What is this blog about?
First… all my posts on this blog are free. If you subscribe, then you’ll be able to stay on top of all of them! There are multiple sections, which you can freely subscribe or unsubscribe from. It’s unlikely that you’ll receive new posts at a frequency more than once or twice a month.
I’m a Taiwanese/Japanese/Irish-American composer (Spotify, Bandcamp) and game designer based in Tokyo. My independent games studio, Analgesic Productions, has been nominated for international awards for our games like Anodyne 2: Return to Dust!
What do I write about? Well, a number of things:
Culture/Game Design Critique: I like to discuss game design trends or issues within the field, sometimes citing historical interviews, referring to games from a wide period of time. For example - thinking about trends in game design (and their addictiveness), or the relation of places like Costco to spaces within game design.
Game Development Logs: Updates on the games I’m working on. I try not to write perfunctory devlogs: instead, I like to go deep and discuss the design thinking behind my decisions. I’ve been working as a small, award-nominated studio for 10+ years, so if you’ve ever been curious about what exactly goes into making games, check these out!
Short Fiction: I like to write short stories now and then. These rarely fall into existing genres, and are often ways for me to explore ideas that are harder to express in the form of an essay. For instance, in “Aloesian Mode” I think about the process of music creation, although in a loose, fantasy manner.
Personal Essays: These sometimes overlap with the “Culture/Game Design Critique”, but often my writing has overlap with thinking about life in the USA/Japan as well.
Game Reviews: Self-explanatory! I tend to focus on older or lesser-known games. I won’t be posting *every* game I review - but instead want to focus on polishing up/collecting a handful of my very casual/rambly Backloggd game reviews.
New game announcements/merch: An opt-in only newsletter - I’ll post announcements of my new games (or console releases), as well as merch releases.
Note that the posts here are exactly the same as those on my Neocities blog (this link also links my games and book reviews, as well as my even older blog).
The game design devlogs tend to come from my Itch.io page. Right now that consists of work on Analgesic’s next game and this other project (Shuffled World) of mine.
History of my writing
(As of 2023/03… these always go out of date…)
2012-2020: I updated a wordpress blog.
2013-2015 or so - I was writing short posts on my Tumblr (the wordpress links some of those), mostly game-related
2014-2018: Occasionally I posted essays on Medium. Those have been imported to Substack.
2020-Present: Moved to blogging at my Zonelet (a blogging system for Neocities). Also started a blog.
2023: Started crossposting here.
I self-published a novel about Chicago in 2015, you can find it here.
I did some NPC writing for Anodyne 1+2 and Even the Ocean, wrote All Our Asias and a lot of Sephonie.
