2024 March Retrospective

Picking this months’ theme was a difficult one for a number of reasons. On one hand, the excellent Shogun mini series has dropped, and in the wee days of the month we got a difficult game about climbing.

A rather though call to make, I am not going to lie. But, if you happen to be reading this in the confines of your browser, then you already know who won as far as the theme is concerned, just by looking at the hero image of this post.

A Difficult Game About Climbing

Before I talk about the game, let me give a little introduction about its maker known as Pontypants.

He released his very first game called Punch A Bunch early last year, which has seen moderate success overall, but one could argue that it did pretty well for a debut title.

Now that we’ve seen the numbers, let’s take a look at its trailer below.

Like many indies, he also documented the entire development cycle in the form of devlogs which he uploaded on his YouTube Channel.

After the release of Punch of Bunch, he kind of went silent for a while and it wasn’t clear to me at first as to why. I mean people were speculating as always, and then at the end of last year, he dropped the announcement trailer of what would become a difficult game about climbing.

It was kind of unexpected, but I was happy to see him still kicking and working on something fresh and shiny. The trailer did generate some hype, more than I expected to be honest and I was certain that when he does end up releasing the game, streamers are going to pick it up, just like they did with Getting Over It some years prior.

In many ways, it is the spiritual successor of it and if you look around the reviews on Steam, you’ll notice how people joke that the player has finally gotten out of his pot.

I do feel like it was a missed opportunity to some extent not to do some sort of a launch day cross-promotion or collaboration with Bennett Foddy, but hey nothing is ever perfect.

While there was no extensive series of devlogs this time, Mr. Pontypants has thrown together a launch-day retrospective devlog of sorts, in which he goes over some of the aspects of developing the game, including, extensive and very loud drum rolls, switching engines a while into its development.

The elephant in the room of course is how did the game do? Did it sell enough copies for Mr. Pontypants to continue his indie gamedev journey and will the revenue suffice for him to make yet another game?

Well, according to Gamalytics, it sold extremely well. Obviously, these numbers are estimates and not 100% accurate, but even if we take the most conservative numbers, it’s pretty damn clear that it did well, and just like I suspected when I saw the announcement trailer, streamers and speed runners alike had a field day with it.

Keep in mind that it was self-funded and published, so there will be no cut by a publisher.

In closing, I have a very deep and personal confession to make! Even though games like this are not my pesonal cup of tea, I still bought a copy just to show my support.

xz backdoor

The xz backdoor is a primary example of why monstrosities like systemd should not exist in the first place. Obviously, any piece of software that was linked to the library was affected, but any excuse one can find to bash on systemd should be used to the fullest extent.

I loved the reaction of the Debian Stable community who are literally many many versions behind when it comes to everything rejoicing in unison as there was no way in hell for them to be affected by this under any circumstances.

Will be interesting to follow where this all leads and how the story unfolds as the pieces are put together. At this point in time, there’s just too much speculation to make any educated guesses as to how all this came about.

At any rate, update your systems even if you are not officially affected.

Shogun

I don’t think that is there anything more to be said when it comes Shogun, I’ll just let the trailer speak for itself.

Sadly, it’s just a mini-series which kind of crushed the hopes of people who were thinking that this might be the next Game of Thrones.

I was skeptical of course, but just because I know that it took HBO several attempts, before they managed to pull off Game of Thrones, and it’s easy to forget all the brilliant but half-baked attempts like the excellent Rome that came before and survived only for a couple of seasons.