Palia (Closed Beta)

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Palia in white fancy text with beta below. The background is a green natural landscape with deerlike animals drinking from a river.Developer: Singularity 6
First Release: 2023 (Beta)
Version Played: PC Closed Beta

Humans disappeared from Palia long ago, leaving behind their ruins and the mystery about what happened. You’re a human and suddenly appear at the ruins. Time to meet the locals.

Palia is a cozy MMO with a focus on things like crafting and exploring, rather than combat. There are bows and animal hunting, but that’s as combat-oriented as it gets. Player characters don’t have hit points and simply respawn if they jump into dangerous places (like deep water).

The closed beta has two main areas and also the player housing (everyone has their own instance of the housing plot). I got lucky with closed beta access, so these are my thoughts on that.

It all starts with character creation. There are two body types (A and B) which have a set of faces linked to that body. Everything else can be used on either body. That means any voice, hairstyle, clothing or makeup. The basic selection has options for different races, including being able to have a hijab for those who want to cover their hair.

Though the body types aren’t assigned a gender, and being able to put any of the stuff on them is great, they are still rather binary in their overall shape choices. I would like a few more bodies to choose from. Or the option to choose between flat chest or breasts on the current bodies. Given the range of body types in the NPCs, I wouldn’t be surprised if this happens at some point.

Character creator screenshot

Image Caption: The character creator for Palia has a starry background with the interface on top. A range of hairstyles are shown, including straight and curly hair, braids, locs, and a hijab. A colour selector has a mixture of natural shades and other colours. The character is on the left, showing the selected wavy curls hairstyle.

The way the skills are handled in the game works well. These skills are things like growing crops, fishing, bug catching, hunting, mining, chopping down trees and furniture making. What’s nice here is that very little grinding is required. Once I had a feel for where to get all the materials, I’d wander around collecting whatever was around. A bug here, a tree there, maybe some mining.

Housing is introduced very early, so I quickly started on growing some crops and setting up crafting stations. This housing area starts with some harvestable resources (trees, rocks and mushrooms) and has a private pond for some fishing. The full buildable space needs to be unlocked during play, but it’s a good size that’s clearly intended for an endgame of decorating the whole thing.

Star quality (literally marked with a star in inventory) bugs and fish can be placed as pets, so my endgame will involve whole rooms full of pets, as that’s just how I roll.

House plot screenshot

Image Caption: My character stands on the housing plot at night. The character has brown skin, black and purple curly hair, and purple clothing with a leaf pattern. A small building, fenced area with crops, windmill, work stations and two cuddling plushies, can be seen. The game interface is shown, with an inventory bar, compass, quest objectives and focus bar.

I appreciated little things, like crops not dying if they run out of water (they simply pause growth) and decor not taking up any storage space. If multiple players hit the same harvestable resource, everyone gets the full loot. These design choices help to make things more relaxed.

I also enjoyed the story so far. Humans appear with only the memory of a starry void and a reassuring voice (this is the setting of the character creator). Some quests are about visiting ruins, with a focus on exploring and solving puzzles. There’s obviously more going on here about what happened to humans and how it’s connected to the flow (a form of magical energy).

Exploring screenshot

Image Caption: My character is in a derelict tower with holes in the wooden floor and ivy growing on the walls. A lantern and plushie are on the floor. The toy is a cute animal cuddling a mushroom. I want that toy.

The NPCs have lives and wander around (press m for the map to see where they are currently). Every NPC has a friendship quest line and some also have a romance quest line. These quests provide more information on the various characters and the world. Only thing I’d say here is the NPCs are purple elf people, anthro cats and robots. It’s a pity that players have to be human and can’t unlock any of those appearance options.

It’s a multiplayer game, but the current system isn’t good for people who want to directly play together. For those who try teaming up, it’s tricky to get on the same server/instance. Groups find they get split up if they change to a new area.

This means that though other players are around, it’s mostly a game for parallel play: most people play alone near each other, rather than with each other. Some resources actively need many people, such as cutting down the flow trees, but this tends to happen in an impromptu way. There isn’t a reason for the gang to stay together once it’s done.

Flow tree screenshot

Image Caption: Multiple characters swing axes at a purple glowing tree. The tree’s health bar shows it’s taking damage.

Housing could have some potential future issues, as access is restricted. Friends can visit, but particularly as the game ages, people will want to show strangers their awesome decorations. I hope that something like the Animal Crossing dream codes might be introduced for that.

The controls are usable, but more the sort of thing I associate with console games that have been moved to the PC. The mouse controls the camera and the keys control movement. There aren’t options to lock the camera behind the avatar or to turn left/right (the camera has to be pointed in the direction of travel).

Options include things to reduce motion sickness. Most game information is text, but it would have been good to have subtitles on the speech in the character creator and the intro/exit speech of the NPCs. An option to click to start/click to stop would be nice for skills, rather than having to hold the mouse button. I can cope now, but holding down buttons was very painful at the height of my arthritis, so this will be a challenge for some gamers.

In very important news, you can pet the dog. It’s an option that comes up sometimes when you’re talking to him, though there isn’t an animation that goes with it.

The game succeeds at being cozy. The current content is a solid foundation with room to expand. It may not appeal to people who want a team game and some of the controls are not the best. In the end though, it’s free and I’m finding it fun, so I’m here to stay for a bit. I’ve got carrots to harvest.

(Shameless plug: Everyone gets a refer-a-friend link, which earns special items in the game. Here’s mine if anyone wants to sign up an account. Open beta started on 10th August 2023, so anyone can sign up now. I’m not being paid for this, I just want the cute fountain: Palia Account Signup)

2022: Onwards

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Another year is done and I appear to be healing. The neurological symptoms are mainly over, though it was a process to get back to working on things. The joints remain damaged and one of my knees doesn’t straighten. I’m always going to be fragile compared to how I was, but I appear to be broadly healthy (outside of the obvious mobility problems).

I took a break in summer to just do whatever came to mind. I read several novels, did some random mesh work for Second Life (I redid my cake shop) and wrote a short story.

The most difficult thing has been that I’ve always had executive dysfunction. I’m now faced with a list of things I should have been doing over the last few years, which makes it difficult to pick things and work on them. As such, I’m making no claim of doing anything in a sensible order or to a certain deadline.

 

Writing

Book sales were down last year. I’m several years behind releasing a new project and that’s been hurting sales. Unfortunately, knowing this creates a lot of pressure, which is not the best way to actually get a big project finished. I closed my Patreon, so I don’t have that as a backup either, but that does lead on to the next thing.

Some people have asked how to throw money at me and the next novel is some time away. So, I had the idea of publishing some single short stories available for $0.99. I’d aim for longer shorts (but shorter than novelette) and include some story notes at the end. That means even though some might be available elsewhere, or will be in the future, the story notes will remain a unique feature of the singles.

It didn’t go that well when I published a novelette in the past, but I recognise that times have changed. The average price of a self-published novel has gone up, making the shorts seem less expensive in comparison. Patreon has also popularised the idea of paying a dollar per thing (which is often a dollar per short story for a writer).

Anyway, if this interests you, let me know.

 

YouTube

I took down a lot of videos, so that I could edit them and reupload. This has been a great learning experience. I even managed to get usable audio on two videos where I had to cut it completely before. This isn’t the path to success or anything like that, but I don’t have the time or strength to really go for the channel. So I’m getting my backlist of videos as strong as possible.

I did make a few new videos. Some were done using a phone to film, which is easier for me to handle. As a result of this, I also started a TikTok account, where I’ve uploaded some of the vertical videos I did for YouTube. I can’t really use TikTok as it’s not accessible, but I can upload stuff there for people who prefer it over YouTube Shorts.

 

Communication

A big issue has been the demise of Twitter. I’m not leaving anytime soon, but it’s harder to be seen and to talk to people. I’ve tried various alternatives, but ended up only really using the two I already had: Tumblr and Reddit. Neither of those is really a replacement for the casual microblogging experience.

In terms of my social life, I’m doing well with Second Life. I have friends there. I have lots of stuff to do. Given that I can’t go out and do all the stuff I used to do, I’ve ended up doing more in Second Life. I’ve taken up a breedable cat game (KittyCats), expanded my shop land a bit, and hope to get into more building things this year.

In terms of chatting to other writers and the business side of things, everyone leaving for social networks I hate is obviously a problem. I’m not sure even sure if anyone will even see this blog post. It also ended my livetweeting of the Alien / Predator films, but at least I ended on a high with Alien vs. Predator, which I really enjoyed.

 

TL;DR

My health has improved a lot, other than continuing joint issues and reduced mobility. I’m hoping to publish a few shorts to get a little more money as I work on the next big writing project. I’m polishing videos and reuploading them on YouTube and TikTok. Twitter is dying, but I’m still there for now.

2021: Recovery

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I’m well into my second year of post-COVID arthritis. The good news is that I am slowly recovering. The fatigue went away early in the year. The arthritis improved greatly after I was vaccinated. This doesn’t mean it’s completely gone. Walking is difficult. I still have to spend time managing joint function and pain. I don’t know if there will be permanent damage. But I can do a lot more than I could this time last year, so that’s a good thing.

One of the family has just retired. I knew this was coming, which is why I’ve been especially concerned about wanting to get new projects out in the last few years… and not being able to do so because of health and other disasters.

 

Art

Zazzle was my first project after I started to improve. My aim was to add 1000 products to my store, for a total of about 3000 public products. The new designs were things like basic patterns. The idea was to add generic stuff that tends to sell and worry about more creative things some other time.

I didn’t quite get to the total because Zazzle was also doing some cleaning. They removed products that weren’t selling or had been out of stock for a long time. Overall, I did add a lot of stuff, and sales were reasonable.

 

Publications

I had two stories in anthologies that were supposed to come out this year. “Busy Little Bees” was released in Common Bonds. Rosalind’s Siblings was cancelled. I didn’t sell any new stories this year.

 

Writing

Getting back into writing has been difficult. I did write two stories for Second Life hunts, though they were both ones with more random and strange structures. One was articles and journal entries and the like. The other described various species of spider. When I attempted to write things with more regular story structures, I completely failed. I have a lot of notes for a sequel to Werecockroach, but I struggled to actually write it.

Late in the year, I decided the best thing would be to write whatever worked. Random and strange worked for the short stories, so I picked something in my pending ideas which fitted that. The winner was Void Stew, which I’ve been tweeting about as the vegetable growing story. It’s all about people trapped in an endless void, who grow vegetables to survive.

There will be future issues with marketing this book. There’s some market for quieter slice-of-life stories, which this does come under. Though it’s also got random second person bits, one character with verse chapters, and a lot of stuff that can be harder to sell. I hadn’t intended to write it right now because of the potential difficulties.

But anyway, here I am. I need to finish something and I’ll just have to hope I find an audience. I’m hoping that getting something finished will mean I will be able to write the Werecockroach sequel, which I think does have an audience.

 

Other Things

I managed to post a few YouTube videos, including a brand new ASMR one with keyboard typing. I did a few of the new shorts as well, which was a nice way to ease back into it. I have no plans or schedule for my channel. I’ll just upload things as I get an urge to make a video.

I want to get back into reading now that my brain functions again. I have a few books in mind and was given a few recommendations. I don’t know if I’ll end up reviewing them or not.

 

TL;DR

My health is improving. I added a lot of basic patterns to Zazzle and started writing a book about growing vegetables in an endless void.

Story in Common Bonds

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I have a new story out in the Common Bonds anthology called “Busy Little Bees”. This anthology has speculative stories about aromantic characters. Mine is near future science fiction about an aroace woman looking for her clone siblings. Themes include issues surrounding cloning and surrogacy. If that’s all you want to know before reading it, click the link below for sales links. If you’d like some of my thoughts on writing it, continue on below the cover.

Book Link: Common Bonds

 

The cover of Common Bonds

The cover of Common Bonds. Two red people sit back to back. They’re smiling and one holds a book and one holds a mug. They’re surrounded by green vines and white flowers. It is edited by Claudie Arseneault, C.T. Callahan, B.R. Sanders and RoAnna Sylver. The cover is by Laya Rose.

 

Backstory

This was an anthology funded by Kickstarter. I was contacted before that, asking if I’d write a story for consideration for the Kickstarter launch. If accepted, it would have been one of the ones mentioned as “contains stories by!!” and all that. It didn’t happen. I didn’t have a great year in general. I also had two very close story deadlines. So I had to say I couldn’t get it done in time, but I’d submit to the general slush when the public call went out.

Writing to themes can be a challenge, but I had some clues this time. I know what stories the editors had read before asking me to send something. A lot of my short fiction has characters who just happen not to get involved in romances (it often doesn’t occur to me unless it’s relevant to the plot), but the first who states not being into that is Tyler, the unlikely vampire in “Midnight Ice Cream”.

I later went on to write “Werecockroach”, where Rin is asexual and aromantic and uses the words.

Both of those are relatively clear and simple in terms of narrative structure and tone. I do also write things that get rejected for not being stories, but that didn’t seem like the sort of thing the call was after.

For my story idea, I wanted to focus on an aroace character, as that’s what I am. I also wanted to focus on sibling relationships, as I like writing those.

 

Inspirations

The good inspiration was CC (CopyCat), the world’s first cat clone. She ended up with a different colour coat to her mother. They had identical genes, but that isn’t everything.

This didn’t surprise me a whole lot as I knew some identical twins who didn’t end up looking alike, but it doesn’t appear much in science fiction where clones are often assumed to be literally identical. Even more so than identical twins. I wanted to explore the ways people could end up looking and being different from the same starting genes.

The bad happened when YouTube was changing how adverts worked. I ended up with an eight minute unskippable advert selling surrogate services. It was very glossy and tried to make it sound like they’d picked that location as the mothers there were just so great… not because the people were poor and there were few regulations. That shiny corporate branding was chilling and stayed with me.

 

Other Representation

This was an interesting story for me to write, as I really was “writing the other” in some ways. The lead comes from a relatively privileged background, whereas I’ve always been working class. That meant unpacking some of the assumptions she’d make. Not in the sense of a total bigot finding out she’s wrong, but in the sense of someone who generally isn’t a bigot finding she still had some things to work on. I might not have lived that, but I’ve had to field some of those things from the other side.

The trans side also took some thought. I’m non-binary, so including a non-binary and a trans man as characters wasn’t really something I thought about. It just sort of happened. What did take some thinking was the idea of the trans man dressing up as another of the clones, because most of them were women. It made a lot of sense for the plot, but there are potential pitfalls.

The basic issue is this sort of scene is often used as a way to invalidate trans characters. A trans man made to dress up that way will usually be mocked. The outfit will be a pink frilly dress covered in bows that few women would ever consider wearing. There will be comments about how pretty and feminine he looks.

After thinking about it, and considering if there was a way to do it that didn’t disrespect the character, the solution was to be sure the other characters wouldn’t be disrespectful. In a near future where I’d hope people had improved somewhat on those issues, there’d be a conscious effort to not be jerks about it.

This also meant thinking about how other aspects of marginalisation would be treated in the near future world. Class is still present as an issue and I avoided making it seem like there was an easy solution that’d solve everything. It’s about small gains and keeping at it.

The other mentioned is disability. There have clearly been some improvements, but there’s also a family who abandon an adopted child for selective mutism. This sort of near future won’t have solved every problem with every family.

I do have direct experience of selective mutism. There were times as a child when I simply couldn’t speak, though it wasn’t often enough to get much notice, outside of the teacher who tried to ask my parents about it. He did not actually ask the question he meant to ask, which meant this happened…

Teacher: “Why does Polenth sometimes just stare at me?”

Parents: “Polenth’s reading your mind.”

Teacher: “…”

Anyway, that’s just a few of the representation things I thought about as I wrote the story. I don’t tend to think about them in an essay or blog format, but those thoughts are always there somewhere as I write.

 

Bees, Wasps and Swarms

I get on really well with bees and wasps, in the sort of way where I wander about near their hives/nests and they leave me alone or crawl on me. I share sugar with them if I have it. We’re fine. The only time I’ve been stung, I actually stung myself. A dying wasp fell in my hair, I thought the wasp was a leaf, so I stung myself trying to brush the leaf out. The wasp really wasn’t to blame.

I have a video of a wild bee swarm that I took some years ago. It looks very dated compared to video now, but it’s still nice to have the reminder. I’d note that honeybees are native in the UK, so this really is a wild swarm. They were in a nature reserve and were left to do their swarm thing.

So, on that note, I’ll leave you with some real bees.

2020: Arthritis

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After a few bad years when I couldn’t get much done, I’d hoped for a quieter year to sort things out before Brexit hit in 2021. Instead, everyone had a bad year, and I got very little done.

In February, my family had a bad illness which we now think was COVID-19. The initial illness barely affected me, but in the weeks after, I developed severe reactive arthritis (I’ve had it mildly before after viruses, but not like this). This was also during lockdown, so it wasn’t really possible to see a doctor. I had to figure out a home treatment.

One good thing is I got to go out for my birthday, as it was before walking became difficult and before lockdown. My previous birthday was a funeral, so this was an improvement.

I spent most of the year managing the arthritis and sorting things like food orders. I couldn’t do much typing or thinking, so I mostly focused on doing stuff in Second Life and other distractions from the pain.

At the end of the year, I still have arthritis. It’s a lot better than it was and I can think clearly again, though my free time is still limited.

 

Novels / Novellas

One of the issues I’ve faced as an author is a lack of charisma. People are not going to give me money for a crowdfunded campaign. They’re not going to buy birthday presents from a wishlist. If I reach out for help, I might as well have said nothing, as nothing much happens. My value to the majority of people in the reading/writing community is only in the products I can produce.

The next issue being a run of bad years, so I have a lack of new products. This is how it had to be for my health, but it doesn’t make it a good situation.

So this year, I tried a more roundabout solution: I made my products more expensive.

Back when I started, people complained if a self-published novel was more than $0.99 and never mind novellas. My old price point of $0.99 for a novella and $2.99 for a novel was tolerable, but as high as people would go. There have been changes in the industry since then, including bigger publishers taking on more novellas and charging very high prices for them. So I went up a modest amount, taking my novella to $2.99 and the longer works to $4.99.

As well as an overall potential increase in profit, it’d mean novellas make income in their own right, rather than being sold at a loss to promote longer work… because frankly, it didn’t happen. People liked my novella Werecockroach, but it didn’t encourage most readers to try something else.

The first month I did this, sales were about the same. I sold one $4.99 book and multiple copies of Werecockroach at $2.99. I just made more money than usual. November and December weren’t as good, but I suspect sales would have been bad regardless as a lot was going on. Not as good still meant I made more money overall compared to the old prices. I tried a brief advertising campaign in November, but it didn’t get the sales of previous campaigns, so I ended it early.

I’ll continue to monitor the situation and see if sales go back up again as the year settles. If they do, this will give me a bit of space to finish something else. It’ll also mean that something else can be a novella.

 

Short Stories

Last year, I said I wanted to find more projects to submit short stories to. Most of the year was a bust, with nothing likely appearing. There are a few possible projects at the end of the year, so I’ll aim to submit a few things next year for these.

Both of the anthologies I’m involved with ended up delayed due to the pandemic. Common Bonds has now sent out backer reward copies and contributor copies. Early reviews seem to like my story. Both that anthology and Rosalind’s Siblings have been rescheduled for 2021.

In final short story stuff, I put out a temporary short story collection called Patchwork in March 2020. It’s now been removed as 2020 has ended. This had a number of my previously published stories, including ones that had only been on Patreon. It was free and was just to do something nice for people for the year. So if anyone sees a reference to it and is confused, that’s what went on. The stories will all be back again for the next proper collection.

 

Zazzle / Art

I have no complaints about Zazzle this year. They reacted quickly to pandemic sales issues by putting out face masks. I sold some of these (and got some for me). I also saw much higher sales (of everything) in the last quarter. I suspect because people were stuck at home, so those with money found fun things to buy. I continue to be glad I got all this set up as passive income.

I had issues producing art for most of the year, as my hands consisted of sausage fingers and joints that couldn’t take any pressure. I regained the ability to hold tools later in the year, so got back into it by doing Botober. The pieces were posted on this Twitter thread. I’ll likely work a few of them into Zazzle designs, but it was just good to get drawing again.

I will note that doing the art challenge didn’t get a lot of engagement in the sense of new followers or the like. It’s a thing to do for fun.

 

YouTube

I planned to produce a video a week for a year for my YouTube channel. My last video was in March. During this video, I already had early signs of arthritis in my fingers and arms, but hadn’t realised what was happening. It’s why I’m smudging charcoal with the backs of my hands, because bending the wrist too much was starting to get painful. I’d had conjunctivitis too badly the week before to use the first draft of the video, which is also a reactive arthritis symptom. Shortly afterwards, I stopped being able to lift a camera and that was that.

The bad news is it means the channel stalled before I got very far. The good news is the channel didn’t see an overall loss in subscribers and views. A few videos have seen a continual rise in views as they get picked up by the algorithm.

I know people panic about small breaks ruining their chances forever, but this wasn’t my experience. A channel is unlikely to grow during an absence, but it doesn’t mean it sinks either. It’s waiting there for when I can film again, at whatever frequency that turns out to be.

 

Reviews

I was getting sorted to start reviewing again towards the end of the year. I selected a few books, created a schedule and started reading one of them. Then I got an email from Amazon terminating my Amazon Associates account. I always knew this could happen, as Amazon is known for doing this. In theory, people can appeal, but it’s hard to appeal when you’re guessing exactly what happened. Amazon gives basic categories, but no details. The result of the appeal was just a resend of the original email.

I looked around for other larger affiliate schemes, but I didn’t see anything likely to actually make money. The only bigger one I found was Barnes and Noble, who rejected my application.

I will review a few things here and there as I feel like it, but mostly my reviewing is over. I’ve closed my review requests for the foreseeable future. I don’t think there’s a big demand for detailed text reviews anyway these days, so this was going to happen at some point even without the loss of Amazon Associates.

 

TL;DR

I’ve had reactive arthritis for most of the year, following probable exposure to COVID-19. I didn’t do a whole lot of creative stuff, but I did put out a temporary free collection, raised my book prices and started drawing again towards the end of the year. I have no firm plans for the future.