So I definitely did not expect what happened last week. By which I mean I did not expect The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo to get quite the attention it did, starting with a link from Cameron Kunzelman, which apparently tossed the game to Kotaku and after that Polygon, slamming my hosting to death and necessitating me taking the game down for about five hours while I rewrote the code to stream the sound files from a CDN. Shortly after, however, we were covered in The Verge, Wired, and Joystiq. Wow. Wow wow wow.
In addition to all the links and brief write-ups, the piece has so far warranted at least two longer pieces of criticism, the first being Emily Short’s and the second Alex Pieschel’s (the same Alex, by the way, who wrote the article on glitch aesthetics that heavily influenced the game itself).
I did my own write-up over on Tumblr, in response to a player’s question about my use of gender in the game, which also gives some insight into my design process, my intentions, and the way these things often go awry outside a creator’s purview. As I promise there, I’ll be updating the game sometime in the future to iron out some typos, implement a new sound macro, and hopefully rebalance it to encourage choosing a female friend more often.
This will happen sometime after I get a head start on my prospectus. I kinda let that slide a bit.
I’d like to thank everyone who’s played so far, all those who have passed around links, all those who’ve commented here, on tumblr, and on twitter, or those who’ve sent emails. It’s a rather strange feeling to have something that is so offbeat and personal be praised by so many people. Here I’ll also publicly thank my partner, who was incredibly understanding when I spent last Wednesday night hurriedly rewriting my game’s code instead of eating dinner with her, and who’s been supportive throughout this process.
I’d also very much like to thank those people who paid for their horse armor unlockable content via Paypal. I don’t make much money as a grad student, and it’s kind of nice to get some gas money out of a weird text adventure I made.