🔗 Particle wipe generator on itch or hosted locally
🔗 Source code

This is a tool for making particle wipes, a type of transition whose name I made up because I don’t think they have a well-known name! They can be used in Ren’Py, RPG Maker, or anything that lets you write a shader.

Most of my games have done screen transitions with simple fades, and I wanted to try something different here, but I couldn’t find a tool to make the effect I wanted. So I wrote my own. If you’re interested, here’s how it works:

Hello hello! I finally finished that game I was working on, so now I might actually be back to some sort of normal dev schedule.

Except I’m gonna be kinda occupied for the next week or so. So.

• cherry kisses: Hey hey I finished making Cherry Kisses, which is super duper NSFW! It’s probably the most well-designed and polished thing I/we have released, though. Whoops! I gotta stop accidentally making sex games.

  There’s some little niceties in there. Maybe I should, like, write about it sometime.

  Also attempted to get it to work on Android, which… is… non-trivial, despite LÖVE being “able” to target Android.

• particle wipe generator: Cherry Kisses includes a cool heart transition between scenes, which took a surprising amount of effort to create, so I packaged up the code and put some dials and knobs on it. Now you can use the particle wipe generator to make your own particley transitions! Also hosted locally.

  Maybe I should, like, write about how this works sometime. Can’t wait for someone to tell me how I could’ve done it a thousand times more easily.

• irl: We did some spring cleaning! Very exciting for anyone who doesn’t live here, I know. Our bedroom is no longer half-full of half-unpacked boxes, which is pretty nice.

• sudoku: I occasionally waste time with a nice sudoku app, which has a free ad-supported version and a paid version. It has a sequel now, which is even better, but which only comes free with ads. I am incensed by this so I started writing my own JS player out of spite. Unclear whether my spite will last long enough to produce something usable.

Pretty happy to be back to makin’ things! I love that I could spin off some throwaway helper code into a little gamedev tool, and I’d definitely like to do more of that sort of thing in the future.

Another double feature. Surprise, basically all I’ve been doing is working on a jam game. Should be back to normal once I get this out the door.

• art: I doodled, like, once, but then was lost in gamedev all day every day.

• cerise: I finally, like, planned out the progression of the game, and sat down to write it. Prose is harder for me than you’d think, and there’ve been a number of interruptions over the past month, so it’s taking a little while. I’m nearly done and am pretty happy with what I have so far, though.

  Actually, reading my notes here, I’m amazed how much of the game was done in only the last two weeks of February! I didn’t even have the passage of time working yet, and that’s the most fundamental part of the game.

  I did also cobble together a thing for generating particle wipes, which I think is pretty cool; I’ll probably write about it and release a web version in the near future.

Should be done in a day or two, but I’ve been saying that for a week, so who knows.

I already missed a week! But I was mostly working on a jam game so that’s not too surprising.

• art: Trying to keep up a semi-regular drawing schedule, with mixed success. I’m still working on my character lineup painting, though I’ve hit a few awkward spots that are proving difficult to fix. Sketched some stuff a few times. Drew Lexy with a sword.

• music: I made part of a song, which was originally going to be for the Strawberry Jam game, and then I forgot about it, whoops. And now I will very much not have time to do music. It was coming out pretty okay, though, which is encouraging!

• alice’s day off: Hey, remember this? Our wildly explicit VN for last year’s Strawberry Jam, which we intended to finish a few months later, and then, didn’t? Still working on it! I wrote out rough drafts for a couple more routes. This’ll probably become my main priority after this month, so I can actually get another thing done and off my plate.

• cerise: Spent a lot of time on engine work (some of it not even necessary) and probably not enough on the game itself, and now I only have ten days left oops. Parallax layers are now actors, Tiled support is cleaned up a lot, sprites support four angles (or really, an arbitrary number of angles), physics were updated for top-down mode, and I finally implemented raycasting for realsies. Cleaned up dialogue code a lot, again, and put together basic dialogue UI.

  Fixing raycasting was a fun little problem, and free top-down movement offered an interesting little vector puzzle. Maybe I’ll write about those sometime.

  I also spent a little time porting some of my other LÖVE games to use my updated engine code, which also means they should run on LÖVE 11. I’m not finished yet, but once the month is over, I’d like to get updated releases out. It’ll only really matter for Linux users, since the Windows and Mac downloads include their own copy of the LÖVE runtime, but I’m a Linux user, so.

I better, uh, go get to work on this game.

Hey! Miss these? Great! I’m doing them again and no one can stop me.

• art: I spent half the week rendering. Something, something, joke about rendering and EEVEE. No but really, I found out I’m kind of okay at this and set out to paint a whole lineup of all my Floraverse characters, which turned out to be really hard and time-consuming, but anyway here’s Lexy and slightly weirder Lexy and Cerise. Only, like, seven more to go.

  Hm. If only I’d constructed some sort of art website to put this kind of work on. If… only.

• fox flux: This game keeps plodding along. I added a little blowing-a-kiss mechanic a while ago, and I finally gave it a real animation, which I then spruced up a bit more after recording that GIF. Also been cleaning up a big mess of half-finished features I left for myself, including particle effects for— well, that would spoil it!

• strawberry jam: I’m running Strawberry Jam 3, the low-pressure month-long horny game jam! I haven’t gotten very far on my game yet, but most of the work is going to be upfront planning (I hope), so that’s not too worrisome. I just started writing code today, and hopefully will have some kinda rough skeleton done by the 25% point on Friday.

  This is gonna be most of my month! What an exciting topic to come back to.

More coming down the pipe; I’m accelerating all the time.

Eevee grew to level 32!

This has been a surreal and difficult year, but everything turned out much better in the end.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

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In this issue, I bash my head against a rock. Sorry, I mean I bash Star Anise against a rock. It’s about collision detection.

Previously: I draw some text to the screen.
Next: more collision detection, and fixed-point arithmetic.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

---

In this issue, I draw some text!

Previously: I get a Game Boy to meow.
Next: collision detection, ohh nooo…

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

---

In this issue, I cannot get a goddamn Game Boy to meow at me!!

Previously: maps and sprites.
Next: text!

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

---

In this issue, I get a little asset pipeline working and finally have a real map.

Previously: spring cleaning.
Next: resounding failure success?.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

---

In this issue, I tidy up some of the gigantic mess I’ve made thusfar.

Previously: writing a main loop, and finally getting something game-like.
Next: sprite and map loading.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

---

In this issue, I fill in the remaining bits necessary to have something that looks like a game.

Previously: drawing a sprite.
Next: a little spring cleaning.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

---

In this issue, I figure out how to draw a sprite. This part was hard.

Previously: figuring out how to put literally anything on the goddamn screen.
Next: the remaining bits necessary to have something game-like.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

---

In this issue, I figure out how to put literally anything on the goddamn screen, then add a splash of color.

Next: drawing a sprite.

I skipped a week again because, surprise, I’ve been mostly working on the same game…

• art: Actually been doing a bit of it! I painted a thing on a whim, and some misc sketches, a few of which I even felt like posting.

• alice: Finally kind of hit my stride here and wrote, um, a pretty good chunk of stuff. Also played with extending the syntax a bit, and came up with a choice menu that hangs around while the dialogue continues. Kinda cool, though I’m not totally sure what we’ll use it for yet.

  Even with my figuring out how to accelerate, it’s looking like we’ll have to rush if we want to hit our promised date of June 9. So we might delay that a little… maybe even Kickstart some stretch goals? I dunno, I’m leaving that all up to glip and just writing stuff.

• writing: While I’m at it, I actually picked up and worked on a Twine from ages ago. Cool.

• idchoppers: Holy moly, it actually works. The basics actually work, at least. I can’t believe how much effort this hecking took.

  I also tried to start putting together an actual map API, with mixed results. And tried to figure out the maximum distance you can jump in Doom, which is surprisingly tricky? Doom physics are super goofy.

• blog: I actually published a post, which is even tangentially about that idchoppers stuff! Wow! Maybe I’ll do it again, even!

Huh, that almost makes it sound like I’ve been busy.

Hi. Yes. Sorry. I’ve been trying to write this post for ages, but I’ve also been working on a huge writing project, and apparently I have a very limited amount of writing mana at my disposal. I think this is supposed to be a Patreon reward from January. My bad. I hope it’s super great to make up for the wait!

I recently ported some math code from C++ to Rust in an attempt to do a cool thing with Doom. Here is my story.

Here’s a problem I’m having. Or, rather, a problem I’m solving, but so slowly that I wonder if I’m going about it very inefficiently.

I intended to just make a huge image out of this and tweet it, but it takes so much text to explain that I might as well put it on my internet website.