I realize I’m bleeding a little bit into August, here, but here’s your monthly check-in all the same! June saw a variety of streams and guests and lots more work on Imaginal, amidst the whirlwind that is E3.

Here’s what fun July had in store:

1. July was heavy on the Class streams, starting it off with another “Just Okay” games series with Mike Birkhead. We took a look at The Bureau: XCOM Declassified and had a lot of insights about expectation management as a result.

2. As Imaginal wraps up, we did a dev stream on QA, hopefully enlightening people to some best practices (and fun stories) from game QA pros.

3. It hasn’t all been work and class streams. Last month I did a lot of “for fun” streaming of Nuclear Throne, most of which involved me trying to reach the throne in order to consume delicious chocolate. I think these fun streams are important for me to have a more informal venue, even though there are often gamedev discussions that come up during them.

4. One big event that happened in July was my first public showing of Imaginal! Riot and Glitch City banded together to host an event showing off a bunch of indie games out of Glitch down at Riot’s campus. As my first “showfloor” experience with one of my games, it was an invaluable learning experience. Plus, people enjoyed the game, which was super refreshing! The event yielded a follow-up stream to implement the showfloor notes, which doubled as a discussion on indie game communities with a stellar panel of guests.

5. As implied by the prior note, I am now an official member of Glitch City LA. Glitch City is an AMAZING shared developer space, a bunch of cool devs working on a bunch of great projects. They also host a number of public events for the LA community, including the aforementioned Demo Night during E3 last month (here’s my demo night talk on Masterful Hugging). I have to give a special shout-out-and-thanks to Schell Games, who is sponsoring my membership at Glitch. THANK YOU!!!

6. More class streams wrapped up the month. We played Yoshi’s Woolly World and talked about tutorials and level design and had lovely stream audience participation. You can check out the two part streams here and here. I really enjoyed how in depth these class streams got, and am very proud of my audience members who did homework 🙂

7. On the Hyperlight Drifter front, things are plugging away! The team said some very kind things about me in their latest update. <3 <3 PAX is on the horizon and I’m super pumped to go there and help the team show off the game!

8. July also saw a lot of health mitigation, and attempting to slow down. I swear I attempt to slow down every month and then just look back at all the things I did when I write these updates and think “well…there’s that, I guess!” I did get to traveling this month – down to San Diego, but it was less to talk shop with dev friends as it was to relax and eat burritos.

Any big insights from July? I feel it is more of the same – self care, self care, self care. August is going to be the start of a whole lot of events, and hopefully next update will have more news about when I launch Imaginal!

I can’t believe it’s 4 months since going indie! Once again and as always, I must thank my patrons. I seriously could not be doing all these amazing things without your support, and I am grateful for you every day.

For the rest of you, if you would like to help support me on this continued adventure (and get access to more frequent, in-depth updates), please consider supporting me on Patreon. It really is a HUGE help, and every little pledge enables me to do what I do.

Thank you and see you next month!