Another Patreon request from Nova Dasterin:

Maybe something about level design. In relation to a vertical shmup since I’m working on one of those.

I’ve been thinking about level design a lot lately, seeing as how I’ve started… designing levels. Shmups are probably the genre I’m the worst at, but perhaps some general principles will apply universally.

And speaking of general principles, that’s something I’ve been thinking about too.

I’ve been struggling to create a more expansive tileset for a platformer, due to two general problems: figuring out what I want to show, and figuring out how to show it with a limited size and palette. I’ve been browsing through a lot of pixel art from games I remember fondly in the hopes of finding some inspiration, but so far all I’ve done is very nearly copy a dirt tile someone submitted to my potluck project.

Recently I realized that I might have been going about looking for inspiration all wrong. I’ve been sifting through stuff in the hopes of finding something that would create some flash of enlightenment, but so far that aimless tourism has only found me a thing or two to copy.

I don’t want to copy a small chunk of the final product; I want to understand the underlying ideas that led the artist to create what they did in the first place. Or, no, that’s not quite right either. I don’t want someone else’s ideas; I want to identify what I like, figure out why I like it, and turn that into some kinda of general design idea. Find the underlying themes that appeal to me and figure out some principles that I could apply. You know, examine stuff critically.

I haven’t had time to take a deeper look at pixel art this way, so I’ll try it right now with level design. Here, then, are some levels from various games that stand out to me for whatever reason; the feelings they evoke when I think about them; and my best effort at unearthing some design principles from those feelings.

I may have spoken too soon; I had some pretty sleepy nights this week. Oh, well. The slow march of progress continued nonetheless. Also I played Zelda a lot.

• potluck: I built a few little mechanisms: platforms, keys, switches, etc. I don’t have much game yet, but I’m putting off the bulk of it until GDQ week. Hope I can actually do this game justice in just a week! It’ll be a different kind of experience, since the art is set in stone and I already have an engine that can do most of what I want; I just have to build levels and story.

• book: I churned out a good few thousand words, rewrote the introduction, and got rid of a ton of stuff from the old book concept. It’s actually presentable as a work in progress now! Nice.

• veekun: I struggled with form ordering for quite a long time, but finally got it figured out, which is useful and important. Getting there. Also I had to yakshave my self-hosted git (which I use for ripped sprites), after an upgrade caused it to bitrot.

I did less than I would’ve liked, but I’ve still got some decent momentum on these three big things. Still feeling pretty good, and eagerly looking forward to having time free in July to mess around with art and work on fox flux.

Despite flipping my sleep, as I seem to end up doing every month now, I’ve had a pretty solid week. We finally got our hands on a Switch, so I just played Zelda to stay up a ridiculously long time and restore my schedule pretty quickly.

• potluck: I started building the potluck game in LÖVE, and it’s certainly come along much faster — I have map transitions, dialogue, and a couple moving platforms working. I still don’t quite know what this game is, but I’m starting to get some ideas.

  I also launched GAMES MADE QUICK??? 1½, a game jam for making a game while watching GDQ, instead of just plain watching GDQ. I intend to spend the week working on the potluck game, though I’m not sure whether I’ll finish it then.

• fox flux: I started planning out a more interesting overworld and doodled a couple relevant tiles. Terrain is still hard. Also some more player frames.

• art: I finally finished a glorious new banner, which now hangs proudly above my Twitter and Patreon. I did a bedtime slate doodle. I made and animated a low-poly Yoshi. I sketched Styx based on a photo.

  I keep wishing I have time to dedicate to painting experiments, but I guess this is pretty good output.

• veekun: Wow! I touched veekun on three separate occasions. I have basic item data actually physically dumping now, I fixed some stuff with Pokémon, and I got evolutions working. Progress! Getting there! So close!

• blog: Per request, I wrote about digital painting software, though it was hampered slightly by the fact that most of it doesn’t run on my operating system.

I seem to be maintaining tangible momentum on multiple big projects, which is fantastic. And there’s still 40% of the month left! I’m feeling pretty good about where I’m standing; if I can get potluck and veekun done soon, that’ll be a medium and a VERY LARGE weight off my shoulders.

Another patron post! IndustrialRobot asks:

You should totally write about drawing/image manipulation programs! (Inspired by https://eev.ee/blog/2015/05/31/text-editor-rundown/)

This is a little trickier than a text editor comparison — while most text editors are cross-platform, quite a few digital art programs are not. So I’m effectively unable to even try a decent chunk of the offerings. I’m also still a relatively new artist, and image editors are much harder to briefly compare than text editors…

Right, now that your expectations have been suitably lowered:

• potluck: It’s about time I actually started on this! I spent a couple days squabbling with JavaScript frameworks, but in the end I gave up and decided to just build it on my existing LÖVE code. Trying out a new thing is nice, but maybe not when I have a somewhat complicated game in mind that I want to build as soon as possible.

• fox flux: I made a font! Also drew a ton of player sprites and made my grass much prettier. I’m going to need to start thinking about environmental art soon, and I’m kinda dreading it because I have no idea what I’m doing there.

• art: I did some (unfinished) modelling and painted some character art (warning: this pic is fine, but the rest of the account is NSFW).

• blog: I wrote some thoughts about teaching technical subjects.

For the first time in possibly my entire life, I feel like I’m a little ahead of the game! The month isn’t even half over and I’ve already done some obligatory stuff, finished off one languishing task, and made some decent inroads into several other things. Nice.

A sponsored post from an anonymous patron:

I would kinda like to hear about any thoughts you have on technical teaching or technical writing. Pedagogy is something I care about. But I don’t know how much you do, so feel free to ignore this suggestion :)

Good news: I care enough that I’m trying to write a sorta-kinda-teaching book!

Ironically, one of the biggest problems I’ve had with writing the introduction to that book is that I keep accidentally rambling on for pages about problems and difficulties with teaching technical subjects. So maybe this is a good chance to get it out of my system.

• blog: I wrote about introspection, or more specifically, what it’s been like to gradually shift from “pure tech” to more creative work.

• fox flux: I am trapped in animation hell, but making progress. I made a pretty cool new parallax background. Also took a short break from drawing to do some physics, and now I have critters that can stop at ledges.

• idchoppers: I wrote a quick thing that counts texture usage in maps, by both count and area.

  Honestly, I’ve been avoiding idchoppers because getting the API right is going to be a good bit of tedious work, so if it’s going to go anywhere then I’ll need to devote some serious time to it. Not sure whether I will or not. Little cute tools like a texture count make for useful example cases for an API, though, so I guess this helps.

• flora: I did some secret work for a not-yet-released thing. It is very good.

• art: I drew a June avatar which I am super happy with!

Mostly I’ve been doing a lot of pixel art, and I should maybe take a break from it for a little while, because I have a lot of stuff to do this month. Stay tuned.

• fox flux: I have been working on fox flux a lot? Like, a lot. There’s so much art and planning to do, but I’m starting to make some serious dents in both, and I’m getting pretty excited about this game. I hope other people are too! (And don’t worry, it’ll have a SFW mode.)

• blog: I wrote a post on what I know about networking in games, which is admittedly not much. Also I wrote half another post that I didn’t publish until today so I technically can’t mention it here until next week.

• flora: I was held at gunpoint by glip and forced to help them design my own characters, which is, extremely cool and good. I’m starting to think they like doing creative work with me and think I have interesting ideas??

• art: I painted a picture, which is sort of fox flux concept art.

• veekun: Whoa hot damn I worked on veekun a bit. I finished up item parsing, though I didn’t quite get as far as loading items into the db. So, uh, not a whole lot, but I’ve dipped my toes in so now it’s fresh in my mind and should be easier to keep working on.

I’m feeling pretty good? It’s nice to have a couple of big projects to work on that hold my interest and offer enough variety that I can do something no matter what kind of mood I’m in.

This month, IndustrialRobot has generously donated in order to ask:

How do you go about learning about yourself? Has your view of yourself changed recently? How did you handle it?

Whoof. That’s incredibly abstract and open-ended — there’s a lot I could say, but most of it is hard to turn into words.

I accidentally went nocturnal again, so I spent much of the week in a tired daze, which I’m not really very happy about.

• lunar depot 38: I finally fixed both of the bizarre graphical bugs some people were seeing in Lunar Depot 38, so if you were one of those people, feel free to give it a try again! The problems were, alas, just some unsatisfying shader bugs.

  Oh, and the Ludum Dare judging is finally over; we came in 204th. Hooray!

• fox flux: Spent most of the week on pixel art. I say “on”, but a lot of that time was spent staring at the screen not really sure what to do next. Learning how to squeeze new ideas out of my brain is… really hard. I did a decently complex animation and a few new kinds of terrain, though, so I guess that’s tangible progress.

• potluck: The potluck is over, and I’ve assembled the full final spritesheet. Now I have to make a game that uses every single one of these tiles, and only these tiles, somehow.

• blog: I started writing a little sample game for a blog post, then abandoned it and rewrote the post from scratch, so that was a good use of time.

Feel detached from the world (since I’ve mostly been up at night) and like I’m not making much progress on anything, which is, frustrating.

Nova Dasterin asks, via Patreon:

How about do something on networking code, for some kind of realtime game (platformer or MMORPG or something). :D

Ah, I see. You’re hoping for my usual detailed exploration of everything I know about networking code in games.

Well, joke’s on you! I don’t know anything about networking.

Wait… wait… maybe I know one thing.

• fox flux: I spent a preposterous amount of time spriting, and somehow came out the other end with like… five more sprites. I’m having a tough time designing abstract tiles, too. This is going to take forever.

• game boy hackery: Pokémon Red and Blue didn’t have unique small sprites for every Pokémon in your party list; instead there were half a dozen general shapes like “generic insect” and “generic snake”.

  A full custom set of icons in that style, by Emi Monserrate, floated past my radar a week ago.

  It seemed like an obvious and interesting challenge to try putting those sprites in the games. So I did.

• art: I doodled, just, a whole bunch of stuff. Some of it was okay! I oughta produce some actual finished work sometime, for real.

• blog: I got rid of the Disqus ads. Sorry about that.

• potluck: You may recall that I’m doing TILESET POTLUCK, a project where people contribute tiles (without being able to see what’s been submitted so far) and I make a game out of whatever I get. This week I got a jump on the actual game by spending a day making a tiny baby environment with Phaser, which seems pretty neat so far.

• flora: I wrote a third of a short story as a way to get myself jumpstarted on writing, since I still have a bunch of it to do this month. Then I went to bed, so, not sure how well that worked.

• stream: I streamed the middle third of Doom II The Way id Did. Very exciting.

Still have infinite art to do, but I’m starting to get somewhere. Really need to get started on some writing, so I’m gonna go do that now.

Oh hey I did a bunch of stuff.

• patreon: I wrote the usual monthly update and posted my progress so far on my book for $4 patrons. Also I meticulously tagged all my old posts for some reason, so I guess now you can find photos of Pearl if you want to?

• blog: I finally fixed the archives page to not be completely flooded by roundups, and added a link to it, which has been missing since the last theme refresh ages ago. Also updated the sidebar to match the front page.

• flora: I hastily cobbled together a species sheet VN, the first new one in a year or so.

• music: I made a song. It’s okay. It feels incomplete, probably because I got tired of working on it partway through and gave it a hasty ending. Maybe I’ll iterate on it sometime. I also started mucking around with an attempt at contributing to the Flora glitch album, but I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.

• potluck: I came up with a weird idea: ask the general public for sprites, then make a game out of whatever I get. I made a tiny Flask thing for submitting tiles and the results so far are… weird. Nine days to go until I close tile submissions, if you want to give this a shot.

• dev: I fixed some mGBA bugs with multiple gamepads, woohoo.

• art: I did some doodling that wasn’t too bad. Mostly I started trying to flesh out the fox flux tileset, which is proving more difficult than expected.

I have some Patreon obligations I oughta get to sooner rather than later; I should probably get a skeleton engine ready for the potluck game, whatever it ends up being; and I’d like to get some more book work done. But at the moment I’m mostly practicing art and trying to make tiles, since the art is going to be the major blocker for expanding fox flux into a somewhat bigger game.

• lunar depot 38: As previously mentioned, glip and I did Ludum Dare 38, producing a little tower-defense-y game called Lunar Depot 38. Judging is now open, so if you also did LD, feel free to rate our game!

• fox flux: I still want to extend this into a more finished game, so I’ve been working on that, mostly in the form of sprite work. I spent at least half a month on the art for the jam version, and I suspect it’s going to take even longer to get all the art done for the final. Should be really good practice, at least?

• blog: I finally finished redoing this site’s landing page! It’s much easier on the eye than the old projects page, I think, and spreads focus around more sensibly.

• etc: The Internet was down for a day, and then I spent two days on a weekend trip with glip, so not much happened there.

• art: I bought a tablet — like, one with a screen, not a graphics tablet. But it’s also a graphics tablet, with Wacom pen pressure and everything. So now I can draw in bed, and have been doing some of that. Results are mixed; drawing on a screen is pretty weird, and undo is not as readily accessible.

  I continued touching up my Lexy sprite from Isaac’s Descent — working on the walk cycle now. Not the most exciting work, but it looks much better.

  I also drew a snake sipping coffee, for reasons.

• book: I finally got through collision detection and some physics. This thing is really coming along now, and it’s cool to see it develop! I doubt I’ll finish the first chapter this month, alas — turns out there is a whole lot of groundwork to lay even for my tiny baby first game.

• blog: Finalized a Sitepoint article. Did some more work on a new homepage, which is finally nearing completion, I hope.

• spline: Wow, haven’t touched this in a while. Started implementing editing things, because glip has needed that for forever. Didn’t finish.

• lunar depot 38: I participated in Ludum Dare 38! This time I teamed up with glip to do the Jam, so we spent three days scrambling to make a game together. (Spoilers for next week’s roundup: the game is Lunar Depot 38.)

I spent a good chunk of the week sick and/or becoming nocturnal, so not a lot of actual work resulted. I’m feeling better now, though, and getting back into the swing of things.

• art: Did a lot of doodling, since that’s fairly low-energy. Probably the best thing to come out of it was some character design slash concept art for Isaac’s Descent HD.

• games: Streamed some more Eternal Doom. Seems like every third map has some incredibly obtuse secret required for progression.

• book: Once I was over the plague, I got back into this, woo. Wasted too much time squabbling with LaTeX before conceding defeat. Working on explaining a bad approach to collision detection at the moment.

Now I can finally get to my plans for April: working on the book more and exploring art/music.

I seem to be sick! Again? All of my cycles are devoted to antivirus. Please forgive my brevity.

• art: Did some final toodling around in Blender and made myself a really bad ironic 90s avatar out of my Eevee model. Speedpainted a rainy view out my window. Doodled or whatever.

• games: Streamed Eternal Doom and some other stuff a few times, for probably far too long, but whatever it’s fun. Played through Axiom Verge, which has gotten some gears a-turning.

• blog: Spent probably more than half the week working on a post for Sitepoint, plus a bit of work on another about fox flux, neither of which are published yet.