As I said before, I was occupied for a bit, but now I should finally be able to get back to doing these weekly! I did manage to get a few things done over the past three weeks:

• flora: Finished up and published a Luneko species sheet! Happy April Fool.

  That’s Anise. Anise is the April fool, and also he’s happy.

• blog: I wrote about how the particle wipe generator works, in lurid detail! I think it’s an interesting little read, even if you have no use for the tool itself.

  I also spent a lot of time backfilling old art on my (clean) art gallery. It’s not updated quite yet; there’s a lot to go to, shockingly so, and I haven’t even made it through year one yet. Honestly, I’m kind of embarrassed by how much my output declined over time.

• art: Speaking of, I’m back to drawing regularly, instead of just saying I wish I were drawing regularly! I think I’ve actually been drawing pretty regularly for like two weeks now. Most of it is porn. I should probably draw some not-porn, too. It’s just, you know, porn is a lot of fun to draw.

• secret thing: I laid some groundwork for the little game engine I’m writing and haven’t really talked about yet. More on that, including maybe even a name, once I feel like I have some kinda proof of concept.

• sudoku thing: I taught it about extra regions so now it can be used to play hyper sudoku? I don’t know why I’m even making this. It’s kind of unusable until I add undo/redo and puzzle generation, and both of those are effort. I guess I’ll see if my spite is strong enough to power me through both.

• streaming: Ash and I played video games on the internet while high and you can watch it if you really want to for some reason.

Hey, that’s not too bad a haul, considering I didn’t even have time to work for most of the month! Got some good stuff going on, glad to see I’m up to speed again at last.

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.

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.

Doin’ game stuff. Probably going to be quiet for a few weeks still.

• alice: Actually wrote a decent amount of stuff, though fairly haphazardly. Finally kind of getting into the groove here. Still contemplating more interesting ways to offer choices, without turning the game into a combinatorial explosion.

• art: Did some doodles. Not as frequently as I’d like, and mostly not published, but I did some, and that’s nice.

• fox flux: Revisited the parallax forest background briefly. Made some progress, but talked to glip and maybe it’s not the right approach in the first place? Not thinking about it too seriously right now, regardless.

• idchoppers: Miraculously, I got multi-polygon splitting finally working… and then hit a panic when there are coincident segments, which offhand I’m not sure how to fix. Sigh.

Way behind on blogging, I know, sorry.

• art: Did some doodles. Not as frequently as I’d like, and mostly not published, but I did some, and that’s nice.

• alice: Continuin’ on, though mostly planning and tech stuff this week, not so much writing.

• irl: I did my taxes oh boy!

• blog: I made decent progress on last month’s posts, but, am still not done yet. Sorry. I only have so much energy I can pour into writing at a time, apparently, and working on a visual novel is eating up tons of it.

• anise: We picked up progress on this game again, came up with a bunch more things to populate the world, and both did some sketches of them! Also I did some basic tile collision merging, which I’d been meaning to do for a while, and which had promising results.

• idchoppers: I got arbitrary poly splitting mostly working, finally…! I can’t believe how much effort this is taking, but it doesn’t help that I’m only dedicating a couple hours at a time to it completely sporadically. Maybe I’ll have something to show for it soon.

The visual novel is eating most of my time lately, and I’m struggling to get back that writing momentum, and in the meantime it feels like it’s consuming all my time and not letting me do anything else! I’m getting there, though.

Hi! It’s been three weeks again. But this time it’s because I was up to my eyeballs in making a video game, and I generally don’t have much to say during those spans beyond “I’m making a video game”.

• alice: We made a video game! Or, at least, a demo. Note: extremely NSFW (although that link is fine; it’s just a release post).

  I hadn’t used Ren’Py a month ago, so there was a lot of scurrying around trying to figure out how to make it do what I want, and then there was a lot of fiction-writing which I have a tough time getting into, but I’m pretty happy with how it came out. Now we just need to make the other 80% of it.

• idchoppers: Oh, yeah, I got the geometry thing I was doing basically working. Next I gotta adjust the algorithm to work with an arbitrary number of input shapes, which is slightly more complicated.

• blog: Wrote about some tech wishes for 2018. Wrote a decent chunk of a post about my experience with idchoppers and Rust and porting weird C++ code, but it had to wait until I’d actually gotten the thing working, and then I just didn’t finish it yet haha.

Yep, that’s it, really busy, bye

I ran out of brain pills near the end of January due to some regulatory kerfuffle, and spent something like a week and a half basically in a daze. I have incredibly a lot of stuff to do right now, too, so not great timing… but, well, I guess no time would be especially good. Oh well. I got a forced vacation and played some Avernum.

Anyway, in the last three weeks, the longest span I’ve ever gone without writing one of these:

• anise: I added a ✨ completely new menu feature ✨ that looks super cool and amazing and will vastly improve the game.

• blog: I wrote SUPER game night 3, featuring a bunch of games from GAMES MADE QUICK??? 2.0! It’s only a third of them though, oh my god, there were just so many.

  I also backfilled some release posts, including one for Strawberry Jam 2 — more on that momentarily.

• ???: Figured out a little roadmap and started on an ???.

• idchoppers: Went down a whole rabbit hole trying to port some academic C++ to Rust, ultimately so I could intersect arbitrary shapes, all so I could try out this ridiculous idea to infer the progression through a Doom map. This was kind of painful, and is basically the only useful thing I did while unmedicated. I might write about it.

• misc: I threw together a little PICO-8 prime sieve inspired by this video. It’s surprisingly satisfying.

  (Hmm, does this deserve a release post? Where should its permanent home be? Argh.)

• art: I started to draw my Avernum party but only finished one of them. I did finish a comic celebrating the return of my brain pills.

• neon vn: I contributed some UI and bugfixing to a visual novel that’ll be released on Floraverse tomorrow.

• alice vn: For Strawberry Jam 2, glip and I are making a ludicrously ambitious horny visual novel in Ren’Py. Turns out Ren’Py is impressively powerful, and I’ve been having a blast messing with it. But also our idea requires me to write about sixty zillion words by the end of the month. I guess we’ll see how that goes.

  I have a (NSFW) progress thread going on my smut alt, but honestly, most of the progress for the next week will be “did more writing”.

I’m behind again! Sorry. I still owe a blog post for last month, and a small project for last month, and now blog posts for this month, and Anise game is kinda in limbo, and I don’t know how any of this will happen with this huge jam game taking priority over basically everything else. I’ll see if I can squeeze other stuff in here and there. I intended to draw more regularly this month, too, but wow I don’t think I can even spare an hour a day.

The jam game is forcing me to do a lot of writing that I’d usually dance around and avoid, though, so I think I’ll come out the other side of it much better and faster and more confident.

Welp. Back to writing!

• blog: I wrote a birthday post, as is tradition. I finally finished writing Game Night 2, a full month after we actually played those games.

• art: I put together an art improvement chart for last year, after skipping doing it in July, tut tut. Kind of a weird rollercoaster!

  I worked a teeny bit on two one-off comics I guess but they aren’t reeeally getting anywhere fast. Comics are hard.

  I made a banner for Strawberry Jam 2 which I think came out fantastically!

• games: I launched Strawberry Jam 2, a month-long February game jam about making horny games. I will probably be making a horny game for it.

• idchoppers: I took another crack at dilation. Some meager progress, maybe. I think I’m now porting bad academic C++ to Rust to get the algorithm I want, and I can’t help but wonder if I could just make up something of my own faster than this.

• fox flux: I did a bunch of brainstorming and consolidated a bunch of notes from like four different places, which feels like work but also feels like it doesn’t actually move the project forward.

• anise!!: Ah, yes, this fell a bit by the wayside. Some map work, some attempts at a 3D effect for a particular thing without much luck (though I found a workaround in the last couple days).

• computers: I relieved myself of some 200 browser tabs, which feels fantastic, though I’ve since opened like 80 more. Alas. I also tried to put together a firejail profile for running mystery games from the internet, and I got like 90% of the way there, but it turns out there’s basically no way to stop an X application from reading all keyboard input.

  (Yes, I know about that, and I tried it. Yes, that too.)

I’ve got a small pile of little projects that are vaguely urgent, so as much as I’d love to bash my head against idchoppers for a solid week, I’m gonna try to focus on getting a couple half-done things full-done. And maybe try to find time for art regularly so I don’t fall out of practice? Huff puff.

It was my birthday! I need to write a birthday post argh.

• anise!!: Surprise! Mostly Anise. I refactored dialogue to be a bit less of a hairball; started making item pickups actually work; decided to reverse a former decision and expand the world a little bit (which unfortunately means the world map doesn’t quite fit all on the screen at once, oh well); finally got around to making animated tiles work (!!!); experimented with making sound effects in SunVox, with mixed success; and just general working on level design which takes incredibly far much longer than I ever expected.

• misc: I wrote a userscript to highlight the game being currently played at GDQ, though it’s not quite so useful now that GDQ is over.

  I realize I don’t really know where a tiny oneoff thing like this should live, and I’ve left a trail of a good few of them. Hmm. I guess I could’ve written a release post for it, but it also seems like it should be in an index of stuff somewhere…?

• ???: ???

• anise!!: Work continues! glip is busy with a big Flora update, so I’m left to just do code things in the meantime. I did some refactoring I’d been wanting to do for months (splitting apart the “map” and the “world” and the scene that draws the world), drew some final-ish menu art (it looks so good), switched to a vastly more accurate way to integrate position, added a bunch of transitions that make the game feel way more polished, and drew some pretty slick dialogue boxes. Nice!

  I’ll be continuing to work on this game during GAMES MADE QUICK??? 2.0, my jam for making games while watching AGDQ all week! Maybe join if you’re watching AGDQ all week!

• art: I tried drawing a picture and this time I liked it. I also drew the header art for the aforementioned game jam, though I didn’t have time to finish it, but I think I pulled off a deliberate-looking scratchy sketchy style that’s appropriate for a game jam? Sure we’ll go with that.

• blog: I finished a post about picking random numbers and a post about how game physics cheat. Which, ah, catches me up for December! Heck! I think I’ve found a slightly more casual style that feels easier to get down, though?

• writing: I finally wrangled a sensible outline for a Twine I’ve been dragging my feet on, so now I don’t have any excuses! Oh no!

Happy new year! 🎆

In an unprecedented move, I did one thing for an entire calendar week. I say “unprecedented” but I guess the same thing happened with fox flux. And NEON PHASE. Hmm. Sensing a pattern. See if you can guess what the one thing was!

• anise!!: Wow! It’s Anise! The game has come so far that I can’t even believe that any of this was a recent change. I made monster AI vastly more sensible, added a boatload of mechanics, fleshed out more than half the map (and sketched out the rest), and drew and implemented most of a menu with a number of excellent goodies. Also, FINALLY (after a full year of daydreaming about it), eliminated the terrible “clock” structure I invented for collision detection, as well as cut down on a huge source of completely pointless allocations, which sped physics up in general by at least 10% and cut GC churn significantly. Hooray! And I’ve done even more just in the last day and a half. Still a good bit of work left, but this game is gonna be fantastic.

• art: Oh right I tried drawing a picture but I didn’t like it so I stopped.

I have some writing to catch up on — I have several things 80% written, but had to stop because I was just starting to get a cold and couldn’t even tell if my own writing was sensible any more. And then I had to work on a video game about my cat. Sorry. Actually, not sorry, video games about my cat are always top priority. You knew what you were signing up for.

My sleep got all screwed up and I caught a cold which knocked me on my ass for a couple days. Very efficient to have both happen simultaneously. I’ve made up for it by being a busy beaver so far this week.

As for last week…

• anise!!: Good progress! I fixed screen transitions to not diagonally cut across other chunks of the map (except in an obscure case I noticed two days ago). Implemented some interactive stuff, drew some extra grass tiles to fill in what glip gave me, polished the first part of the map decently well, and then sat down with glip and sketched out the progression for the rest of the map.

• blog: I wrote most of another Game Night installment, but managed never to finish it. I also wrote maybe 60% of an interesting mathy post, which I also managed not to finish yet, largely because I ended up down a rabbit hole for half a day about the intersection of probability and calculus (which is fascinating).

And that was about it! I spent two and a half days just playing through Breath of the Wild while sick; I never actually beat the game. And now I, er, still haven’t beaten it. I’m trying to find all the shrines before I do, and there are maybe half a dozen left with all the quests finished, so all I can do is run around the world and hope the shrine radar goes off. I’ll get back to that, uh, later.

I guess this’ll be the last roundup of 2017! Happy new year!

I’ve been a bit all over the place! And I’m starting to go nocturnal again, oh no.

• art: I started drawing a header image for my itch.io page, which for a year now has been barren, save for a promise that I would soon make it unbarren.

  I accidentally spent a good chunk of time toodling around with 3D modelling again, this time trying to aim for low-poly with pixel art textures. I tried a couple things, but the biggest success by far was Star Anise.

• anise!!: Still not done, but asymptotically approaching done. Most of the time has been going towards the map, which has been rearchitectued several times, and which is bigger and more complicated than anything we’ve done before. Also did some regular old mechanical stuff, like doors and whatnot.

• misc: I had MegaZeux on the brain and wanted to try out the Web Audio API, so on a total whim I wrote a little player for MegaZeux’s SFX strings.

• ???: Ah! Not ready to talk about this one yet.

Oops, I seem to have missed a week. I was doing Ludum Dare 40, but then I stopped, because— well hang on lemme just bullet this.

• anise!!: I intended to enter Ludum Dare with glip; we were working on a game about Anise that we’d conceived about a month ago but never gotten around to. We made pretty decent progress, but realized we couldn’t fit anywhere near what we wanted into only three days, so we’re just… running with it. It’s going on a little longer than we wanted, but it’s getting pretty fun to play now, and I guess that’s pretty good progress given that we had absolutely nothing ten days ago. I’m even figuring out AI for once.

• fox flux: Worked on some portraits and big text and underground tiles. Made some sound effects. Did a whole pretty cool footstep thing that combines particles with footstep noises and is very great.

• other games: I discovered bitsy, the teeniest game engine I’ve ever seen, and wanted to make something with it — so I made Roguelike Simulator (and also wrote a release post).

• cc: I got so frustrated with trying to find something in Unity Collab history that I cobbled together a thing for exporting Collab history to git. No, you can’t have it, I’m still not convinced it won’t delete my entire hard drive or something. Also I probably fixed a bug in the actual game somewhere in there.

• blog: Finally finished that post about object models, only a month late! Hooray! Also wrote a game night post, which may or may not become a series?

Also some other stuff that I’m not ready to share yet.

I have a lot going on and can’t believe the month is a third over yet, but I’m charging forwards!