The Queue: playing lots of indies edition

I’ve been playing a lot of Drop Dutchy this week. It’s a very pick-up-put-down puzzler. It takes the lines and blocks of Tetris — with a far slower, more relaxed drop speed — but adds an additional element of having the bricks and lines give you resources which can be used strategically to improve various other parts of gameplay. Like if you stack several Wood pieces together, your Rangers will get more units, and after the round you can use the Wood you collected from making lines to improve your Ranger for later rounds. But, if your (computer) opponent also has a Ranger, watch out.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions and we supply the answers. Get it? Supply? Because wood and grain and stuff?

It depends. I don’t usually try to prolong a good experience, because usually as you make your way to the end if a game is designed well that includes narrative pacing.

However, if there are significant things in the way of the end, like a big bad gross boss fight, sometimes I’ll avoid that. But also, sometimes it’s such a pain in the butt that I’ll just grit my teeth and keep doing it until it’s done — the last “fight” of Amnesia: The Bunker was like this. Clunky and fiddly mechanically, need luck to pull it off, ugh, this isn’t spooky or compelling, just let me finish. Also, the concept was much more fun than the game itself, I found.

Right now I’ve technically finished Blue Prince by finding The End, but there’s what I’d consider to be an epilogue which, like The End, also makes me find several specific pieces at once and perform specific actions. While I want to finish it up, it seems so tedious I’ve been putting it off.

Yes.

While I consider this my main job, I’m also the primary caretaker for my kids. So, over the summer, I have a lot of time where I do things like take them to swim classes and shred out some posts or social media stuff from my laptop in the car or from a folding chair with an umbrella to cut down on the glare. In summer I have less time in front of my computer, but simultaneously more gaming time (as long as the game I want to play is lightweight or on mobile). Then, when they go back to school I have more time at home sitting in front of my larger rig, but then I fill the gaps with additional side hustle stuff (I do a lot of captioning for Rev, or did — I’m finding the juice isn’t worth the squeeze anymore — plus Upwork and some other freelance gigs, and I’m trying to break into some voice work but that isn’t panning out) and other pastimes.

So I have way more time on my hands when the kids are in school, but way more stuff to do during those times, but because the kids also have school activities and clubs and stuff, I wind up with less unstructured gaming time for always-on high computer demand games like WoW. But also, I can technically pick up a game whenever I want when they’re in school! But also, no I can’t.

It depends on the type of experience you’re looking for. Reddit has always been good for oddball little niche hobbies. Ironically, some of the best places for hobby discussion are the nominally toxic traps that arise from the more mainstream categories. Subreddits like /r/houseplantcirclejerk are invaluable for helpful tips and pointers because those subreddits form because they’re sick of the hundredth person asking about watering plants with ice cubes that week, or whatever the most popular fallacy in that hobby is — the guitar one talks about “toanwood”, the fish one asks whether a teaspoon is too big a tank, etc.

Personally, I spend a lot of my social media time on BlueSky because it captures that 2014 Twitter feeling pretty well. We also have a BlizzardWatch account there, which we have to post to manually, as opposed to our Facebook and Twitter, which is just hooked into wordpress and shoots off updates when we post new stuff automatically. Despite having tens of thousands more followers on our Twitter and Facebook pages, for the past year or more we’ve had far better engagement by every metric on BlueSky. We also have a Threads page, which as far as I can tell from our numbers is a completely dead platform, and our Instagram is likewise a little dead (though all we can really post there is podcast clips, so that makes a bit more sense we wouldn’t get a ton of engagement). And we also have a YouTube page, where we post our full-length podcasts (but not uncut, that’s for Patreon Patrons only), plus some shorts. The shorts do okay in terms of metrics, but we generally look at them as more like marketing for the podcast itself, and those are also posted natively to our social media platforms which support it.

There are 2 things Spirit City still needs in terms of functionality for me. The big one is still recurring to-do scheduling. I have manual lists for each day of the week, but I still have to manually check and uncheck everything, manually rotate, and each day’s list has to be separate from my daily to-dos and my broader “hey this is due by this date” to-dos, so it’s very clunky to manage each one, one by one.

The other, which would be truly amazing for my duties on the site, is a time-based alarm. There are a ton of times where we’ll have a post go live at X am, or an embargo lifts at Y, or I just need to remember to go pick up a kid from an activity at Z. I usually manage this via my phone, which works, but it’s a big, jarring alarm. If it was integrated into Spirit City it would be so much simpler and less disruptive.

In terms of the vibes and aesthetic, there isn’t a ton to add for me. With the outdoor environment on the train some varied outerwear like coats and umbrellas would be nice. Most of the extra sounds and vibes from the All Aboard expansion fit into most of my needs, especially the deep sea noises and the seashore stuff. I think the only stuff I’m missing at this point are a few specific activity foleys, like scribbling/writing pencils and scrubbing erasers on paper, and I could do with a running sink and more clinking/cleaning glasses sounds in the Kitchen. Maybe even a sweeping sounds foley or — and I realize this one is kinda wild — something like a vacuum in the next room. I’m very into the body doubling aspect of Spirit City so making my avatar clean up after herself even more is always good.