A new gacha has its teeth in Gorbiriel - or perhaps its claws, canonically - and he is as powerless to resist it as a level one Kätzenlandsknecht.

I got a mail last Friday or so that I thought was interesting, and so I called him because his phone number was in his sig. The rule is that if you don't want me to call you, don't have that in there. I thought it might be worth going into here in the post. Maybe? We'll see.

I'm curious - did you buy Jump Ship yourself or was it given to you? Do you get affiliate links? Most artist disclose these things now days but I'm not sure if you do get compensated or if you truly picked up the game randomly and liked it so much it led to an article or two and some comics.

Ross Something Or Other

I have cleverly anonymized the name there at the end, and also removed the phone number which allowed me such turnkey ingress into his evening. But! A couple things:

I am absolutely not above taking money to promote stuff. Taking money to promote Jump Ship would be the most trivial calculation imaginable. Obviously, it would have to be clearly marked. But it's just a demo that hit during one of Steam's many Fests; it's not even in Early Access yet and I don't even think a date has been determined for that. It's a team of heavy hitters for sure but if they were trying to rustle up some buzz they probably wouldn't be coming to us - .jpegs just aren't how the game is played now. My guess is that its performance in Early Access is going to determine the course of the next several years of their lives. I'm not sure they'd even have the money to spend.

I'm a little too Gen X to leverage affiliate links, I always instinctively bridle when I see them even though this is just how the world works and it's dumb to do that. You can't buy a comic that goes up on a normal day, unless you won it at a Child's Play auction - that would probably be a great "product," in the classic sense.  Alas!

You would think that developing a game might be the hard part, but incredible games come out all the time. And precisely because incredible games come out all the time, along with other games that exist at various points on the quality scale, it's entirely possible to miss your moment for reasons that have nothing to do with your work. I think this is really scary. It keeps me up at night. Broadly speaking, this is referred to as "discoverability" and virtually every time I see the word used it's about the fact that it doesn't really exist.

Sometimes you play a game in an early state and you don't know if the problems you are having are because the game isn't tuned or has technical issues or if it is because you are a scrub, and need to git gud. We decided to stop after a few missions of Jump Ship for this reason - the shooting was weirdly tight, but we just kept getting wrecked. It was our intention to just wait until it came out in a more robust form. The next day, even after establishing this policy, we all got the itch to really test ourselves against it and that's when we found the game - the intended game. It gave us a legendary afternoon with my best friend and my nephew. That's when we started writing strips. We live in a world where you can and should ask questions like the one I got in the mail. It pleases me to answer thus: this is just what I'm like. I think it's my job to thumb the scale. I'm like the lady who wants to hug every cat, but for, you know, beautiful indie horseshit this fallen world would smother and destroy.

(CW)TB out.