🔗 Advent calendar, with links to individual projects

Happy new year!

For December, I had the absolutely ludicrous idea to do an advent calendar, whereupon I would make and release a thing every day until Christmas.

It didn’t go quite as planned! But some pretty good stuff still came out of it.

🔗 Doom text generator, locally hosted

I’ve been mad my entire life that one of these didn’t seem to exist. ZDoom can print arbitrary text, of course, but only if you fuck around writing and compiling an ACS script or whatever! There’s no console command for it! Outrageous!!!

So I finally made this. It took like ten hours, which I have to say, is fucking incredible.

I did not expect my return to writing to be like this.

Twigs, our nine-year-old sphynx cat, has died.

He is survived by Pearl, his lovely niece; Anise, his best friend and sparring partner; Cheeseball, his wrestling protégé; and Napoleon, his oldest and dearest friend.

I would not say I’ve been having a great time.

• fox flux: I fixed some bugs with pushing on flat ground, and did a bunch of math.

Hello!! This is just the year of endless interruptions. I switched medication and I’m functional, but I think I have withdrawal from going off the old stuff, so I’ve been a little spacey for about a week. Hoping it passes soon! Also some other distractions happened. But in the meantime I’ve been drawing a lot.

• art: I’ve been joining Ash’s commission streams for the past week or so and mostly doodling porn, but after doing that for a while, I decided I should try coloring stuff again, so now I’m doing that also. Definitely need the practice, but really enjoying seeing myself produce more finished work again. I guess I could go put some of that work in the canonical place, too.

• blog: I did a whole bunch of work on a blog post which is going to be preposterously long, but hey, what a way to come back. Hoping to finish it by the end of the month, if I can get my brain working again.

• alice: Still writing for this…

• fox flux: I’ve been kind of taking a break from physics, but I did have some ideas about how extrinsic velocity could work, got them working for a conveyor belt, and then extended the same concept to a rough rework of pushing. It works surprisingly well given how little time I spent on it, so that’s very promising.

• gleam: I put together the first production VN with it, and although I had to cheat and hand-edit a bit, GLEAM grew a bunch of useful stubs of features along the way! It’s getting there. Also I discovered a fascinating edge case in Firefox when you have 800 images visible but all but one of them have zero opacity.

Wee bit late, but I’ve been busy.

• fox flux: I wrote some push physics tests, now that it’s possible to do that. Removed some old obsolete garbage I’ve hated for like a year, hooray. And then I got stuck in a horrible loop of coming up with a new idea for how to do pushing, realizing it won’t work in some case, making a thousand notes, rinse and repeat.

  I can’t even fall back to spriting, because my tablet broke! Argh.

• doom: I made WasteNot, a ridiculous ZDoom mod that tracks how much ammo/health/armor you lose by grabbing items when you’re close to the max amount you can carry. Also I put some Doom stuff on Itch and the landing page here.

Very exciting week. I spent a lot of it exhausted, after rushing to invert my sleep schedule in not very much time.

• irl: I went to the dentist, which I think was the last of the errand backlog, hallelujah.

• fox flux: Continuing on from last week, I threw myself headfirst into this idea of splitting up base actor code.

  I tried it against Isaac’s Descent HD (my LÖVE port of Isaac’s Descent that I only ever released on Patreon), since it has a very small number of abilities and objects, and just went hog wild.

  The results have been promising! Most of it went much more smoothly than I expected. A little bit was much more horrible than I expected. But within the space of a week I’d gotten a rough first attempt working, ported it to fox flux, and gotten the game… um… mostly limping along. There’s still some lingering fallout, and I haven’t even gotten to Lexy herself yet, but it seems like this will be an overall improvement. I can even write tests now! Tests!

  I also did some more work on the revamped Lexy sprites, but then my tablet broke — again — so that came to a screeching halt.

• blog: I started on a second post (without finishing the first, hm), or more specifically, I started on a complicated but very cool interactive doohickey to accompany the second post. Very excited. Should probably, like, finish one of them.

• alice: Planning, writing.

I’m discovering all kinds of ancient damage in myself, but I’m chugging along!

• irl: We’re making our way through an endless backlog of errands. There are so many. But they’re getting done, which is good! Also the internet was out for a day so that was fun.

• gleam: It got a big ol’ refactor, which left it working exactly the same, so that’s fun! Stubbed out enough features that it’s now (technically…) possible to use it to make a VN from scratch, rather than just previewing and making minor edits to an existing one. I split apart the player from the editor and ensured the player works standalone; I added a loading screen; and I finally got around to adding back music support. It’s coming along!

• art: I did like half a dozen daily comics? You know. “Daily”. The last one was… oops, almost a week ago. I’m sure I’ll get back to them real soon now.

  Also some sketching! I’ve almost filled a real physical sketchbook for only the second time in my life.

• stream: I took a crack at Sigil on UV, trying for 100% kills and secrets, with… mixed results! Great fun, I guess.

• fox flux: I am admittedly struggling a bit.

  We played Cadence of Hyrule; I found the art style inspiring; I tried to glean something from it that I could apply to my sprite work; and I realized basically everything I’ve drawn is counter to what I most like in pixel art. It was a struggle just to produce the few tiles I have so far, so I don’t know what to feel or do here.

  At Ash’s suggestion, I started trying to draw some Dewclaw tiles, but boy! That’s difficult. How do you design small pieces that can be put together into something sufficiently reminiscent of a city? I don’t even know how to draw a city, not really; I’m remarkably terrible at filling in small details of a concrete place or situation.

  And then I tried to do something technical and split up Lexy’s code — since historically it’s been littered with a ton of if self.form == 'foo' then ... special cases — only to discover that it breaks everything. Now I’m trying a different approach, which is not breaking everything quite as badly, but which has massive repercussions and possibly slows the game down by double-digit percent. Love game development.

• alice: Still plodding along on Alice’s Day Off. I wrote a half-draft, half-outline of another route. Just been hard to get in the right mood, lately.

• blog: I started on a post! Wow! Remember when I used to write posts? I’d like to do that again. I’ve got one half-done and ideas for a few more, if I can just get some momentum going again.

I’ll get there.

Hello. I don’t know how I am! But I did some stuff.

• fox flux: Workin’ on a new walk animation.

• gleam: After years of saying I should totally do so, I finally started making a little editor for the Floraverse web VN engine. I’ve been gradually teaching it to load and play back the existing VNs (from scratch, because the old code is Quite Bad), and it’s finally hitting the point where it’s possible to make something from scratch. Sort of. I mean, there’s no saving or loading or exporting, and a bunch of stuff is broken, but you know. Getting there. Maybe I’ll even make a VN myself.

• art: I started doing daily comics again and then forgot after day 1.

GLEAM has basically taken up my whole week; turns out that while client-side web stuff has improved dramatically, writing an editor is still an incredible pain in the ass. Getting somewhere, though.

Oh, and that marks the end of my journal! Cool, I guess. I don’t tend to fill up notebooks very often.

Hello. I’m kinda up and down but recovering, I think.

• art: I drew a bunch of porn, most of which is on my porn gallery (warning: porn). I even wrote some stuff, which will never see the light of day.

  I also finished putting all my 2015 art on my clean gallery, if you want to see the arc of my art journey, which slowed considerably after the first couple years. Kinda bummed about that.

• irl: We have done so many fucking errands you have no idea.

• gleam: I put together another Floraverse VN, but more importantly (to me anyway?), I’ve actually made some inroads on making a little editor for these things. It’s not entirely functional yet — did you know that drag-and-drop is a huge pain in the ass — but it resembles something and I’m making swift progress. Hallelujah.

• fox flux: I gathered up like a dozen pages of dense notes and kinda consolidated them into one place, which is nice.

  I also, accidentally, uh, okay funny story, I was taking notes on paper and I doodled Lexy pulling a lever, and later I tried to sprite it based on her current sprite, and I didn’t like it a lot, so I pixel-traced over the drawing instead, and it was way better, and this led me on a journey that ended up with a completely different sprite design. It’s a thousand times better in every possible way, but I’ve also invented a massive pile of work for myself, because now I have to redesign a dozen variants of her and redraw like 200 sprite frames. It kind of feels like I’m back to square one and have accomplished nothing at all on this game, in fact! But fuck me it’s so much better

Next week marks a fun milestone. I’m now on the very last page of the book I’ve been using to jot this stuff down, one week per page. It spans almost four years. I should probably find another one real quick.

I’m burnt out. I just can’t get into anything. And I’ve been dealing with a huge stack of accumulated errands from last month. And it’s fucking hot in here and that just pisses me off all the time???

So I’m trying to step back and chill and draw and hang out with folks and whatever. Sorry. I don’t know why I’m apologizing.

• fox flux: Added some sparkles to a key.

• mario maker: Made Star Anise’s Dream Land (5TQ-JG0-MNG), a happy-go-lucky level inspired by my cat, and Koopa Valley (463-9CJ-PVG), an attempt at some standard friendly SMW-like fare. Also made half of like six other levels, but I’m having trouble even finishing those.

• art: I’ve been drawing, just, a bunch of porn. It’s nice to be getting back into that. Drawing, I mean, not porn. But porn too.

See you next week.

Hello, hello! It’s been a while. June ended up being an avalanche of errands and personal problems that neatly segued into each other, over and over. Good times! I think everything’s settled down now, but who knows.

Anyway, that gives us three weeks to catch up on:

• fox flux: Finished and committed a bunch of half-implemented ideas in an attempt to get git clean for once (still more to go though); took a crack at porting sound effects from MilkyTracker and sfxr to Sunvox, which was much harder than expected; experimented with a nighttime palette; drew some new vastly improved swimming sprites from scratch.

  Did some work on the camera, which has always been pretty lazy. (I’ve improved it a lot since that recording, so don’t judge it too harshly.) Started on a redone menu, which should be a great improvement over the demo’s menu which was just “resume” and “quit”. Redrew the base dialogue portraits, and they look fantastic, but apparently I never tweeted about that, but you can see it in the next link!

  After spending all this time on miscellaneous mechanics and other bits and pieces, I decided it was finally time to get a basic gameplay loop going — enter a level, get some stuff, leave the level. The results are extremely rough, but I’ve made a start! It’s turning into a game! Which is weird because it was already a game once!

• secret game engine thing: Not a lot, but I’ve cleared some design roadblocks that were seriously getting in the way.

• art: Some doodles. Also I drew some beautiful gift art for my and Ash’s Metapodth anniversary.

• alice’s day off: Wrote some stuff! It’s a miracle.

• gamedev: I ran GAMES MADE QUICK??? III-2, and 28 fine folks managed to produce something game-like within a week! Please give some of them a try!

Currently attempting to get my ass back in gear, with moderate success.

I remain on a fox flux kick. Keep trying to do other stuff as well and then not doing that? Hm.

• fox flux: Documented the hell out of all my rewritten collision code, removed some old hacks, put some methods on a new type that was an ad-hoc table before, and fixed a final remaining edge case in a satisfying way. Did kinda start writing about all this but didn’t finish it yet.

  Then I fixed all the stuff I’d broken about pushing in the process, and cleaned it up somewhat.

  Water is gradually improving but still kinda rough.

  Also added some experimental candy? Candy is pretty good.

  I did some more overhauling of the palette; I’m really really liking how it’s coming out.

  And also a preposterous amount of brainstorming. Like I’ve got half a dozen sheets of paper with tiny 8pt notes crammed on them. This ought to be a fun game.

Welp, back to that, then.

Hello! I’ve been a little preoccupied with meatspace things again, but here is some digital stuff.

• fox flux: I have been a busy little beaver. I consolidated 1D and 2D motion, made ground adherence more conservative about how far it tries to drop you, and totally overhauled climbing to not incredibly suck. But who cares about any of that.

  What I really did is spend like a solid week overhauling collision detection. Finally, after years of wanting it, I have overlap resolution and nearly zero-cost contact detection! Which means that if objects overlap by some horrible twist of fate, instead of freely clipping through each other, they’re now free to move apart but not closer together. It’s god damn magic. Also I now know exactly where you’re touching objects which will probably come in handy for like, critters that walk back and forth on a platform without walking off it? Or something? I forget exactly why I wanted that but hey it’s nice.

  As an added bonus, I can finally fix climbing off the top of ladders — instead of hopping off the top and then landing, you stop at exactly the top, which is incredibly satisfying.

  I will almost certainly be wringing a blog post out of all this.

• art: I worked more on that animation and then kinda forgot about it. Hm. Also some doodling or whatever?

  I drew a little… comic? Series of panels? I drew a thing about a ground adherence bug I ran into, and also a general explanation of ground adherence. It’s on Twitter, though it seems worth preserving elsewhere, once I figure out where that is.

• gleam: I finally made some kind of real start on an editor for the little Flora VNs I put together. It doesn’t do a lot yet, but it has some UI, which is backwards from how I usually make these things, so that’s promising.

• stream: Ash streamed some Spyro while I commentated, and then I streamed some Hat in Time while they commentated, and that was all great.

I am juggling too many things but I extremely want to get them all moving so I guess I’ll get back to it!

• fox flux: Messed with collision code in an attempt to get contact points out of it, but that turned out to be a bit more laborious than I was hoping.

  Finished an animation and generally did some other art.

  Finally finished box pushing, hallelujah.

• art: Doodled. Started on a ridiculous ambitious animation; we’ll see how that goes.

I remember saying something about balancing my time better, and that did not happen.

• fox flux: I basically spent the whole week working on push physics. It was tough going at first, but I finally got it working correctly which feels like a goddamn Christmas miracle.

  I probably did some sprite work in there somewhere too, to let my brain cool down a bit.

  I’m excited about this game, ah! There’s a ton of work to go but I’m actually starting to see some mechanics come together.

• stream: Ash and I played a ridiculous adventure game for a bit. Hm, maybe we should finish that. It’ll be on YouTube, uh, eventually.

Not so much this week; I ended up nocturnal and that threw me entirely for a loop. Back to waking with the sun now and feeling pretty good, so, fingers crossed.