June’s theme is clearing my plate, a concept that becomes increasingly nebulous as time goes by.

I accidentally went nocturnal over the past week, which always leaves me completely fried for a few days due to losing a day. So not the best week, but not the worst either.

• art: I drew a very quick happy Minccino to try to cheer everyone up last weekend. Their tail fluffs are upside-down. Sorry.

  I drew and colored two old friends on a whim, trying to apply some things Mel had told me about color harmony. I think it came out as possibly one of the nicest things I’ve ever drawn, so, that’s nice, whoa.

  I started drawing daily Pokémon (in a predetermined random order), where the only rule is a time limit of 30 minutes. Here are Wobbuffet and western Shellos; I’ll be dumping them all in a Tumblr tag too.

  While I was out at lunch, I drew on paper for the first time in a while. I should probably do it more, but the results aren’t too bad.

• Runed Awakening: Aha! I pixelled an NPC or two, possibly marking the first real character design I’ve ever done, as well as an item and an attempt at a room illustration.

  A couple friends played through the current state of the game, which led to a couple days of chasing down extremely obtuse minor bugs. It’s a little frustrating to have spent a lot of time and have so little to show for it, but one of the bugs was something that’s plauged me for over a year, so I guess it at least fits with the theme of getting rid of looming things. From here I should be able to get back to building things.

• spline: I finally granted Mel the ability to create a new folder by themselves. So far I’ve always done it manually, which has gotten increasingly painful since the folders use the nested set model. There’s still no UI for rearranging them, but this removes a huge source of… requests for manual intervention.

• veekun: I started reabsorbing the current state of the new YAML schema and thinking about how to get it where I want. Didn’t make any actual progress, though.

  Working on getting the remaining images veekun is missing, too.

Probably more of the same this next week. I want to make huge inroads on Runed Awakening, fix the other category of things I have to do manually for spline, and get some work done on veekun one way or another.

June’s theme is clearing my plate! I will finally stop spreading these vegetables around to make it look like I ate some of them, and just sneak them to the dog under the table.

• art: I drew a beautiful manga, which is based on true events. I drew a new header image for here, replacing the old poor cutout of a JPEG exported from Pokémon Art Academy, and adjusted the colorscheme of the whole site to match it. And I did a lot of doodling. A loooot of doodling.

• doom: I did a lot of work on my factory map for DUMP 3, but I don’t think I’m going to make the deadline. I’m okay with that. I did a mad scramble for DUMP 2 in April, then a longer mad scramble for Under Construction in May; I’m alright with not doing a mad scramble for a third month in a row. I can still make maps outside of a particular challenge.

• twitter: I made @perlin_noise, a Twitter bot that tweets Perlin noise in various forms.

• pyscss: I’d had a ton of GitHub mail marked unread for ages, so I finally spent a day fixing a lot of easy bugs and released 1.3.5. I don’t plan to spend significant time on this in the future — especially when there’s now a libsass in C and Python bindings to it — but it’s nice to see some obvious problems fixed.

• blog: It’s been a year since I quit now!

It doesn’t sound like a lot, but honestly most of the time went into the Doom map and artwork, both of which are things I wanted to do this month. I’m not sure how I’ll schedule the mapping if I’m giving up on DUMP 3; maybe I’ll hop on Runed Awakening for a bit and look at the map again later with fresh eyes.

June’s theme is, ah, clearing my plate! Yes, we’ll try that again; I have a lot of minor (and not-so-minor) todos that have been hanging over my head for a long time, and I’d like to clear some of them out. I also want to do DUMP 3 and make a significant dent in Runed Awakening, so, busy busy.

• blog: I published a very fancy explanation of Perlin noise, using a lot of diagrams and interactive things I’d spent half the previous week making, but it came out pretty cool! I also wrote about how I extracted our game’s soundtrack from the PICO-8. And I edited and published a two-year-old post about how I switched Yelp from tabs to spaces! I am on a roll and maybe won’t have to write three posts in the same week at the end of the month this time.

  I did a bit of work on the site itself, too. I linked my Mario Maker levels on the projects page. I fixed a PARTYMODE incompatibility with Edge, because I want my DHTML confetti to annoy as many people as possible. I fixed a silly slowdown with my build process. And at long last, I fixed the   cruft in the titles of all my Disqus threads.

• gamedev: I wrote a hecka bunch of notes for Mel for a… thing… that… we may or may not end up doing… but that would be pretty cool if we did.

• patreon: I finally got my Pokémon Showdown adapter working well enough to write a very bad proof of concept battle bot for Sketch, which you can peruse if you really want to. I had some fun asking people to fight the bot, which just chooses moves at complete random and doesn’t understand anything about the actual game. It hasn’t won a single time. Except against me, when I was first writing it, and also choosing moves at complete random.

  I rewrote my Patreon bio, too; now it’s a bit more concrete and (ahem) better typeset.

• doom: I started on three separate ideas for DUMP 3 maps, though I’m now leaning heavily in favor of just one of them. (I’d like to continue the other two some other time, though.) I did a few hours of work each day on it, and while I’m still in the creative quagmire of “what the heck do I do with all this space”, it’s coming along. I streamed some of the mapping, which I’ve never done before, and which the three people still awake at 3am seemed to enjoy.

• SLADE: I can’t do any Doom mapping without itching to add things to SLADE. I laid some groundwork for supporting multiple tags per sector, but that got kinda boring, so I rebased my old 3D floors branch and spruced that up a lot. Fixed a heckton of bugs in it and added support for some more features. Still a ways off, but it’s definitely getting there.

• art: I drew a June avatar! “Drew” might be a strong word, since I clearly modified it from my April/May avatar, but this time I put a lot of effort (and a lot of bugging Mel for advice) into redoing the colors from scratch, and I think it looks considerably better.

• spring cleaning: Sorted through some photos (i.e. tagged which cats were in them), closed a few hundred browser tabs, and the like.

Wow, that’s a lot of things! I’m pretty happy about that; here’s to more things!

Howdy, stranger.

May’s theme is clearing my pl— sorry, scratch that, May’s theme is completely out the window. I spent two and a half weeks working on virtually nothing but a PICO-8 game with Mel. Oops.

The upshot is that… we made a game, Under Construction! I’ve never released a serious, complete, independent game before. Neat. Here’s hoping I do more of that.

A couple of other things happened.

• art: I drew a, uh, Leafeon/Braixen hybrid. I also drew an Eevee sprite for the credits in Under Construction.

• doom: I tinkered a bit when very exhausted with working on UC. I think I only really made a little progress on the pain elemental variant, and rigged ammo to drop smaller ammo if you didn’t need all of it.

• blog: I wrote about making Under Construction and what it was like to work with the PICO-8. I also wrote most of an extremely ambitious Perlin noise post (with interactive gizmos!), which I just finished earlier today.

I still have some obligations left for this month, like one more post (up to four now! augh!), and then next month I can finally spend clearing my plate.

Except.

Something looms on the horizon.

Is that…

Could it be…

Oh no.

DUMP 3 was announced

May’s theme is clearing my plate. I have a lot of small-to-medium-sized stuff I’ve been intending to do for a while, and the sheer number of things is getting a little overwhelming. A lengthy todo list starts to get stressful; it feels like constant looming noise in my head. I want to spend this month getting as much of it as possible out of the way.

• gamedev: I have vastly improved EeveeQuest™, my dink-around non-game for the PICO-8. From where it started last Saturday, it’s grown momentum, friction, gravity, collision, sound effects, background music (basically my first try at music!), scrolling, a HUD, and some evolution stones. The PICO-8 is super adorable, by the way.

  Also, Mel decided we’re making a game, so I’ve been adapting it to fit a map they’ve been designing.

• blog: I rewrote the list of work I’ve done to be less, uh, unreadable garbage. I also set up subdomains c.ee.vee for hosting hostable work, and t.ee.vee for maybe eventually hosting cat photos and the like. I think these are pretty clever.

  I also wrote about what it’s been like trying to learn to draw.

• pokémon: I’m still working on a Pokémon Showdown client for Patreon reasons; I got a bit sidetracked trying to make urwid and asyncio play well together, but I’m well on my way to having a usable API.

• art: Lotta doodling. Appropriately, I think I’ve gotten a lot better in the last month or so.

• doom: I made most of a horrible, horrible pain elemental variant that everyone will hate.

• irl: I got Anise microchipped, so finally my cat is a cyborg. He is better, faster, stronger, and far more mischievous than any pure cat. His cybernetic enhancements have already enabled him to drive me up the fucking wall far more efficiently today than ever before.

• Runed Awakening: In a stroke of inspiration, I figured out a way to connect a puzzle with no reward to a puzzle with no solution. I’m really happy with the shape the game is taking, even if there’s still infinity work left to do.

This week, I would like to finish the PICO-8 game with Mel, write another two posts, finish some of the art I’ve left hanging, finish this Showdown work, and make at least three significant improvements to Runed Awakening. Christ, I’d better get started.

April’s theme was finish Runed Awakening, which I definitely did not do, but I am way further along than I was a month ago. Maybe by the end of May? I don’t want to set a hard deadline when I have no real way to estimate how much work is left, but I don’t want to lose this momentum, either. I’ll keep y’all posted. Hopefully by the end of this week I’ll have made a significant dent in some combination of Runed Awakening and May blogging.

• Runed Awakening: Implemented padlocks, woohoo. Did some more high-level planning; getting pretty close to a cohesive whole here, at least in theory. Drew a couple more pixel items. Then, uh, kinda didn’t touch it again for most of the week because I had Patreon obligations to take care of, oops.

• blog: I wrote about dozenal and using Lua for game development, which somehow turned into a dissection of how to embed Lua and Python.

• art: I spent a couple days drawing after not really doing so much of it for the last few weeks, resulting in some cat complaints, some cat revenge, and my finishing this ancient art trade. At which point two more people asked to trade, sob.

  Also touched up my avatar for May.

• doom: So there’s a texture pack (Community Chest 4) that was really popular among DUMP 2 mappers, but it’s some 13MB. A good chunk of it is just translations or color substitutions of vanilla textures, which is something ZDoom can already express with a human-readable text format, so I started writing a script to detect and convert as many of these as possible. It turned out to be harder than I was expecting and I kinda bailed halfway through. This is very fascinating, I’m sure.

  I did also poke at anachrony a bit; still trying to settle on a set of weapons/items/monsters so I can actually go build some maps when I have the urge.

• tech: A friend lost some data from a web-based shop thing and I magicked it back into existence because I’m actually a witch IRL.

• gamedev: Having admitted I’d never tried PICO-8 in the Lua post, I bought it on a whim and tinkered with it a bit last night, producing this fine non-game. (I worked on it some more today, so it’s better now, but it’s not last week any more so this doesn’t count.)

April’s theme is finish Runed Awakening.

Mel is out of town, so I’m being constantly harassed by cats.

• irl: I cleaned the hell out of my room.

• Runed Awakening: I finally figured out the concept for a decent chunk of the world, and built about half of it. I finally, finally, feel like the world and plot are starting to come together. I doubt I’ll have it feature-complete in only another week, but I’m miles ahead of where I was at the beginning of the month. The game is maybe 40% built, but closer to 80% planned, and that’s been the really hard part.

  I’d previously done two illustrations of items as sort of a proof of concept for embedding images in interactive fiction. A major blocker was coming up with a palette that could work for any item and keep the overall style cohesive. I couldn’t find an appropriate palette and I’m not confident enough with color to design one myself, so the whole idea was put on hold there.

  Last week, a ludum dare game led me to the DB32 palette, one of the few palettes I’ve ever seen that has as many (!) as 32 colors and is intended for general use. I grabbed Aseprite at Twitter’s suggestion (which turns out to default to DB32), and I did some pixel art, kind of on a whim! Twitter pretty well destroyed them, so I posted them in a couple batches on Tumblr: batch 1, batch 2, and a little talking eevee portrait.

  I don’t know if the game will end up with an illustration for every object and room — that would be a lot of pixels and these take me a while — but it would be pretty neat to illustrate the major landmarks and most interesting items.

• spline/flora: I wrote a quick and dirty chronological archive for Flora. I then did a bunch of witchcraft to replace 250-odd old comic pages with the touched-up versions that appear in the printed book.

• blog: I wrote about elegance. I also started on another post, which is not yet finished. It’s also terrible, sorry.

April’s theme is finish Runed Awakening.

It took a few days to clear my plate and get up to speed, and I’m a little worried at how much time blog obligations seem to be eating this month, but I made some good progress.

• twitter: I installed Windows 95 in a VM and documented the experience. I also wrote a good Twitter bot that tweets every word, distorted by some Unicode shenanigans.

• blog: I wrote about emoji, at considerable length.

• Runed Awakening: Ehh. I ran dry on major ideas and spent several days mostly struggling to drum up some more (or avoiding the question altogether, which is how the Twitter bot came to be). I did end up making a little progress, but not what I would call a week’s worth.

I’m halfway through the month and don’t have a whole lot to show for it, unfortunately. Learning how to have ideas is… difficult. With Doom architecture, I at least found a trick for getting my foot in the door: find an empty space and just draw something in it. I don’t know how to translate that to a text-based puzzle game where everything has to make a bit more narrative sense, which is a little frustrating.

I’ve had some more inspiration today, so that’s good, but I’m going to run dry again pretty quickly if I can’t find a reproducible way to generate new ideas. I have a hard time just sitting and thinking in the first place, which is a huge handicap. I’ve had the best luck when doing something tedious and purely physical, so my mind can wander, but I’ve never been able to duplicate the effect deliberately.

April’s theme is finish Runed Awakening.

It took a few days to clear my plate and get up to speed, and I’m a little worried at how much time blog obligations seem to be eating this month, but I made some good progress.

• blog: I scrapped a bunch of manual thumbnails from git and finally switched to Pelican’s thumbnailer plugin. I also wrote about my first computer(s).

• art: I painted an Eevee, and it came out okay. I also did a quick painting inspired by Runed Awakening work.

• Runed Awakening: Aha! Much like making a Doom level, the hardest part is just having ideas, and then having more ideas to fill in the details of the bigger ideas. I’ve got enough big ideas; it’s the little ones that are proving tricky. I did manage to fix a ton of bugs, finally add several alternative solutions for getting past the ███████, implement the ████████ ██ ████, add a new ████████ and an item that can ████████, and jot down some notes on future direction. It’s not quite a week’s worth of work, but it’s a solid few days’ worth, and I feel like it’s a big step forward. I hope I can keep it going!

March’s theme is video games or whatever.

I performed my monthly ritual of completely ruining my sleep schedule and being a zombie for a day and a half, so I’ve spent the last few days trying to fix it. Oh, well, good to take a few days off every now and then.

• art: Did a whole lot of doodling the nights I was nocturnal.

• pokémon: I started tinkering with a Pokémon Showdown CLI client for Sketch’s day of my time last month. I got sort of a proof of concept, and I guess this month I’ll try to turn it into a Python async API.

• blog: I wrote about the Doom map I made, producing the second-wordiest post I’ve ever written. I also slightly improved how Pelican handles thumbnails, and nuked a ton of old manually-created ones from git in favor of a plugin that generates them automatically.

The short time limit of DUMP somehow got me to pour myself into a new thing and produce pretty decent (and ambitious) results, so April’s theme is going to be: finish Runed Awakening. I want it playable by the end of the month, at which point I’ll share it on Patreon for some beta-testing.

March’s theme is video games, sort of?

It’s started heating up here, and we’re in the middle of our usual ritual of trying to avoid turning the AC on for as long as possible. The house has been a bit of a sauna, which is somewhat distracting. Also a bunch of terrible crazy things happened on Twitter. Oof.

• doom: I playtested other people’s maps from that ZDoom mapping project. There are a lot of maps, and I’m just about half done, and wow it takes a very long time to play through this much Doom. I hope some of my commentary is helpful to the other authors!

• SLADE: I chased down a bizarre obscure bug and eventually concluded it was a problem in wxwidgets.

• art: Lots of doodlin’. I animated something for the first time, for Mel’s birthday, and then drew myself a new avatar! I’m pretty happy with both of these, wow.

• blog: Added some more suggestions to my Twitter post. Dabbled, briefly, in figuring out how to make Pelican host work I’ve done, like that Doom map.

I’ve got a few Patreon things to finish in the next few days, and along the way I’d very much like to work out a scheme for hosting other work on this domain.

March’s theme is video games, I guess?

It’s actually been two weeks since the last roundup, but there’s an excellent reason for that!

• doom: As previously mentioned, someone started a “just get something done” ZDoom mapping project, so I made a map! I spent a solid seven days doing virtually nothing but working on it. And it came out pretty fantastically, I think. The final project is still in a bug-fixing phase, but I’ll link it when it’s done.

• blog: I wrote about how maybe we could tone down the JavaScript, and it was phenomenally popular. People are still linking it anew on Twitter. That’s pretty cool. I also wrote a ton of developer commentary for my Doom map, which I’ll finish in the next few days and publish once the mapset is actually released. And I combed through my Doom series to edit a few things that are fixed in recent ZDoom and SLADE releases.

• veekun: I managed to generate a YAML-based data file for Pokémon Red directly from game data. There’s still a lot of work to do to capture moves and places and other data, but this is a great start.

• SLADE: In my 3D floor preview branch, the sides of simple 3D floors now render. There is so much work left to do here but the basics are finally there. Also fixed about nine papercuts I encountered while making my map, though some others remain.

• mario maker: I made a level but have neglected to write about it here yet. Oops.

• art: I drew most of the next part of Pokémon Yellow but then got kinda distracted by Doom stuff. I redrew last year’s Pi Day comic for the sake of comparison. I also started on Mel’s birthday present, which involves something astoundingly difficult that I’ve never tried before.

• irl: I replaced my case fans, and it was a nightmare. “Toolless” fasteners are awful.

Pouring a solid week into one thing is weird; I feel like I haven’t drawn or touched Runed Awakening in ages, now. I’d like to get back to those.

I also still want to rig a category for posts about stuff I’m releasing, and also do something with that terrible “projects” page, so hopefully I’ll get to those soon.

March’s theme is… is… I don’t know yet.

• blog: I made a cheesecake. (By the way, it turns out I had enough leftover filling to make an entire second one! Wow.) And wrote about Valentine’s Day. And wrote about this eerie clone of tech Twitter. I’m actually kind of ahead of the game this month!

• art: I started documenting my adventures playing Pokémon Yellow. Very… slowly.

• veekun: I came up with a rough YAML schema for Pokémon data and faked a Red dump. The idea is to try replacing the relational database with just in-memory data, stored separately per-game and in a way that can be reproduced easily. There isn’t very much data anyway, in the grand scheme of things, and trying to keep it relational is getting to be a huge headache. I’d really like to have a simple proof-of-concept of this sometime soon; Sun and Moon come out towards the end of the year, and I’d like to have a redesigned site ready to go.

  I’m using camel for this, so I’ve found reason to hack a few more features into it already. I’ll clean them up and release them, ah, sometime.

• floraverse: Yahoo is rejecting the store mail for some reason, which led to my discovering that Google Apps “aliases” are totally different from GMail “aliases”, and you need to have an address aliased in both places for it to actually appear in the “From” field.

• doom: Someone has started a “just get something done” ZDoom mapping project, so I’m going to do that. The actual mapping time hasn’t started yet, but I went looking for inspiration in the form of textures and background music.

• irl: Yardwork. Exciting.

I don’t know what to have as a theme. Runed Awakening still needs a lot of work; veekun needs an overhaul with a time limit; there’s this ZDoom mapping thing; and I’m drawing Pokémon Yellow as I play it. So maybe the theme is just… video games? Sure, we can do that.

February’s theme is writing, and the major project is a book.

• Runed Awakening: Wow! Fixed a central area! Laid groundwork for scoring! Lots of work on, er, a core mechanic! Lots of work on a major NPC and their related geography!

• Don’t Eat the Cactus: I went on a brief diversion and created a tiny interactive fiction game called Don’t Eat the Cactus, which is based on true events.

• SLADE: Some more papercuts. A microscopic amount of work on 3D floor rendering. (Also, 3.1.1 is out now, so that’s pretty cool. I may update my Doom guides at some point to mention this.)

• blog: I made cheesecake.

• art: I drew some miscellaneous stuff. Haven’t really been in the mood for daily comics, and my inspiration has run a bit dry; all I do every day is work on stuff or not work on stuff. I’m working on an art trade and a Pokémon 20th anniversary thing, though.

• book: Wow, yes, I did actually write some book, with only a few days left in the month. I wrote a solid chunk of a chapter, even. I don’t actually like how it came out; it’s very dry, with none of the usual casual tone in my blog posts. I’ll have to… work on that.

February’s theme is writing, and the major project is, er, a book.

I haven’t actually written a single word of a book? But oh dang I had one solid-ass week. I’ve been nocturnal for a few days and it’s been working pretty well.

• art: Did a ton of doodlin’ practice. I think I’ve finally hit a point where I can sketch something and have a decent chance of getting it sort of right, which is amazing, and a confidence boost as well. I ended up crafting a brand new Twitter banner, which is absolutely gorgeous.

• Runed Awakening: I built out several areas, fixed up a central critical puzzle, and had a lot of ideas for plugging together things I already had. I’m being vague, so that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was a pretty big step forwards.

• blog: I intended to write about abuse and harassment, and it sort of morphed into offense in general, but it seemed to resonate. Also I wrote about Twitter’s weird collection of subtle features, and I’m still getting suggestions for edits. Also also I switched the site to pretty solid https, which turns out to be pretty easy with Let’s Encrypt.

February’s theme is writing, and the major project is a book.

I had a strange week.

I’ve had frequent headaches since around the end of January, especially when staring at text on a screen for long periods of time, which has made the theme of writing a little difficult. This week, I finally went to an optometrist. Lo and behold, my eyesight has worsened from 20/15 post-LASIK to 20/25. One pair of glasses later, and the headaches are gone. I barely notice the difference, but I guess teeny-tiny monitor text was just fuzzy enough that I tired my eyes out trying to focus on it all day every day.

I’ve also been a little disillusioned with drawing lately — it seemed like I couldn’t even move the tablet pen how I wanted any more. This week I discovered I’d somehow turned on the stabilizer (which smooths out your strokes), and it was high enough to mess with me but not high enough to be the obvious cause. Whoops.

Not a great start to the month, but at least that’s all taken care of.

• art: One or two dailies, though I’ve taken a bit of a break, due to eye pain and lack of ideas.

• spline: Trimmed blog posts to the first couple paragraphs on the front page of Mel’s personal site, so you can actually see the buttons at the bottom.

• Runed Awakening: Dealt with some technical nonsense regarding touchability, which was satisfying but made no visible improvement. Did a lot of planning. Still feel like there’s too big a gap in the middle of the game, but I’m very gradually closing it.

• doom: Playing with weapons again. Looking for sound effects. Experimented with improving function documentation on the ZDoom wiki.

• blog: Wrote about UI changes.

• slade: Worked on previewing 3D floors — mostly fixing tricky bugs with what I’d already done.

February’s theme is writing, and the major project is a book.

• spline: Styled Mel’s personal site and put it in production. Did a lot of last-second oh-god-we’re-in-production-and-nothing-works fixes, like throwing in Disqus and GA and fixing permissions and whatnot.

• blog: I made pretzels! Also I wrote about making pretzels. And about writing. And like two-thirds of a post about UI changes.

• art: The usual. Also hourly comic day.

• doom: Some more tinkering. Made a few weapons that are pretty sweet. Also made a little start of a ZDoom editing demo map.