Hello friends and kind Patrons! (You're all friends really!) It's been a while since a post here, and for that I apologise.
I wanted to post some musings about the overall format of MoeGamer going forward, as I'm pondering making a few minor changes to how I do things. This was partly inspired by the fact that Evenicle took a little longer to cover than I intended, and I'm now deep in the Project Zero/Fatal Frame series and keen to make sure I do it justice across all five installments.
I love working on the Cover Game format. My original thinking behind it was to give a game or series that didn't typically get much attention the same treatment that mainstream sites would give a triple-A game: multiple articles over the course of a longer time period, exploring a different facet of the overall experience in each article. I think that's been working well, and thus it will definitely be continuing.
The main thing I'm contemplating is divorcing the Cover Game format from the rigid monthly structure. I do like having a "magazine-style" format with a specific theme for each month, but since I'm not actually restricted by a physical printing or publication schedule as a real magazine would be, there's no real reason to keep to such a rigid format besides appeasing my Asperger's by making things nice and neat. (Except when things like Evenicle happen, everything gets a bit out of whack!)
In other words, what would happen is that a Cover Game feature would take "as long as it takes" rather than forcing me to either squeeze everything from a long game or substantial series into a month — or drag out something smaller over a longer period, for that matter. It can be an interesting challenge to do the latter in particular — I was especially pleased with how much I was able to write about Ne no Kami, for example, since that's quite a short visual novel — but it's not always practical or desirable.
So why am I talking about this now? Well, I was already planning to take December "off" from the Cover Game format as I did last year by doing a new cycle of The MoeGamer Awards, since those were a lot of fun and a good way to wrap up the year during the inevitable disruption to daily life that the holiday season brings. What I'm proposing for now is that rather than trying to rush the rest of Project Zero by the end of October (and that will be a rush if I want to play all five games — I'm only just nearing the end of a playthrough of the second game right now!) I take my time over it, with a loose commitment to having completed all of it in time for the beginning of December and the Awards posts.
Project Zero is a series I'm keen to do justice to with my coverage — both because I like it a lot, and particularly because it's something that I've been specifically requested by one of you good people to explore and write about. But I'm not sure I'll be able to do that to my satisfaction if I try to cram three-and-a-bit more games into the next 13 days. So I'm going to ditch my originally proposed plans to cover Muv-Luv in November (which might have been a bit ambitious anyway!) and take my time over Project Zero, even if that means I end up spilling out of Spoopy October. Oh no.
My proposed changes to the Cover Game format here won't affect the usual daily output on MoeGamer. Regular features such as Waifu Wednesday and various videos will continue — I'd also like to get back to doing video "readings" of past articles, so let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like to see videos of, be they past Cover Game features or individual articles — but the game- or series- specific features will vary in how much time they encompass in total.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all once again for continuing to support my work on MoeGamer. With the recent news over Facebook fudging its video view statistics, ultimately leading to a lot of writers being put out of work in favour of a "pivot to video" by many news organisations, we're looking at an age where the written word very much has the potential to make something of a resurgence. And while I'm not a daily news site or an attempt to compete directly with the Polygons and the Kotakus of the world — and I have no intention to ever be that — I am proud of my ongoing attempts to bring games and visual novels that don't get much respect from the mainstream press some much-needed attention and appreciation, so it means the world that there are people out there who think my work is worth supporting.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to reach out, either here in the comments, on MoeGamer itself, on Twitter or on Discord. Thanks for reading!