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 Alas, no dice, so I’m currently stuck with a fairly outdated copy of the Android emoji, which I don’t want to upgrade because Google makes them worse with every revision.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.

Anonymous asks:

Could you talk about something related to the management/moderation and growth of online communities? IOW your thoughts on online community management, if any.

I think you’ve tweeted about this stuff in the past so I suspect you have thoughts on this, but if not, again, feel free to just blog about … anything :)

Oh, I think I have some stuff to say about community management, in light of recent events. None of it hasn’t already been said elsewhere, and I wouldn’t say it’s really about “online” or has a strong “point”, but I have to get this out.

Hopefully the content warning is implicit in the title.

IndustrialRobot asks… or, uh, asked last month:

industrialrobot: How has your views on tech changed as you’ve got older?

This is so open-ended that it’s actually stumped me for a solid month. I’ve had a surprisingly hard time figuring out where to even start.

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.

A kind anonymous patron offers this prompt, which I totally fucked up getting done in July:

Something to do with programming languages? Alternatively, interesting game mechanics!

It’s been a while since I’ve written a thing about programming languages, eh? But I feel like I’ve run low on interesting things to say about them. And I just did that level design article, which already touched on some interesting game mechanics… oh dear.

Okay, how about this. It’s something I’ve been neck-deep in for quite some time, and most of the knowledge is squirrelled away in obscure wikis and ancient forum threads: getting data out of Pokémon games. I think that preserves the spirit of your two options, since it’s sort of nestled in a dark corner between how programming languages work and how game mechanics are implemented.

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.

Chugging along.

• fox flux: Touched up another critter, some more terrain, messing with a background, blah blah.

• veekun: Pokémon importing is so close. I’ve hunted down how incense affects breeding (which was sort of pointless since there aren’t any new incense), found shapes, dealt with evolution, and filled in a few other little things. It even runs to completion now! But I can’t fully import Pokémon until I import items — oops! — so I’m working on that now.

• art: Drew some ridiculous nonsense.

• blog: Been working on a post about datamining, since that’s a thing I’ve been working on lately.

• cc: I think I basically spent two days squabbling with Unity Collab and the asset store.

I now have seven or eight things in-flight, which is way too much, so I’ve decided to make an active effort to spend four hours every day working on some combination of veekun, the potluck game, my book, and Patreon blogging. So far, so good.

Also, the rest of my Fridays and Saturdays have been reserved for working on Chaos Composer. So, uh, yeah.

• fox flux: More portrait work, which was surprisingly difficult! I forgot that drawing an actual picture with pixels is a little more involved in some ways than drawing it, uh, without pixels? I also designed and drew a new NPC, vastly improved the sprites for a couple critters, and made a pretty good start on some terrain tiles for a new zone.

• chaos composer: I fixed a long-standing problem (two, actually) with the pixel scaling being slightly off. I’m helping! I also made a completely empty scene and wrote a basic player controller from scratch just to get accustomed, which I’ll now probably throw away because one already exists.

• veekun: Added support for extracting move flags and Pokémon shapes (which were hell to find). Wrote a move importer and wrote quick effect text for every move, so moves are now in the database, hurrah! I have a Pokémon importer mostly done, so that’s well on its way as well. I’m so close I can taste it, though I expect I’ll find a lot of minor followup work, and I haven’t even touched more complicated stuff like wild Pokémon encounters.

Most of my four-hour blocks have been going to veekun so far. I’d really like to get blog posts out of the way early for once, but both proposed topics are a little vague, and I’m not sure what I want to say about them yet. I also still haven’t spent any time on my book this month, augh, and of course haven’t touched the potluck game in a week now.

Meanwhile, most of my other time went to fox flux, where I’m just taking forever to do the art. I think I’m starting to get better at it, but spriting an entire game is still a hell of a daunting task.

I spent the week working at a pretty good pace, yet this sounds like such little progress? Making stuff just takes a while, I guess.

Spoilers: I didn’t finish the potluck game! I think I bit off a little more than I could chew, since the game necessarily needs a bunch of mechanics and world to actually make use of all the tiles. So I’ll just… keep working on it over time. It’d be nice to finish by the end of the month, but suddenly I have far more stuff than before to be working on, so who knows anything.

• potluck: I made an inventory, added UI for it, implemented the other colors of locks, made several kinds of projectiles, implemented damage and recoil and i-frames, made a whole menu for customizing gamepad controls, rigged a convoluted thing that tries to adapt the UI to the style of gamepad you’re using, implemented conveyor belts, and did a whole lot of planning. But still, so far to go, sob.

• fox flux: Started touching up portraits from the first game while watching glip play Zelda. Results thusfar are promising!

• chaos composer: I have been drafted into working on glip’s game, already in progress in Unity. I just got ahold of the game thusfar, and I’ve never used Unity before, so I’ve mostly been giving myself a crash course by clicking stuff at random to see what happens.

I have no idea what I’ll be doing this next week! I have a lot of things vying for my attention, and somehow the month is already one-third over. I’d like to knock out some low-hanging fruit, so maybe I’ll get blogging out of the way and try to finally finish veekun?

Busy week, including a friend’s visiting, but most of my time went towards only two things:

• veekun: I got forms dumping (more or less), got moves dumping, spent a whole lot of time chasing down obscure little details, and wrote most of a yaml-to-sql importer for moves. That all leaves me pretty heckin’ close to having the core Sun and Moon stuff in the database. Finally, the end is in sight.

• blog: I wrote about level design by going over some levels in games that are memorable to me.

I’ll be spending the next week working on the potluck game and watching SGDQ!

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.