Hello Snapzu! Brand new and ready to conquer this new platform!
Hello Snapzu!
My name's Ash and I run a blog called Odin Gaming.
Odin Gaming
Odin Gaming is about strategy and simulation gaming and modding. On my site are mods, guides, the odd opinion, and a few Let's Plays. Featured games include Stellaris, Crusader Kings, Kerbal Space Program, and Civilization.
I've always found modding communities to be a little disparate and in need of a constant thread to help bring them together. I've dabbled in modding for years and, as it happens, have ended up becoming a professional software engineer. These two "traits", hand-in-hand, mean that I find myself well-placed to investigate incompatibilities and get mods working nicely together.
I also just seem to have the patience for it!
My cornerstone content is comprised of the odd mod installation guide, carefully-curated mod lists (that are kept up-to-date), and some deep-dives into decade-old modding communities surrounding older games, such as Civ IV and Dawn of War (the original!).
About Me
So how did I end up doing this?
My gaming hobby was, believe-it-or-not, a gift from my grandma. I'm relatively certain my first exposure to video games was Manic Miner on the ZX Spectrum. I fondly remember my grandma buying Mario Bros 3 for the NES and sitting with me for hours as we played Super Metroid or Ocarina of Time. Yes, Nintendo was my first gaming love.
Trying my best to cast my mind back, I think my first modding experience was with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I originally owned this game on the XBox, but had a friend who had joined the PC Master Race a little earlier than me. He showed me console commands and the power of editing game files to do pretty much whatever you wanted. At this point in my life, I was just interested in giving myself super-elf abilities.
And that was that! Once I realised I could make games what I wanted them to be, I was hot on it.
Blogger Newbie
I've been at this for about 10 months now. I'm still making plenty of mistakes, but learning so much. I feel like I've hit a second wind recently - with a site redesign and a new breath of life in my social media strategy - and Snapzu, I hope, will be a part of that.
I'm looking forward to meeting some of you and discovering some great content!
Join the Discussion
Welcome Ash!
Thank you!
Welcome! I don't game, myself (at least I haven't in years), but it's nice to see something from quite a different perspective! Also, I just had a look at your website and it looks really slick! What are some hurdles you've run into with it?
(btw I love the privacy policy, it's a nice change of pace to see you be so transparent about it!)
Thanks for looking! That means a lot! I've gone to some effort to make it look slick, so I'm glad the work has payed off!
The biggest hurdle was - and probably still is, to an extent - page loading speed. The blog's pretty media heavy, I use a number of plugins (meaning extra JavaScript a lot of the time), and I have a penchant for long-form posts, so it can be a challenge to keep it snappy. I think it's in a good place right now, but there's always room for improvement!
I'm glad you noticed the privacy policy! I work as a software engineer in cyber security by day, so privacy and digital security get discussed a lot. I know how important it is to me - though I've become a lot more relaxed about it in launching Odin Gaming - so I wanted to extend that same courtesy to my readers :)
Interesting! How do you find getting more readers etc is going?