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        <title>Vertette's Blog</title>
        <link>https://vertette.github.io</link>
        <description>A blog where an obscure indie dev dumps his thoughts sometimes.</description>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Legend of DELTARUNE]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/legenddeltarune</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[(This article will spoil Deltarune up to Chapter 5.)]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Arrogance of Sony]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/arrogancesony</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Here's a game you can play at home. Go through a list of video games consoles sorted by date, take the one that sold the most that generation and then try and find how many outright baffling business moves the manufacturer made around that time that can only be explained by pure hubris. It's an educational insight into how a company that believes it has no competition left makes decisions, and how they determine how much they can dick over consumers before the market punishes them. Nintendo has made their share of dumb boners in the past few decades, and Microsoft can't stop making dumb business moves recently (though how many of those were made due to stupidity or incompetence is hard to say), but in the gaming space there's no company more arrogant than Sony. From the moment they started out in gaming, they tried to screw Nintendo over with the PlayStation's licensing control, and went from there. If you weren't convinced before, then recent news should have.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Fairness of Steam's Cut]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/fairnesssteamscut</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Valve has been showing up a lot in gaming news recently. And not just regarding their recent and upcoming hardware like the Steam Deck's price increase, the Controller, Frame or Machine, but also the numerous lawsuits they've been facing, which are starting to become quite noticeable in their frequency. The most recent one, as of this writing, comes straight out of my own country and is regarding Valve's "monopolistic behavior" negatively affecting developers and consumers:]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The March of Technology]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/marchtechnology</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Technology is a fascinating industry to work in. New tools, frameworks and software are coming out all the time, and as a (web) developer it's part of the job to keep your skills honed. That's not to say all of the coworkers I've had bothered, but that's how you end up stagnating and becoming unemployable. As for me, I'm always looking for new toys to experiment with and love coming up with solutions how to automate more of my processes.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Success of Japanese Publishers]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/successjapanesepublishers</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[In September of 2024, I got to cross an item off my bucket list that's been there for a decade or so: I went to Japan. Now don't misunderstand, I didn't go because of my hecking love of animu and mangos or to find the cute otaku girlfriend of my dreams (tfw) but because of its culture, nature and architecture, which has fascinated me for a long time (I made Salaryman Shi for a reason). To make a long story short, the country was beautiful, the people were kind and the food was delicious, but I didn't write this entire blog post just so I could brag about my amazing vacation. That was only part of it. What I really wanted to write about is the clear division between the state of the Western and Eastern industry, which has been on my mind since I came back from my trip and is still very much relevant today.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Sustainability of AAA Games]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/sustainabilityaaagames</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 06 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[It's only been one month into the new year, and already things are looking dour for the video game industry. Last year we witnessed million dollar games flopping and investors pulling out of sizable deals, and now there's a swarm of layoffs and cancellations to add on top as well. I've actually been meaning to write about this topic for months, but recent events have gotten so extreme I moved this article forward in the queue.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Motivation of Indie Developers]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/motivationindiedevs</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 13 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[There are many stereotypes surrounding indie developers: we're pretentious, we can't handle criticism, we use the term "retro" to excuse our lack of art skills and so on. Though it might hurt to hear, we have to acknowledge that this reputation we have is well-deserved. It's even better to actively fight it, not just for the medium but to better ourselves as people. The stereotype I really want to tackle in this blogpost, however, is this: we drag our feet through the mud like a cow walking through the streets of Mumbai. How often have you seen this story play out: a few months into development, an indie developer announces their new game. The passion is thriving on both the developer and the community's side at first, and then the game takes somewhere between three to ten years to come out, if it comes out at all. Seeing a developer who's working on a game you're looking forward to break out the word 'canceled' will never not sting. But for the developer, it stings even harder.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Passing of Time]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/passingtime</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA["I'll try to write something every two weeks at the very least"... Right, when was the last- ah snozzberries.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Story Integration of Deus Ex]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/storytellingdeusex</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Whenever video game enthusiasts start spewing the fires of the classic "are video games art" discussion everywhere again, certain titles typically come up regularly: Mother 3, Shadows of the Colossus, Journey and such. If you include gaming journalists' opinions into that discussion, however, you get some other more experimental titles in the mix like Gone Home, Sunset and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. This blogpost won't delve into the many arguments over whether games count as art and what even counts as a game, as you've undoubtedly read them a million times before, but what is interesting is that a lot of those experimental arthouse games that typically focus on telling a story are not the best examples of utilizing the medium to tell a story.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Fun Factor of Uplink]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/funfactoruplink</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Remember family computers? Before we had tablets, middle class families would buy overpriced computers from dodgy computer stores that the whole family got to share. As they were mostly used by children and adults who didn't have the slightest understanding of technology, it didn't take long for the family computer to down to a crawl, plagued by shady Kazaa downloads and suspicious Internet Explorer toolbars. Between a lack of money to buy a better computer, no easy way to buy digital games in Europe for the longest time and no nearby stores that sold computer games, it took until my brother moved out of the home before I really started getting into PC gaming.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Magic of Starfield]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/magicstarfield</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Since the dawn of humanity, we've marvelled at the stars, wondering "what could be out there?" The answers we have right now might not even be that exciting, but the fascination we have with space continues anyway. The unknown never stops being interesting, and space is either an infinite unknown or very close to it. And like many of humanity's most thought-provoking questions like "what would you do if the world fell apart tomorrow" and "what if vikings were real", Bethesda made a game that taps into that very human question: Starfield.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Identity of Yooka-Laylee]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/identityyookalaylee</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 08 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[How do you make a spiritual successor stand out?]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Pixel Art of Salaryman Shi]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/pixelartsalarymanshi</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[It was late 2019. I was bored out of my skull, waiting for DJ Coco to fix up a build for Paperball so I could get back on testing, but I didn't feel like working on any particularly big project at the time. I looked around my hard drive looking for anything to do and found some old mock-up graphics I made for an old, abandoned project. A feeling of nostalgia immediately washed over me.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Character Design of Paperball]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/designpaperball</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 24 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Were Paperball's character designs a success? It's a hard question to answer for me. I remember waking up early one morning and finding a message on my phone. "Vinny is playing Paperball", a friend told me. "Holy crap", I replied. I rushed onto my computer to check Twitch and there it was, Vinny from Vinesauce was in fact playing Paperball, the game that I had been helping my best friend DJ Coco develop for the past year or so.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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            <title><![CDATA[Hello World]]></title>
            <link>https://vertette.github.io/post/helloworld</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 24 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Welcome to my blog, my name is Christopher Stephens. By day I do boring IT work, by night I work on games. I've worked on games like Paperball, Salaryman Shi and Onlink. (They're not very well known so don't think you've been living under a rock if you've never heard of them.) This blog is where I'll put up articles discussing and/or analyzing video games from a developer's perspective.]]></description>
            <author>Vertette</author>
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