The Absolute State of this Blog
I'm a big fan of Sven Co-op, so much so that I was only half joking when I presented the terrible idea of playing and reviewing every map to my partner in crime, Dunkelschwamm. Much to my surprise she agreed and now here we are, 371 maps in to the 1558 maps currently on the Sven Co-op map database. It was done primarily to get people to stop leaving reviews in the comments and to actually put them in the review section. Let me just check the reviews on the map database. . . . yeah, I think it sort of worked. Then we got nervous that wikidot might die and take the site with it so I created this blog as a mirror.
Dunkel was unemployed at the time and my fiancé still had tons of patience for me so it went swimmingly, I think we averaged something like 15 reviews a week. I did the math but circumstances keep changing and so do the numbers, so that's a very rough estimate. We both dabbled in making maps for Sven long ago when the game was relevant and popular but never released anything. Well, dissecting Sven maps to figure out what makes them good or bad is amazing inspiration and I am proud to say I now have a map out there for the world to see. Stop reading this and go play it. After releasing it (and after rushing to patch all the problems I had left in, twice) I hung out on a couple servers running it. To my total shock and surprise I met somebody who claimed to read this blog EVERY DAY! Well the pressure was on and I totally cracked, I'm not doing reviews anymore and this is the eulogy.
Nah, just kidding, I got married and moved to a much smaller house with a much bigger yard. Mowing my lawn is almost a whole day affair. Dunkelschwamm landed her dream job and worked through some stuff that I'm not going to elaborate on. We both worked through some stuff that will not be elaborated on. Needless to say that destroyed our review schedule and lead to the current absolute state of this blog.
Here's a funny story, for our one year anniversary (which I rounded to the New Year for convenience) I had a whole post written out. It sucked honestly, it was all stats and numbers, tracking our progress in the driest way possible. I showed it to Dunkel, she gave me great input and advice, and then I deleted the post and convinced myself nobody cared. Then that happened again the next year. I've been meaning to write this post since the beginning of 2023. Well, better late than never I guess.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that we're still here. I want to say we are not on hiatus but I just checked the definition of 'hiatus' and it just means a gap or a pause, I'd be hard pressed to explain how eight reviews in ten months isn't a pause so I admit it, we've been on hiatus. I'd like to say we're coming back soon but I just don't know, rural living doesn't grant a lot of free time and I'm usually wiped out when I do have free time. I'm adapting, Dunkel already has, and eventually we will pick up right where we left off.
Thank you to all our fans, we definitely do not deserve you. I'm still going to drop a bunch of boring numbers and math on you guys but that will be after this picture of my dogs.
These dogs are so cute I want to puke. But hey, I promised you exceptionally boring number talk here so buckle up.
So far we have reviewed 371 maps out of a current (as of 6/5/2024) total of 1558 maps. Now, we aren't going to review ALL of them, we started reviewing some PVP maps but won't be doing that anymore for various reasons. There are lots of remakes and merges now, I guess that's the new trend, and we might play the bulk of them but I don't see us writing whole new reviews for each one. There are other considerations too, like if the map is flat out broken or in a language neither of us speak.
Because there are over a thousand maps to review and more are being added every day I set up a brisk schedule to follow that would hopefully get us done in four years. Before the hiatus I had to keep revising that number up and had settled on a timeline of ten years. Yikes. I'm not going to crunch the numbers again so I'm just going to say this will probably take a couple decades, I hope the game sticks around that long.
I put together a spreadsheet to keep track of everything, here's a peek:
On the right of everything are spaces for word count. Here's another funny story, the first day we did reviews (the legendary 12 review day) we played all the maps first in one sitting and then wrote the reviews later at the end of the day. We kept getting details of the maps mixed up with one another and it was a pretty terrible way to do things. So we started doing reviews immediately afterwards, but we realized that we actually spent more time writing than playing the map, like twice as long. We had to get that under control so we started paying close attention to word counts, it took a long time to settle on our current style.
We can see our average character counts at the bottom, myself at 3291.466 and Dunkel at 3414.461. The blacked out parts above it are total character counts, hidden so we can have a grand reveal after finishing the last review. I'm confident we're going to surpass the word count of Game of Thrones, aka A Song of Fire and Ice.
There are more tabs too, keeping track of maps we need to circle back to for various reasons like needing a third player or somebody that can speak Spanish (we'll probably need an Argentinian to guide us through the Argentina maps). My favorite tab is the author tab where we can see our average reviews for each author, it won't give us any good info unless we review EVERY map by that author but it is still fun to look at. Poor Robootto sits in last place with an average of 2.211 across 61 maps and the current lead is Salamander with an average of 9.25 across a grand total of 2 maps (which is actually all the maps this person has made, so I guess this number is accurate).
This is the end of the post. Go play my map, Laundromat.
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