State of the Hunt, Week 10/2023: Blog for the Blog God!

Well, seems like I am back.

First of all, many thanks to everyone for the kind words and warm welcome after my short previous post! I am feeling incredibly humbled by your reactions, especially when I wasn’t really expecting anyone to still be hanging around this blog, checking for updates! I was also sorry to hear that people were actively worried for my wellbeing — I certainly did not mean for that to happen!

So what happened? Nothing much, really — or at least, nothing too different from what the rest of you will have gone through over the last couple of years. Two and a half years of a world-wide pandemic (and counting…) were certainly a challenge to get through with (most of?!) my wits intact. There were also health problems galore in my immediate family, a situation that is unfortunately still ongoing. But I did never make a conscious choice to step away from the hobby for a longer time — it just happened to fade into the background for a while.

In fact, I still vividly remember sitting in the garden during the late summer/early autumn of 2021, quietly tinkering with the World Eaters Rhino conversion that would end up being one of the last things I posted here on the blog before my hiatus. And suddenly, it’s more than two years later, and Eternal Hunt is now 11 years old, incredibly enough — and with little enough input on my part — at least for the last two+ years.

And now I am back — it was always clear that it would be a new World Eaters release that would draw me back out of hiding. And that’s exactly what happened. And I can assure you we’ll be looking at World Eaters kitbashes and conversions again before long, for however long this resurgence of Eternal Hunt may last.

But for today, I would like to take a small detour, if that is okay with you, and briefly look back on the last two years of my hobby hiatus:

So what have I actually been up to in all this time?

On the hobby front? Not much, to be honest. In fact, before the new World Eaters hit, my most involved attempt at creating something hobby-related was a kitbash representing a veteran bolter marine for my custom INQ28 Astartes chapter, the Golden Legion (I wonder if anyone remembers Praetor Janus Auriga, for instance):

As you can see, the model was based on one of the Easy-To-Build Primaris Marines. My aim was to build a fairly standard Space Marine (in a classic pose & wielding a boltgun), while also featuring some visual elements that would embody the look and feel of the chapter. I want the Golden Legion to read as a very knightly & somewhat ostentatious chapter, and they are also Imperial Fists successors, so the use of a medieval looking helmet was key. I chose the head of Rodicus Grytt, an Imperial Fists brother of the Deathwatch originally released in the Deathwatch: Overkill game set — does anyone even remember that? 😉

All in all, it’s a fun conversion, and one I hope to get painted one of these days, so Brother Laertes of the Golden Legion will be able to begin his life of service to the Velsen Sector. But I’ll readily admit that this isn’t a particularly impressive hobby output for such a long period of time — but I didn’t really build or paint anything else, to be honest.

At the start of 2022, an article of mine was published in the 4th issue of 28 Magazine, and I loved that! But to be fair, the article talks about the HeroQuest set that I painted allll the way back in 2019, so it doesn’t exactly qualify as brand new content 😉

Oh, and I backed Mike Franchina’s VERY intriguing “Trench Crusade Kickstarter”, which seemed like the best parts of Warhammer 40k Inquisition, the Mutant Chronicles and World War I aesthetic, all thrown into a blender, with some magic fairy powder sprinkled on top. Really looking forward to receiving those miniatures at some point in the hopefully-not-too-distant future!

Beyond that, I barely kept up with the hobby, only really following two of my favourite hobby blogs – namely Apologist’s blog and Between the Bolter And Me, and I tried keeping – vaguely – up to date on the lovely World Eaters army of my buddy Augustus b’Raass. And that was it — in fact, one of my first tasks, now that I am back, will be to figure out which hobby blogs & communities are even still going. For instance, I was really happy last week to find “The Bolter & Chainsword” still alive and kicking!

CITADEL

I think the main reason for my absence was that most of the energy I would have spent on the hobby actually went elsewhere — but where?

Maybe some of you will still remember my first fledgling steps in designing videogames, using Media Molecule’s design suite Dreams — I briefly posted about it, back in the day.

Now over the last three years, I have become an active member of the Dreams community and have been ceaselessly working on my various projects there.

Fair warning: This will have very little to do with the actual focus of this blog, so if you are only here for the little plastic people, feel free to skip the following.

But maybe, just maybe, some of you will be interested to find out where I have been burning most of my creative energy these last years:

So, my main focus has been to work on CITADEL, an ongoing game project very much inspired by games like “Journey” (by thatgamecompany) or by the games from Team Ico and Fumito Ueda (“ICO”, “Shadow of the Colossus” or “The Last Guardian”). These games have been a massive inspiration to me, and I wanted to create something at least slightly reminiscent of them. Hence CITADEL.

In the game, you join a pair of shadowy beings called “The Wanderers” and explore the ruins of a fallen civilisation, the eponymous CITADEL. This all plays out as a third person action adventure, although the gameplay is really rather simple: You can really only run, jump & explore, as the various locales and the story of the CITADEL unfold around you.

So far, two (of four) acts of the game have been released. Check out this trailer that should at least provide some first impressions of what the game looks and sounds like:

And here’s a small gallery of screenshots giving you a better idea of the game’s various environments:

Now if the game should look a little dodgy to you: Fair enough, that’s because literally all of it has been made from scratch. Yes, the underlying engine takes care of A LOT of the work that is required to make the game function at all, but all of the assets & music were created by me. And that’s how even a fairly dodgy game can come to feel like a momentuous achievement: In fact, to create an entire world like this, basically from nothing, really feels like you’re shaping the raw energies of a universe, if you’ll excuse the hyperbole. Well, it does during its best moments — there’s also a lot of cursing, playtesting and trying to get my dodgy programming to work, obviously.

But yes, it was easy to spend a lot of time doing this, and it certainly continues to fascinate me. I could go on, waxing poetical on the brilliance of Dreams and the community surrounding it, but I’ll keep the brunt of that subject for elsewhere. Like I said, video game design is not really the focus of this blog (that being said, I’d be very happy to answer any questions you might have on the subject — I just don’t want to cram it down your throats).

And surely enough, the game shares very little, if any, common ground with Warhammer 40k or miniature wargaming, admittedly. The most grimdark – and hence Warhammer-adjacent – thing I may have created so far is the Sunken One, as somewhat Cthulhuoid creature appearing as an opponent in CITADEL’s second act:

Isn’t he a beatuy? 😉

Anyway, in the – somewhat unlikely – eventy that any of you should own both a PlayStation (4 or 5) AND a copy of Dreams and would like to take a look: The two first chapters of the game are available right here:

https://indreams.me/dream/miVNpyuKwhP

https://indreams.me/dream/mryKJhppVcd

I would, of course, love for you to check this out and let me know what you think, so if you have the means to do so, I’d be excited to hear your thoughts and impressions of the game so far!

But over here on Eternal Hunt, chances are we’ll be returning to our usual menu before long: As you may already have glimpsed in my previous post, I have been hard at work tweaking some of my older World Eaters conversions — and putting the new Khorne Berzerker kit through its paces! So I think that’s where we’ll be heading for the next post. And who knows, we may even meet some old friends again — like Lord Captain Lorimar:

In the meantime, I’ll be totally honest with you, because I don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver: Who knows how long I can keep this up? Maybe updates will be sporadic. Maybe there’ll be longer breaks again. These are tough times, and I am still a lazy bum when it comes to blogging. What I do know is this, however:

It was lovely to be welcomed back into the community, and if nothing else, I want to thank you all for it by sharing some new-ish work soon. So I hope you’re looking forward to that! I also hope today’s post, while a slight departure, wasn’t a complete turn-off.

And, in closing — how I missed writing these words:

Please feel free to let me hear any thoughts and suggestions you might have. And, as always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!