks. I downloaded the game yesterday and finished it this morning, after a small delay - I saw the sunrise creeping at my window and decided I’d better get some sleep. FEZ is absolutely fantastic.