• egg watch: Our little PICO-8 toy became a little more of a game; we started coming up with and implementing mechanics. And then we forgot about it, oops. Or maybe I forgot about it, since all the art is done, so the ball’s pretty much 100% in my court now.

• blog: More work on some words. Also, I wrote a post about why I used LÖVE for my recent vidyas.

• adulting: I did my taxes and realized that self-employment tax is completely flat, ignoring all deductions and exemptions and brackets and whatnot. So that stung. Whoops.

• book: Oh, hey, I’m writing one of those! I finally sat down and wrote a new start of an outline and cranked out a good few thousand words. It’s coming along much better than the previous attempt, too. Pretty happy about this.

• pico8: I was thinking about UI, and about the PICO-8, and realized the PICO-8 console could be entirely reconstructed in LÖVE. As a weird sort of experiment, I set about doing that. I only spent a few hours on it across a couple days, and am not pursuing it all that seriously, but it’s been interesting to work on.

• art: I actually spent a few hours on art almost every day this week, to great success. Then I tried to make a 3D model for the first time for glip’s birthday, to not so great success.

I am now cruising, which is great. Alas I have jury duty in three days, which is extremely not great and will probably trainwreck my momentum again.

This month, IndustrialRobot asked my opinion of FOSS game engines — or, more specifically, why I chose LÖVE.

The short version is that it sort of landed in my lap, I tried it, I liked it, and I don’t know of anything I might like better. The long version is…

Uhhh I am having a hell of a time getting back in the saddle. We had a friend visit, and I think he gave me his cold, and my cat is an asshole, and the dog ate my homework.

• blog: Some work on some words.

• art: I haven’t drawn in months. I tried to do it a bit. Results inconclusive.

• games: I spent a whole day powering through the last 20 or so Strawberry Jam games, just in time for voting to end! Phew! The results (probably NSFW) are in, and, er, I won? This didn’t really occur to me as a thing that could happen and I feel a little guilty about it, hm.

• gamedev: I merged most of the later fox flux work back into Isaac’s Descent HD, which I’m treating as a central repo for the engine guts I keep reusing. I really, really need to sit down and split the engine stuff out cleanly so I don’t have to keep cherry-picking stuff around, but I haven’t had time yet.

  Also, Mel and I started working on a little PICO-8 toy in an attempt to get ourselves moving again. It’s coming along okay.

Spoilers for next week: I’m doing better this week, finally. My sleep is still wrecked and I still have a cold, but I’m at least sorta doing things.

Trying to catch up on stuff and also relax a bit, simultaneously, and the results are confusing.

• blog: I wrote a late sponsored post on utopia. Also some work on a couple others I have in mind.

• idchoppers: On a total whim, I started writing a WAD parsing and whatnot library in Rust, called idchoppers. It doesn’t do a whole lot yet and it’s kind of a mess while I figure out how to design types in Rust, but it’s enough that I managed to flip every map in Doom 2 and dump MAP01 to SVG.

• games: I played a lot of Strawberry Jam games, and I think I’m still only halfway through, yikes.

I feel awake and decently-rested, but somehow still drained. Oof.

It’s been a while, but someone’s back on the Patreon blog topic tier! IndustrialRobot asks:

What does your personal utopia look like? Do you think we (as mankind) can achieve it? Why/why not?

Hm.

Hi! It’s been a while. Per tradition, I didn’t write roundups while in the middle of frantically working on a video game.

• fox flux: Mostly, I made a video game for a month-long game jam. It’s an hourish-long puzzle platformer and is somewhat NSFW but you can snag it from itch.io if you like. (If you install it via the itch app, it’ll patch automatically and more quickly in the future. Though I’m not sure how itch will handle the Linux “build”, which is just a LÖVE file.)

  My ever-evolving physics code got some improvements again, but the biggest time constraint by far was the art — I am not very fast, and I had to learn a lot of things as I went. I’ll be writing about some of that in the near future. Still, it’s pretty cool that (with Mel’s indispensable advice) I managed to produce enough art for a competent-looking game.

  I did all the sounds as well, though Mel composed the music, which made the whole thing much better.

  Post-release, I fixed a few critical bugs, and I’ve been working on some little vignettes to make the ending a bit less, er, anticlimactic.

• bolthaven: I also worked on Mel’s game for the same jam, but the script turned out to be much longer than expected, so it wasn’t finished in time.

• blog: I’ve started writing both a Patreon post for February and a spontaneous post on some art insights from the past month.

Lots of work, but a short summary. I’m exhausted and moving a bit pokily these last couple days, but I’m more inspired than ever. I’ve got a lot of stuff to catch up on and plenty more gamedev to do; hope you enjoy some of it!

Onwards!

• flora: I wrote another twine for Flora.

• music: I spent a day with MilkyTracker and managed to produce a remixed title theme for Isaac’s Descent HD! It’s not entirely terrible.

• isaac: I redid all the sound effects, slapped together a title screen, fixed a ton of bugs, added a trivial ending, and finally released a demo on my $4 Patreon tier! It’s just a port of the original Isaac’s Descent levels, so nothing particularly new or exciting, but I’m happy to see it in a more polished form. And now that everything basically works, I’m free to experiment with puzzle mechanics.

• neon: I released NEON PHASE 1.2, with a few bugfixes, most notably making the game not be glitchy as all hell when playing under fairly high framerates.

• patreon: I wrote the monthly prologue, which is just so amazing, you can’t even imagine.

• games: And then the latter half of the week went towards Strawberry Jam, my month-long horny game jam. I’m churning out art for a puzzle-platformer (surprise), while Mel is doing something more story-driven (surprise), and we’re both helping each other out. Rate of progress seems okay so far, but I do have to put together two games in only a month, and I’ve still got a couple other looming obligations as well. Fingers crossed.

  I’m tweeting bits of progress in a thread on my secret porn account.

Next few weeks will largely be, well, work on video games!

I feel a little bit like life is disintegrating into chaos, but I’m plowing ahead nonetheless.

• isaac: I finished porting NEON PHASE changes over to the Isaac’s Descent codebase, which is great! Now the only major blocker for a little tech demo is redoing the music (argh).

• games: I finally finished playing through all the games submitted to GAMES MADE QUICK??, which took an incredibly long time, oh no. I dumped thoughts on the games in a Twitter thread, or you can browse through them yourself. There’s some pretty cool stuff in there, and I’m still amazed that much of it exists just because I said “hey let’s make some video games”.

  It was such a smashing success that I also put together Strawberry Jam, a month-long game jam for making horny games, whatever that means. (The concept is NSFW, but the landing page is not.) I have two separate ideas I want to pursue, plus Mel is doing their own game and will need my help to put it together, so I have a very busy month ahead. We’ve both already started on the art for our respective games, and we’ve been doing some planning as well.

• neon: I fixed a bunch of bugs but didn’t cut a new release yet, oops. One or two are still lingering, and I don’t want to make a ton of releases just for bugfixes.

  I wrote down “fixed %”? What does that even mean?

• art: I tried drawing some things and they did not come out as well as I wanted.

• veekun: I did some actual work — I have abilities ripped to YAML and a script that successfully loads them into the database, and I’ve taken a stab at items. I have no idea when this is going to get done, though; I’ve got a mountain of work to do in February.

• blog: I started redesigning and merging my projects page with the landing page for this domain to make a more useful index of work I’ve done. Not happy with it yet, but it’s getting somewhere, gradually.

Next month will be, well, video games. A lot of video games. Plus I have other time-critical stuff to do. Plus I have other not-time-critical-but-really-needs-doing stuff to do. Oh boy!

As is tradition, I skipped a week because I was busy making a video game with Mel.

The video game is NEON PHASE and I wrote about it and it’s pretty cool.

Between that and our hellcats, I’ve been sleeping terribly again, so things are currently a bit of a slog. I have so much to do. Making slow progress.

Other than that:

• blog: I wrote the traditional birthday post and the aforementioned post about NEON PHASE.

  I’ve also been putting some effort into re-revamping my list of work, since right now it’s largely a wall of text. Now that I’ve finally registered an account on itch.io, I’ve been putting our previous little games on it, which takes a surprising amount of effort to do well.

• isaac: I’ve been cherry-picking the NEON PHASE work back to the Isaac HD codebase. It isn’t particularly difficult, just sort of tedious.

• other game stuff: I’ve been planning NEON PHASE 2 with Mel, and I’m thinking about doing another game jam for February, and I wrote a little linear Twine under tight time constraints.

I’ve also been running through the games made for my jam, playing a few of them each day, which is surprisingly time-consuming. But several dozen little things exist just because I invited people to make stuff, and that’s incredible, and I want to see what that stuff is.

I still need to get out a demo port of Isaac’s Descent (argh) and finish loading SUMO into veekun (ARGH) and then I can get back to the… three? four?? games I seem to be working on at the moment.

It all started after last year’s AGDQ, when I lamented having spent the entire week just watching speedruns instead of doing anything, and thus having lost my rhythm for days afterwards.

This year, several friends reminded me of this simultaneously, so I begrudgingly went looking for something to focus on during AGDQ. I’d already been working on Isaac’s Descent HD, so why not keep it up? Work on a video game while watching video games.

Working on a game for a week sounded an awful lot like a game jam, so I jokingly tweeted about a game jam whose express purpose was to not completely waste the week staring at a Twitch stream. Then someone suggested I make it an actual jam on itch.io. Then Mel asked to do a game with me.

And so, thanks to an almost comical sequence of events, we made NEON PHASE — a half-hour explorey platformer.

Eevee grew to level 30!

Wow! What an incredible fucking year. I’ve never done so much in my life.

My sleep has been pretty weird, and I’ve had a few drowsy days lately, but I’m mostly keeping the momentum going.

• art: I made an effort to draw something every day. I drew a January avatar, doodled with some friends, made a weird pixel animation, and whipped up a quick illustration for a game jam I’m accidentally running.

• music: Sketched out a few phrases and studied Cave Story a little more. I made a pretty decent start on a new remix of the Isaac background music, after some feedback from Mel. I hacked it into the game, too, and hearing it while testing other stuff turns out to be a good way to find what needs improvement.

• isaac: Mostly implemented the stone doors, drew a credits Eevee, found a way to draw sprites inside text (sorta). I think this just leaves the title/credits, music, and bugfixing. So, so close.

• veekun: Cleaned up and committed some recent extraction work, but didn’t make much new progress.

This week is AGDQ, which means I’m going to spend an awful lot of time watching people play video games instead of doing anything useful. I was pretty unhappy about that last year, so this time I’m “running” a non-serious game jam all about trying to make a game during that otherwise-lost time.

Finally, 2016 is dead. Good riddance. I’m sure this year will be different, as though time were composed of discrete chunks with different moods.

• isaac: I set about moving a bit more hardcoded stuff into Tiled, which is better than nothing. Fixed a few oddball physics bugs, like being able to walljump, which I’d somehow never noticed. Made the inventory actually work correctly, and gave it a HUD. Made the book mostly work. Finished up the laser. Spent far too much time drawing rock and brick tiles.

  It’s not quite at the point of playing the original game as I’d hoped, but it’s reeeally close.

• music: Worked a little bit on a remix of the Isaac background music.

• book: Dicked around with Sphinx and LaTeX for hours instead of actually writing anything. Did a teeny tiny bit of writing.

• veekun: I figured out how texture animations work, which is incredible and makes my model viewer actually almost correct. It still has some bugs and weirdness, and I haven’t actually tried it on every single dang Pokémon yet, but this is looking extremely viable.

  I went a-hunting for more artwork, ended up writing a thing that just dumped every single image it could find in the entire game, and managed to dig up the bigger sprites used in the Pokédex. Alas, naturally, only the Pokémon actually catchable in Sun and Moon have a big Pokédex sprite.

• art: I did some doodling in a vain attempt to remember how to draw. Not sure if successful. I got a couple scraps of concept art for Isaac HD out of it, though.

Despite how it sounds, I’ve actually had a lazy last few days, which has been a nice change after several solid weeks of plowing ahead at maximum speed. Priorities remain the same as they have been.

• veekun: I worked on extracting and viewing Pokémon models.

  That’s it. That’s all I did all week. I got rather into it. (I guess I also worked on some Sun/Moon dumping, but that wasn’t very exciting.)

  I’ve put it on hold for now, but after a solid 8 or 9 days of work, the results so far are pretty dang cool. I absorbed a whole lot of stuff about 3D, too.

See you next year!

A couple solid days each went towards different things, with pretty good progress for all of them.

• isaac: Did a little bit of cleanup. Added some raycasting to the “physics engine”, so the laser eye now actually works correctly — it fires a ray along the laser’s path and looks for the first solid obstacle. (In the PICO-8 version, it just checked map tiles straight down until it found something other than empty space.)

• art: Spent a few days on some inked reward drawings for Mel’s Kickstarter.

• music: Studied how Cave Story’s music is put together in exquisite detail. It helps that the music was all written in tracker style, and the whole soundtrack is available in XM format, which trackers are happy to open. The result of this effort was a song that’s not entirely terrible, which isn’t bad considering I’ve only spent a week or two combined on learning anything about music.

• veekun: I, uh, spent a couple days on actually beating the game, so now I don’t have to worry about spoilers.

  I also resurrected my ancient WebGL model viewer, taught it to play back animations, improved the outlining, and added a bunch of controls. Work continues on this, but I’d really like to have interactive models available on veekun.

I’m mostly charging ahead on veekun stuff right now, and probably for the next few days.

Isaac plods ever closer to matching the feature set of the PICO-8 game.

• art: I did a little pixel animation and a lot of doodling trying to remember how to draw. Almost a bit of character design, too.

  My pixel art keeps getting compliments, which is really cool, but at the same time I’ve been frustrated with how lackluster my non-pixely art is. I tried repainting an idea from last year on a whim, but used the DB32 palette (which I’ve used for pixel art before), and it came out kind of_amazing_. So that confirms my problem is color, and it’s given me a few ideas for how to think about color differently.

• isaac: Level transitions now work, though the spawn point is still ignored, so it’s pretty common to get stuck in a wall. Isaac grew a simple jump animation and a… sleepytime sequence. The appearing platforms now look much better, and the resurrection rune is now animated.

  The cave texture I had was kind of underwhelming, so I tried drawing a new one at a higher resolution. That stood out way too much, but after a few attempts and refinements, I ended up with something very nice that also lets me draw edge tiles fairly easily. I also wrote a shader from scratch for the very first time and was reminded of what a pain GLSL is!

  Between using a textured blending brush for a Bob Ross style background in the above painting, and a whole lot of studying Cave Story art (and actual cave walls) before finally landing on the tiles above, I feel like I’ve finally started to grasp some deeper idea about how the illusion of depth and form works.

• music: Finally, finally tried my hand at this for real. I even made a whole song, which is not very good, but is better than having made zero songs. I’ve sketched out a bunch of simple melodies, but none of them are particularly great yet; it’s going to take a lot of experimentation before I can really make any music worthy of putting in Isaac HD.

  I also worked on recreating sound effects, with some modest success. I’m not satisfied with what I have yet, but I’ve learned a lot about combining waveforms and how to use a bunch of knobs in LMMS. (I must’ve spent four to six hours just trying to make a satisfying grinding-rock sound.)

• veekun: I tracked down where most of the remaining Sun/Moon data is. I’m still, er, trying to finish the game, but I’m getting close to the end, I think!

I’m having to teach myself half a dozen new things at once for the sake of Isaac HD, which feels like slow going but is ultimately kind of great. I think I’m on a good pace to have the original levels playable by the end of the month. (I don’t intend to stop there by any means, but it’s a great milestone.)

Not having four lengthy posts looming all month is a huge weight off my shoulders, by the way. I’ve barely even thought about writing tons of prose in a week and a half, and now I have enough prose juice saved up that working on a book for a while is sounding appealing! This is great. Thanks, y’all. ♥

• zdoom: On a total whim, I resurrected half of an old branch that puts sloped 3D floors in the software renderer. It kinda draws them, but with no textures.

• blog: I wrote a thing about not copying C which was surprisingly popular.

• sylph: I accidentally spent 45 minutes writing a microscopic parser for a language that can only print string literals.

• patreon: I finished up some revamping of my Patreon — the wall of text is now a short and straightforward stack of images, and I dropped the blogging milestones. I’m no longer obliged to write X posts per month, huzzah.

• art: I pixel-drew some new veekun version icons, which may or may not go live. Also drew a December avatar.

• veekun: I got started on adapting my ORAS dumping code for Sun and Moon, and have box and dex sprites 90% dumped. Text is mostly done as well.

• art: I did a few pixels, which you may or not be seeing in the near future.

veekun effort continues (as I scramble to actually finish the game so I don’t spoil myself). Also trying to, uh, remember how to draw?