#FF 3

There are plenty of amazing folks out there to follow in every field on every platform, but I don’t know them all, not have the time to talk about them! (Incidentally it’s hard to also watch Netflix on the side while typing on a mechanical keyboard, too loud)  Anyways, onward! These will be pretty short because 1) I’m bad at this and 2) There’s only finite space available (There isn’t, I’m just bad at this). Without further ado, I give you a list:

Natalie @ScarletCatalie

Natalie is super awesome, so awesome in fact, that she was recognised in GamesIndustry 100 in 2018 list. Natalie makes awesome games which you can find on her itch.io page and has a Patreon if that’s your thing. She talk’s a lot about games but is also fairly light hearted and fun.

BarryOne @BarrySkellern

Barry likes shooters. Barry also likes to chase the odd high score, or so I’ve been told. He’s told me that I’m the only person to have finished the demo for his latest game Thrunt XL and I believe him. Barry’s a pretty down to Earth bloke who likes to talk games and streams as well as devs.

Jemma @urbanneurosis

Lover of cats and variety streamer Jemma is super cool. Unfortunately for me she’s in Australia which means timezones which means I don’t get to catch her streams much, but when I do they’re always fantastic! If I ever get around to making an actual game I’ll be sending her a key as soon as I can generate one!

Craig Perko @craigperko

Craig is a really cool, chill dev. He’s working on a game called The Galactic Line, and a few other projects along the way too. Not only that but he streams dev and has a lot of interesting stuff to say about games and things in general.

Yunitex @unakavanagh

Yunitex is a cool Irish streamer, and not only does she stream in English, but also does some streams in our Irish language, or ‘as Gailge’ as we would say. Incidentally I don’t speak the language but that is a whole other (sad) story. She also talks a bit of Irish politics and generally likes to have a bit of craic.

Keith Evans @KaynSD

Keith is a really lovely guy, and I really like the way a lot of his tweets seem like he’s just thinking out loud, and we get the privilege of hearing what’s going on in his head. He’s working on an interesting non deterministic proceduraly generated game using koch curves (I hope I got all of that right), and you guessed it, he streams dev too! Well worth checking out his streams if you like watching dev happen.

Katie Aidley @katiesgamecrner

You know what? I don’t think Katie streams (I could be wrong, I an not good at paying attention when I should). But she does blog about a favourite pass-time of mine: boardgaming! Support Katie’s Patreon because supporting cool and interesting people is important!

Xavier Nelson Jr @WritNelson

Xavier is super cool and responsible for such things as the #BillyOceanGame at GDC 2018 as well as doing writing for Hypnospace Outlaw and PCGamer. I really liked his recent piece on Deus Ex and his piece on honouring loved ones in games. He’s also an endearingly positive and very likable chap.

CT Toth @IAmCJToth

CJ is writing, and writing and writing. I’ve read some of that writing, heck, I even own some of that writing, and for what it’s worth, I enjoy that writing. She also blogs, and a lot more regularly than me (I should fix that). I’m looking forward to her next game, known as The Fall, even though I know nothing about it!

Joost Kivits @Joost_Kivits

Joost (Pronaunced Yoast) runs Beggar Studios, and is working on a game called A Beggar’s End, and RPG set in a magical desert. We stream Divinity: Original Sin 2 together with the HyperGauntlet developer himself, Nick Udell. Joost is a really cool guy and great fun to stream with, even if I did ‘accidentally’ set him on fire on more than one occasion.

Seems to be a lot of streamers here, or is everyone just streaming these days? Heck, even I stream from time to time! As always if you don’t see your name here, it’s not because I don’t think you’re awesome, it’s because I don’t have the time or ability to list so many great folks! If you want to find more cool people to follow you can check out my previous follow Friday posts: #FF and #FF2.

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One year on

A year and a day ago I started this blog with the aim of posting once a week, either about games or gamedev. In my first post ‘Opening Gambit’, I talked a little but about where I was in my game dev and where I was planning on going. Of course nothing has turned out quite as I’d planned and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I thought it would be fitting to talk a bit about how I’ve progressed in the year and how I plan to go from there, as a reflection of my first post.

Games Roundup

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the games I’ve been playing lately. I’ve dabbled in a few games but I’ll only talk about the few that really grabbed me. I’ve been replaying a lot of CoD: Modern Warfare 2 lately but there’s no real point getting into that, and besides I’m terrible at it. I’m gonna get right into it…

Valve’s Review

So Valve had has updated it’s customer review system, and the predictable outrage occurred, as it always does whenever Valve changes anything about steam, or doesn’t release Half Life 3. And I have to admit, I kind of got caught up in the moment and spent a bit of time reacting when I should have been thinking. So I’ve done a little thinking, and things aren’t all bad.

Latest Gaming Experiences

Time for another look at some games I’ve been playing lately. As I haven’t had a whole heap of time to play games the list won’t be too long, nor to surprising. Nonetheless I’m delve a little into them to tell you what I think.

Compounded

As you’re probably aware, I kinda like video games. Just a bit, ya know. But they’re not my only gaming love. I love tabletop gaming too. From pen and paper RPG’s like Shadowrun and Fate to card and dice games to cooperative and competitive board gaming. I might do a post on my table top gaming sometime but today I’m going to talk about board games. My small collection contains Galaxy Truckers  (Anniversary Edition), Hegemonic, Catan, Lego Creationary and Compounded.

I want to talk about Compounded today, because even though my other games are great, Compounded is the one my friends and I keep coming back to. And there’s a good reason for that, it’s easy to pick up (and re-pick up after long absences from gaming) and pretty fun to play.

Stardew Valley Review

So Stardew Valley has been out for quite some time now. Time for me to give my two cents. I’ve put 45 hours into the game and am into my second spring. For those of you who may not know what Stardew Valley is, it’s a farming sim of sorts.

Twin stick stealth race ’em up

Gonna be a short post this week (and late). But it’s been a long week due to work stuff and being a dad. So, here’s a few games I like, that I hope you do too.

Elite: Dangerous, Empty MMO

Disclaimer: I backed Elite on kickstarter, and have been a fan of Elite since the version my dad had on the ZX Spectrum 48K that we loaded from a cassette tape. Took something like 4 minutes to load and didn’t have a progress bar. Thankfully it loaded pretty reliably.

Things have rather moved on since those days and I can’t say it’s all been bad. Also I still consider it my day, so you won’t yet hear me say ‘Back in my day…’. As you probably know there have been 3 more entries since the original elite. Elite: Frontiers (Presumably where Frontier got it’s name after Ian  Bell and David Braben went their separate ways) followed by Elite Frontiers: First Encounters (Elite 3) and of course more recently by Elite: Dangerous, named after one of the titles you get on the path to Elite, and incidentally the highest rank I achieved in any of the games as combat was never really my thing.

Hidden Gems

I’m pretty wiped out from a long and stressful week so today I’m gonna recommend some games I’ve played that maybe you’ve not heard about. I’ll post the next step on the text adventure tutorial next week.