I know, I know: everybody loves Hades, the Super Giant’s latest jewel. These days, it is impossible to read any online game magazine without reading articles about it. This game has been on everybody’s mouth since its official release on September 17th.

And for good reasons.

Hades managed to raise the bar of the roguelike genre just when the genere started to become stale and boring. There are many reasons for this success but, in my opinion, Hades’ greatest accomplishment is that it was able to provide a glaring example of a roguelike with a solid storytelling.

At the beginning of January, I put my hands on a dirty cheap Play Station 4 because, in the new house, I have no space for a gaming PC. Since then, I decided to make up for a bunch of games I missed in the last years starting from these two: Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017) and The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013). I approached them with diametrically opposed expectations, and in both cases, my expectations were very wrong. So I started asking myself why I was wrong and what I look for in games and narrative media.

Yesterday I was reflecting about an interesting fact: in the list of “my favorite games of all times,” the top 10 is packed with games that share all a common element. The games are:

• Dark Souls
• Dark Souls II
• Well… every game of the soulborne genre.
• Hollow Knight
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• And more.

Can you guess what they all have in common?

Sure, they all have a decadent setting (the world is falling or is recovering after a cataclysm), but there is a way more common design element: narration through discovery.

This year I joined and won the NaNoWriMo challenge: write 50000 words for a novel in 30 days. I did it. Now the nerd side need to splat on this page all the accumulated stats.

The Novel

I think it is the proper way to do it: I need to talk about the novel. The novel is, of course, in Italian and it is unfinished. With 52k words I reached barely the beginning of the third act, more or less. Many things need to be rewritten, characters disappeared in thin air as soon as I discovered that I don’t need them… stuff like that. The usual way to do a first draft.

The first month of the year is gone and I’ve made a game! The January 2016 entry of 1GAM, namely “Writer’s Block”, is now completed (kind of)!

January 2016 has been a great start for this year! During the last months of last year I started a personal journey to fight my inner demons. I don’t want to bore you with some self-improvement/productivity bullshit -it is not the place for that- so I will not. You just have to know that after 6 months of trying and failing this January is the month in which all the good habits really start to stick.

The “One Game A Month” challenge was the perfect way to test myself and doing one of the activities I love most. As usual, we will start from the beginning.

A month ago I started questioning my ability to stay focused on thing I like. Kill the procrastination monkey is the first thing to achieve any goal in life and I felt that I was losing that battle. Last year was not easy, mostly because I started feeling incapable to achieve anything useful in work. This, in turn, feeds the procrastination monkey, causing more frustration and so on. An evil infinite explosive mental and motivational cycle that drown you, slowly, silently. I had to break the cycle!

But where I could start? I decided to stress myself on an old obsession of mine: writing. As you know I have stories in mind and I have a deep need to tell these stories. There are many ways to express these stories (music or gamedev are the most important one for me!) but writing it is much less complex: it is just you, the story and a piece of paper. There is no technology involved, no extra abilities such as visual arts, no constraints, no distractions. I did not want to feed p-monkey with a lot of fake-problems to justify myself for not doing anything every day. So, I took a piece of paper and I wrote on it: I’ll write One Million Word of fiction. It is important to have some kind of metric to measure your progress and the number of words written is a perfect metric! Every night, at the end of the day, I can update the counter, see the target approaching and feel good about myself.

A month is passed and I want to share this small step with you.