Thursday, June 19, 2025

This is the sixtieth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. June is Accordion Awareness Month, so increase your awareness by listening to some of my favorite artists and soundtracks! Find any you’ve missed in this easily navigable index.

Steambot Chronicles is an amazing game that I sunk a LOT of hours into back in the day, before such things could be tracked and verified. It’s a romantic scrap metal adventure, one of the first open-world games, and elements of it can be found in many of my works today. One of the many things you can do in the game is play music, on instruments ranging from harmonica, piano, guitar, trumpet, and of course an accordion.

So I thought I would just find a YouTube video of someone playing it in the game and share it here, right? Not so much. The game was never very popular when it came out, despite all of its strengths, so the publisher stopped printing copies. It will likely never be re-released on modern systems, due to the 2011 tsunami that basically destroyed the company’s offices and all of the source assets with it. As a result, used copies are very expensive nowadays. There’s precious little content of any kind for it out there, and all I could find was the practice track when you just play the instrument wherever you are.

Playing the accordion in the game required some talent, too, as you had to pull the analog sticks outward and inward in time with the bellows, and use the shoulder buttons for the keys. I couldn’t even find a screenshot of this, and since I don’t have the game any longer, I can’t make one. It’s one of those things that you just have to take my word for, and proof that the internet doesn’t contain all the information ever created. Some things still exist as just stories.

Bonus: Town theme that heavily features accordion

So something pretty neat happened! I was approached by an artist specializing in 3D modeling, to create a model of, well, something! My first thought was a Florabeast action figure, but then my wife pointed out any of the peoples or characters from Euphony of Seasons would also be an excellent choice. The thing is, artists need to be compensated for their time, and this one is no exception. The other thing is, this whole independent publishing thing isn’t exactly profitable, especially when I give away the bulk of my content for free.

I’ve seen lots of success stories with crowdfunding, though, and while the amount the artist is asking for isn’t enough to bother with a Kickstarter campaign, I thought it good to start with you all, the people that actually read what I write, and regularly, too!

I’ll be using Ko-Fi to do this, and unless you’ve been to my World Anvil site, you probably didn’t even know that I had a Ko-Fi page. But I do, so there you go. Just do a Tip and it will make the number go up. If everyone who reads this gives a dollar (US), we can achieve the dream of a 3D printed Turnipig in no time. Or a Veliagos Hunter. Or something else entirely!

This is exciting! And also pretty scary. As always, I appreciate you taking the time to read, and make sure to enjoy the day!

P.S. if you’re super nerdy you can also send USDC, ETH, POL, or anything else cool to 0x96F16E9419200Fa46Fc89C43e2EE39b4553c22AE