• fox flux: Cleaned up and committed the “heart get” overlay and worked on some more art for it. Diagnosed a very obscure physics problem, but didn’t come up with a good solution yet; physics is hard! Drew a very good tree trunk to use as a spawn point; also worked on some background foliage, though less successfully. Played with colors a bit. Tried to work out a tileset for underground areas.

• music: I wrote like half of a little chiptune song that I actually like so far! I’m now seriously toying with the idea of doing my own music for fox flux. Played a bit with more sound effects, too.

• blog: I wrote up the Eevee mugshot set for Doom I made, as an inaugural post for the release category.

• veekun: Finished up Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon! Pokémon sprites, box sprites, item sprites, and the same data as Sun/Moon. I say “finished” but of course plenty of stuff is still missing, alas.

• cc: I’m trying to make glip some building blocks so that they can actually start building the game, so I made some breakable blocks. Also wrote a little shader for implementing their parallax background, which involves a bunch of layer modes.

• misc: I got a new keyboard. Also I installed umatrix because noscript’s web extension version is half-broken and driving me up the wall. Sorry, noscript.

Huh, that’s not a bad haul, despite a few nights of incredibly bad sleep. Cool.

Complicated week.

• blog: I wrote a rather large chunk of one post, but didn’t finish it. I also made a release category for, well, release announcements, so that maybe things I make will have a permanent listing and not fade into obscurity on my Twitter timeline.

• fox flux: Drew some experimental pickups. Started putting together a real level with a real tileset (rather than the messy sketch sheet i’ve been using). Got doors partially working with some cool transitions. Wrote a little jingle for picking up a heart.

• veekun: Started working on Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon; I have the games dumped to YAML already, so getting them onto the site shouldn’t take too much more work.

• cc: UI thing I was doing is actually, usably done! Hallelujah. Now for more of it.

• idchoppers: I got in a surprise Rust mood and picked this up again. I didn’t get very far, mostly due to trying to coerce Rust into passing around interconnected pointers when it really didn’t want to, but I did add a tiny stub of a CLI (which should make future additions a bit less messy) and started stubbing out a map type.

• fox flux: Some more player sprites, naturally. But also, a bunch of stuff! I drew and animated a heart pickup thing, with the intention that hearts are a little better spaced out and getting one is a bit more of an accomplishment. I also figured out how to do palette translation in a shader, ultimately culminating in a cool palette-preserving underwater effect. Oh, and I guess I implemented water. And a bunch of new movement stuff. And, yeah.

  I’m so glad I’m finally doing game mechanics stuff — getting the art right is nice and all, but this is finally something new that I can play. And show off, even!

• doom: I made a set of Eevee mugshots. I don’t know why. Took about a day, and was pretty cool? I might write a bit about it.

  I also streamed Absolutely Killed, a Doom 1 episode of “gimmick” maps that I enjoyed quite a lot! The stream is on Twitch, at least until they nuke it in a week or two, and I used my custom mugshot the whole time.

I did not work on the final October blog post that I started on almost two weeks ago now; my bad. I’ve had my head pretty solidly stuck on fox flux for like a week, now that I’m finally working on the game parts and now just fiddling with the same set of animations forever. I’ve got a lot of writing I want to do as well, so I’ll try to get to that Real Soon™.

Hi! Sorry. I’m a bit late. I’ve actually been up to my eyeballs in doing stuff for a few days, which has been pretty cool.

• fox flux: Definitely been ramping up how much I’m working on this game. Finished another landing animation blah blah player sprites. Some more work on visual effects, this time a cool silhouette stencil effect thing.

• art: Drew a pic celebrating 1000 followers on my nsfw art Twitter, wow!

• blog: Wrote half of another cross-cutting programming languages post, for October. Then forgot about it for, uhhh, ten days. Whoops! Will definitely get back to that, um, soon.

• writing: Actually made some “good ass legit progress” (according to my notes) on the little Flora twine I’m writing, now including some actual prose instead of just JavaScript wankery.

• bots: I added a bunch more patterns to my Perlin noise Twitter bot and finally implemented a little “masking” thing that will let me make more complex patterns while still making it obvious what they’re supposed to be.

  Alas, while Twitter recently bumped the character limit to 280, that doesn’t mean the bot’s output can now be twice as big — emoji now count as two characters. (No, not because of UTF-16; Twitter is deliberately restricting CJK to 140. It’s super weird.)

• cc: I got undo working with this accursèd sprite animation UI, and I fixed just a whole mess of bugs.

This week has been even more busy, which I think bodes well. I’m up to a lot of stuff, hope you’re looking forward to it!

Dammit, another video game came out.

• fox flux: Some nitpicks to the landing frames, and copying them to every other form (augh). Finished up another form entirely, hallelujah. Very little left now. I think last week is also when I pixeled out a few more experimental characters.

• cc: More sprite animation UI work, which is incredibly tedious oh my goodness. I spent a day investigating Mecanim’s suitability for sprite animation again, and ultimately concluded… no. Good use of time.

• blog: I, ah, started on my final October post. Should be done shortly.

• art: The doodling continues! The best results are NSFW, alas, but I did make this quick relatable comic. Also this good face.

• writing: I have begun work on a Twine. Okay, well, last week I basically just wrote a bunch of custom JavaScript for it and zero actual prose, but it’s still work.

Kind of a slow week, I guess. We did spend an awful lot of it playing Danganronpa V3.

• fox flux: Cleaning up the division between this game and the generic engine guts. More work on the remaining protagonist sprites, including finally coming up with a “landing on the ground” animation I like. Experimenting with shaders and game mechanics and whatnot.

• cc: Got that UI for editing a sprite animation to a mostly usable state.

• art: Kept up doodling most days, and even drew something I like.

• fox flux: I’m taking a little time to clean up the guts of my “engine”, which has now been copy-pasted between half a dozen games and moderately modified in all of them.

• blog: I wrote about how I’ve gotten Unity to do 2D platforming.

• art: Doodling.

• misc: Wrote half of a small Discord bot. Started on a new small game.

Getting back up to speed, finishing getting my computer back how it was, etc. Also we got a SNES Classic and Stardew Valley so, those have been things. But between all that, I somehow found time to do a microscopic amount of actual work!

• art: Sketched some stuff! It wasn’t very good. Need to do this more often.

• fox flux: Finally, after a great many attempts, I drew a pixel art bush I’m fairly happy with. And yet, I can already see ways to improve it! But hey I’m learning stuff and that’s really cool. I’ve been working on a much larger pixel art forest background, too, which is proving a little harder to figure out.

• blog: After a long period of silence, I wrote about how JavaScript has gotten a bit better lately. More words to come, probably!

I’ve got some high aspirations for the month, so I’m gonna get to it and definitely not go visit my video game chickens.

Uh, hey. What’s up. Been a while. My computer died? Linux abruptly put the primary hard drive in read-only mode, which seemed Really Bad, but then it refused to boot up entirely. I suspect the motherboard was on its last legs (though the drive itself was getting pretty worn out too), so long story short, I lost a week to ordering/building an entirely new machine and rearranging/zeroing hard drives. The old one was six years old, so it was about time anyway.

I also had some… internet stuff… to deal with, so overall I’ve had a rollercoaster of a week. Oh, and now my keyboard is finally starting to break.

• fox flux: I’m at the point where the protagonists are almost all done and I’ve started touching up particular poses (times ten). So that’s cool. If I hadn’t lost the last week I might’ve been done with it by now!

• devops: Well, there was that whole computer thing. Also I suddenly have support for colored fonts (read: emoji) in all GTK apps (except Chromium), and that led me to spend at least half a day trying to find a way to get Twemoji into a font using Google’s font extensions. Alas, no dice, so I’m currently stuck with a fairly outdated copy of the Android emoji, which I don’t want to upgrade because Google makes them worse with every revision.

• blog: I started on a post. I didn’t get very far. I still owe two for September. Oops.

• book: Did some editing, worked on some illustrations. I figured out how to get math sections to (mostly) use the same font as body text, so inline math doesn’t look quite so comically out of place any more.

• cc: Fixed some stuff I broke, as usual, and worked some more on a Unity GUI for defining and editing sprite animations.

I’m now way behind and have completely lost all my trains of thought, though I guess having my computer break is a pretty good excuse. Trying to get back up to speed as quickly as possible.

Oh, and happy October. 🎃

• art: Doodled some expressions and an action pose or two. Ended up spending a day or two finishing this little beach picture (tumblr) with probably the best background I’ve ever produced? So that’s nice.

• stream: I started streaming Oracle of Ages in two-to-three-hour chunks, on a whim.

• writing: I did a little bit. Dipped my toe in the water, I guess.

• fox flux: Still approaching finishing the protagonist, which I’ve been avoiding showing because it’s interesting spoilers, but god damn it’s annoying not being able to even show what I’m doing. Anyway I’m really close and then I can start building, like, the game.

• cc: Stubbed out a scheme for moving between rooms, though it’s not quite usable on maps yet. Implemented one-way platforms. Finally finished splitting player input out of the player actor code. Gave up on finding any other way to do it and started writing my own GUI for defining sprite animations.

I seem to have spent the last few days fighting with obscure tech issues, which is getting pretty frustating, but it happened this week so it doesn’t count for the purposes of this post.

Other than that, I’m making steady progress on… stuff. Just not nearly as fast as I’d like. Never as fast as I’d like. Never enough time in the day, I guess.

• flora: Put together a visual novel update for glip.

• art: Lots and lots of doodling, but ultimately not a lot to show for it. There’s a Splatoon thing which came out okay. Mostly just trying to get back into the habit, since I’m reeeally rough at the moment.

• veekun: Updated. No biggie.

• fox flux: Asymptotically approaching having the dang player sprites done. So close.

• cc: Got one-way platforms working spectacularly.

• cc: Slopes now work absolutely beautifully.

• fox flux: Many more player frames; there’s still a little ways to go, but I’ve been making incredible progress.

• veekun: Wrote effect text for items and abilities, which was by far the most tedious thing remaining. Perfected item and box sprites. Not much left now.

• art: Doodled a bit?

• cc: I did a lot of physics and a lot of tearing my hair out. I changed ground detection to be based on collision, which opened the door to making slopes work, and clumsily hacked sliding into working. Then I wasted two days banging my head against a wall and getting nowhere.

  (But spoilers for next week: I did get slopes working perfectly on Sunday.)

• fox flux: Focusing just on player sprites since the game is fundamentally not playable without them. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel; almost all of the walking sequences are done, and about half of the forms are more or less done. So, like, 60% of the way there maybe?

• veekun: Loaded and fixed a bunch of little things that were missing, and now the site is basically functional. Had to fix some more form ordering problems, little obscure connections we forget about with every game, and some issues with evolutions. But I do have a website, and that’s nice. Ideally I’ll have something worth publishing by the end of the month.

And, hm, that’s all. Looks like most of my week went to CC physics, which has me in a mood to work on my book again… horf, so much to do.

• cc: I fixed an obscure timing issue and… well, that’s all, how exciting.

  I should really talk about this game more, but it’s big and I’m not the one designing it and I don’t have a good sense of how much we want to keep under wraps yet?

• blog: I wrote a stream of consciousness about how Nazis are bad.

• potluck: What? Yes! I worked on potluck a bit, believe it or not. I’ve decided to try procedurally generating the whole game — something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and a decision that has piqued my interest in potluck considerably. Step one was to clean up all my map code, which was entangled with parsing Tiled’s JSON format, to make it actually possible to generate a map. I finally did that and made an extremely basic proof of concept that just varies the floor height.

• fox flux: The usual brief work on player sprites. The game has a lot of them.

• gamedev: I made a video game with glip again! It was a birthday present for two of our friends, and it’s extremely specific to them and basically incomprehensible to anyone else, so I haven’t decided yet whether it’d be appropriate to release publicly. But we made something pretty coherent on a whim in two and a half days and that’s nice.

I’m currently working on veekun, which has finally progressed to the point that it has data appearing within the website! Hallelujah. I expect there’ll be plenty of stuff to clean up, but this is a tremendous leap forwards. I’ll be so glad to have this off my plate at last, argh.

It sure has been one.

• cc: Got a basic NPC and some dialogue kinda working.

• art: Colored a picture.

• blog: Wrote a post about how my relationship to tech has changed over time.

• fox flux: Still learning how to do foliage, but getting close to something I like. Messed with my palette a bit.

Nothing too special about this week; it went a little slow, but that’s been nice after the mad panic I was in at the end of July.

• cc: I’m getting the hang of Unity and forming an uneasy truce with C#. Mostly did refactoring of some existing actor code, trying to move all the reading of controls to a single place so the rest of it can be reused for non-players.

• fox flux: I put some work into a new forest background, which is already just… hilariously better than the one from the original game. Complex textures like leaves are one of my serious weak points, but this is forcing me to do it anyway and I’m slowly learning.

• blog: I finished that post on Pokémon datamining, which ended up extraordinarily long and slightly late.

• veekun: Dug into some missing stuff regarding items.

• art: Spent a day or two doodling.

Still behind by one blog post (oops), and slacked on veekun a bit, but I’ve still got momentum.

I had a few inexplicably rough days, which I mostly spent playing Splatoon, but I’m good now!

• blog: I got a preposterous amount of work done on a blog post, but unfortunately it’s turning out to be fairly ambitious, so it’s taking a while to finish. Now it’s August and I didn’t post anything at all in July. Oops.

• vidya: I streamed three hours of playing randomly-chosen fan maps from the entire history of Doom. And for once I turned on VODs, so you can still watch it on Twitch until it’s automatically deleted in a few days.

  I also played, uh, one of the GAMES MADE QUICK??? 1½ entries, which is very shameful. I’ll make an effort to play a few more, soon, I guess?

• fox flux: I significantly improved and finished grassy slopes, hooray. Drew some more player sprites; only like, uh, 120 to go. Played with particle effects, to (imo) great success.