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

🔗 Alice’s Day Off demo on itch

🚨🔞 HEADS UP: This game is super duper NSFW. It contains explicit cartoon porn. You have been warned! 🔞🚨

This is the game glip and I (and a co-writer) made for my horny game jam, Strawberry Jam 2. It’s a goofy visual novel about, well… sex, mostly. A few folks with no interest in the subject matter have played it and still enjoyed it, which seems like a great sign.

(Oh, right, and the jam is over, and has 63 entries! Like last year, they run the gamut from “highly abstract and thoughtful” to “let’s put porn in a game”.)

Some lingering thoughts about the process itself:

Anonymous asks, via money:

What would you like to see happen in tech in 2018?

(answer can be technical, social, political, combination, whatever)

Hmm.

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!

🔗 Strawberry Jam 2 on itch

I’m running a game jam, and this announcement is before the jam starts! What a concept!

The idea is simple: you have all of February to make a horny game.

(This jam is, as you may have guessed, NSFW. 🔞)

🔗 Source code on GitHub
🔗 Install, maybe

Does this ever happen to you?

[TODO: insert black and white gif of someone struggling to read the GDQ schedule because it’s a single long table and it’s hard to even keep track of what day you’re looking at, let alone find out what’s going on right now]

Well, no more! Thanks to the power of IavaScript, now it’s like the picture above, which I guess gave it away huh.

Not very useful now, since I forgot to even post about it here before AGDQ ended, but presumably useful in SGDQ since they never seem to change this page at all.

Wait! Before you click on the “install” link above. Firefox users will need Greasemonkey. Chrome used to support user scripts natively, and legends say it still does, but there are so many walls around extensions now that I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, so just get Tampermonkey, which is also available for most other browsers.

🔗 GAMES MADE QUICK??? 2.0 on itch

I realize, with all the cognitive speed and grace of a cat falling out of a chair, that I have my own website where I can announce things that I am doing.

Here is a thing that I am having done: it’s GAMES MADE QUICK??? 2.0, a game jam that runs concurrently with Games Done Quick. The inspiration was that I once spent the entire week of AGDQ doing nothing but watching the stream, which completely ruined my momentum and cost me the following week as well while I struggled to get back up to speed. What a catastrophe!

So my solution was to spend the week making a game instead, which prompted someone to suggest that I make a jam out of it, and so I did. The results were NEON PHASE and also the original GAMES MADE QUICK???.

It’s a bit late to join now, but look forward to the jam during SGDQ, which runs the last week of June! In the meantime, perhaps peruse the fruits of this season’s labor, or at least glance over my thoughts on some of them.

Previously:

• GAMES MADE QUICK??? 1½ (SGDQ 2017)
• GAMES MADE QUICK??? (AGDQ 2017)

Game night continues with a smorgasbord of games from my recent game jam, GAMES MADE QUICK??? 2.0!

The idea was to make a game in only a week while watching AGDQ, as an alternative to doing absolutely nothing for a week while watching AGDQ. (I didn’t submit a game myself; I was chugging along on my Anise game, which isn’t finished yet.)

I can’t very well run a game jam and not play any of the games, so here’s some of them in no particular order! Enjoy!

These are impressions, not reviews. I try to avoid major/ending spoilers, but big plot points do tend to leave impressions.

• 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.

Game night continues with:

• Detention
• Viatoree
• Paletta

These are impressions, not reviews. I try to avoid major/ending spoilers, but big plot points do tend to leave impressions.

Eevee grew to level 31!

A year strongly defined by mixed success! Also, a lot of video games.

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!

Anonymous asks:

something about how we tweak physics to “work” better in games?

Ho ho! Work. Get it? Like in physics…?

Hi! Here are a few loose thoughts about picking random numbers.