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!

On a recent game night, glip and I stumbled upon bitsy — a tiny game maker for “games where you can walk around and talk to people and be somewhere.” It’s enough of a genre to have become a top tag on itch, so we flicked through a couple games.

What we found were tiny windows into numerous little worlds, ill-defined yet crisply rendered in chunky two-colored pixels. Indeed, all you can do is walk around and talk to people and be somewhere, but the somewheres are strangely captivating. My favorite was the last days of our castle, with a day on the town in a close second (though it cheated and extended the engine a bit), but there are several hundred of these tiny windows available. Just single, short, minimal, interactive glimpses of an idea.

I’ve been wanting to do more of that, so I gave it a shot today. The result is Roguelike Simulator, a game that condenses the NetHack experience into about ninety seconds.

For the last few weeks, glip (my partner) and I have spent a couple hours most nights playing indie games together. We started out intending to play a short list of games that had been recommended to glip, but this turns out to be a nice way to wind down, so we’ve been keeping it up and clicking on whatever looks interesting in the itch app.

Most of the games are small and made by one or two people, so they tend to be pretty tightly scoped and focus on a few particular kinds of details. I’ve found myself having brain thoughts about all that, so I thought I’d write some of them down.

I also know that some people (cough) tend not to play games they’ve never heard of, even if they want something new to play. If that’s you, feel free to play some of these, now that you’ve heard of them!

Also, I’m still figuring the format out here, so let me know if this is interesting or if you hope I never do it again!

First up:

• Lisa: The Painful
• Lisa: The Joyful
• MOOP

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

Anonymous asks, with dollars:

More about programming languages!

Well then!

I’ve written before about what I think objects are: state and behavior, which in practice mostly means method calls.

I suspect that the popular impression of what objects are, and also how they should work, comes from whatever C++ and Java happen to do. From that point of view, the whole post above is probably nonsense. If the baseline notion of “object” is a rigid definition woven tightly into the design of two massively popular languages, then it doesn’t even make sense to talk about what “object” should mean — it does mean the features of those languages, and cannot possibly mean anything else.

I think that’s a shame! It piles a lot of baggage onto a fairly simple idea. Polymorphism, for example, has nothing to do with objects — it’s an escape hatch for static type systems. Inheritance isn’t the only way to reuse code between objects, but it’s the easiest and fastest one, so it’s what we get. Frankly, it’s much closer to a speed tradeoff than a fundamental part of the concept.

We could do with more experimentation around how objects work, but that’s impossible in the languages most commonly thought of as object-oriented.

Here, then, is a (very) brief run through the inner workings of objects in four very dynamic languages. I don’t think I really appreciated objects until I’d spent some time with Python, and I hope this can help someone else whet their own appetite.

• 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.

A full replacement of Doomguy’s vast array of 42 expressions.

You can get it yourself if you want to play Doom as me, for some reason? It does nothing but replace a few sprites, so it works with any Doom flavor (including vanilla) on 1, 2, or Final. Just run Doom with -file eeveemug.wad. With GZDoom, you can load it automatically.

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.

An anonymous donor asked a question that I can’t even begin to figure out how to answer, but they also said anything else is fine, so here’s anything else.

I’ve been avoiding writing about game physics, since I want to save it for ✨ the book I’m writing ✨, but that book will almost certainly not touch on Unity. Here, then, is a brief run through some of the brick walls I ran into while trying to convince Unity to do 2D platforming.

This is fairly high-level — there are no blocks of code or helpful diagrams. I’m just getting this out of my head because it’s interesting. If you want more gritty details, I guess you’ll have to wait for ✨ the book ✨.

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.