GZDoom is the fanciest way to play Doom. Unfortunately, it has also historically been difficult to recommend to newcomers, because its default settings are… questionable.

Conspicuously, for over a decade, it defaulted to traditional Doom movement keys (no WASD) and no mouselook. I am overjoyed to discover that this is no longer the case, and it plays like a god damn FPS out of the box, but there are still a few twiddles that need twiddling. Mostly the texture filtering. Christ, the texture filtering.

Anyway GZDoom has a lot of options, so here is a handy list of the important ones. There are fewer than I expected, which is good.

Welcome to part 1 of this narrative series about writing a complete video game from scratch, using the PICO-8. This is actually the second part, because in this house (unlike Lua) we index from 0, so if you’re new here you may want to consult the introductory stuff and table of contents in part zero.

If you’ve been following along, welcome back, and let’s dive right in!

🔗 Steam release
🔗 itch release

Whoops! I meant to write about this when it originally came out, in April, but never quite got around to collecting my thoughts. Here is a very rushed subset of them.

The game is extremely NSFW, but the commentary below is not.

You may recall that I once had the ambitious idea to write a book on game development, walking the reader through making simple games from scratch in a variety of different environments, starting from simple level editors and culminating in some “real” engine.

That never quite materialized. As it turns out, writing a book is a huge slog, publishers want almost all of the proceeds, and LaTeX is an endless rabbit hole of distractions that probably consumed more time than actually writing. Also, a book about programming with no copy/paste or animations or hyperlinks kind of sucks.

I thus present to you Plan B: a series of blog posts. This is a narrative reconstruction of a small game I made recently, Star Anise Chronicles: Oh No Wheres Twig??. It took me less than two weeks and I kept quite a few snapshots of the game’s progress, so you’ll get to see a somewhat realistic jaunt through the process of creating a small game from very nearly nothing.

And unlike your typical programming tutorial, I can guarantee that this won’t get you as far as a half-assed Mario clone and then abruptly end. The game has original art and sound, a title screen, an ending, cutscenes, dialogue, UI, and more — so this series will necessarily cover how all of that came about. I will tell you why I made particular decisions, mention planned features I cut, show you the tradeoffs I made, and confess when I made life harder for myself. You know, all the stuff you actually go through when doing game development (or, frankly, any kind of software development).

The target audience is (ideally) anyone who knows what a computer is, so hopefully you can follow along no matter what your experience level. Enjoy!

This is part zero, and it’s mostly introductory stuff. Please don’t skip it! I promise there’s some meat in the latter half.

I’m working on a video game! Like, a serious one.

The past

I wrote the original game (very slightly NSFW) for my own “horny” game jam, Strawberry Jam (more likely to be NSFW), way back in February 2017.

You play as Lexy, my shameless Floraverse self-insert, who owns an enchanted collar that (among other things) makes her basically indestructible and allows her to easy to transform into… whatever, given some kind of sensible trigger. And then you do some puzzle-platforming to collect “strawberry hearts” and gain access to new areas, much of which (surprise!) involves getting turned into things.

For example, this chain-link fence blocks you:

But if you let that green blob in the grass turn you into slime, you can walk right through it.

There are also spikes, which you get stuck on if you land on them… but slime can walk right through them, glass can stand on top of them, and stone outright destroys them. And so on. As a jam game, it’s not very expansive, but many of the puzzle elements interact differently with many of the handful of Lexy variants, which provided enough potential to make eight levels.

Post-jam

The jam game was rough, but I really liked the concept and wanted to expand on it. I spent a good chunk of the summer of 2017 on it, but it was a struggle. I was still fairly new to pretty much every aspect of actually creating a game — I’d only been drawing for two years, I’d sometimes hit big gaps in the design with no idea how to fill them, and I wasn’t yet entirely comfortable with complex physics or shaders. The art in particular was a huge problem; it took me a long time to produce sprites that I was only passably happy with. My spouse Ash is an artist, and we’ve made several games together where they produced all the art, but this was my idea and I was determined to draw it myself.

Then 2018 hit, which was a whole entire mess, and I didn’t really touch fox flux at all for over a year. I made a couple of other games with Ash, some finished, some not, and kept drawing intermittently.

I returned to fox flux for the middle of 2019, and decided… I’m not sure what I decided, exactly. I guess I’d gotten better at all the things that had been difficult for me before, so I set about trying to improve every aspect of the game at once.

• I realized the (many, many) improved sprites I’d drawn in 2017 were not actually very good, and drew a new Lexy design from scratch that absolutely blew me away… which meant throwing away all the existing art.

• I’d come up with a few new things for Lexy to turn into, each of which altered her behavior pretty significantly, and her code was becoming a spaghetti disaster. So I spent some time completely refactoring actors into bags of components, which I was unsure about until very recently and which ended up breaking pretty much every single object in the game, sometimes in subtle ways.

• I decided to add water, which unraveled into a whole pile of decisions and problems.

• I tried to make consistent or interesting physics for pushing things (e.g. wooden crates), and that became a nightmare. I easily spent weeks on this, trapped in a cycle of finding some edge case that couldn’t be fixed without considerably expanding what I was simulating, struggling to do that expansion while keeping all the basic stuff working, and then finding a new and different edge case.

Did I mention that I tried to do all of these things at the same time, while also trying to nail down the design of a game that’s naturally prone to a combinatoric explosion of interactions?

At a certain point it just felt hopeless. I’d poured easily over a year into this game, and all I had to show for it was a jumbled pile of stuff that didn’t work, strewn about a couple test maps that didn’t even contain any puzzles.

The present

I don’t know what happened, exactly. I’d given up on the heavily-simulated push physics last year, at least, so that wasn’t so much of a concern any more. But I still had a mess. I’d long since written git status off as unusable.

Until this past month, when I sat down and just started powering through the mess. One by one, I fixed the serious breakages that the component refactor had caused. I dedicated a day or two just to figuring out water physics, put a little more thought into it, and ended up with something that looks and plays quite nicely. I finished redrawing basic Lexy, and even added frames I hadn’t had before.

I think the difference was… fear. I’d previously hesitated so much, both in the art and the gnarlier code. It was such a struggle to get something working at all that changing it in any way was terrifying — what if I broke it and couldn’t even get it back to how it’d been?

I don’t know how to describe exactly how this felt, and I also don’t know how to explain what changed. It was like a switch flipped. I think it started when I drew new dirt tiles, and it didn’t even take that long, and I loved them. I’ve always had a hard time drawing terrain, and for once I just sat down and did it and it came out well and it looked like mine, like my style, which was a thing I hadn’t even really grasped I have before. After that I just cranked out a mountain of new sprite art, faster and better than anything I’d done before. Like I’d been accumulating XP over the past few years and just now decided to spend it all on levelling up.

Over the past six weeks, I have:

• Redesigned the terrain
• Vastly improved the palette
• Completely finished redrawing Lexy
• Redesigned the HUD
• Mocked up a new dialogue layout
• Drawn a new font
• Drawn and implemented new consistent level entrances
• Animated a treasure chest opening cutscene
• Animated getting a key
• Added a completely new tally at the end of a level
• Added transitions for entering and leaving levels
• Added swimming behavior
• Redrawn the old gecko as a much more visible bananalizard
• Animated the hearts and several other pickups
• Ported the original forest levels to use all the new stuff
• I don’t even know there has been just so much

Just look at the style evolution! God damn.

Here’s that same level from above:

A lot of the last few weeks went towards level transitions, which previously… kind of worked. They were always a hasty jam hack that I never liked; there was a quick screen fade when going through a door, there was barely any notion of being “in a level” vs not, and the game even counted the fucking hearts in a level on the fly the first time you entered it. It was all very silly.

But now (please pardon the occasional frame drops from my screen recorder):

I finally feel like I’m making some real progress. I finally feel like this could be something I take seriously, that it could be a real game, something more than half an hour long. At some point it just became an absolute joy to look at and run around in.

The idea

The basic concept is the same, but I want to add some structure to it. The jam game was four single-room levels you could tackle in any order without much guidance, then another set of the same. Which is fine, but doesn’t give me much wiggle room in the design.

In the full game, levels will contain not just hearts, but also a treasure (a la Wario Land 3), some amount of candy (usable at the shop to buy things of some description), and an explicit exit. The overworld will function a bit more like a world map, and though you’ll still need to collect N hearts to get to the next zone, there may sometimes be obstacles that can only be overcome by finding the right treasure in a level.

I also intend to give Lexy some active abilities, for example this blown kiss (recorded with older art) that can toggle pink objects between two states:

I even have a plot in mind! The jam game had only a teeny tiny one.

The future

Ash is currently busy with their own game, so I think this is gonna be The Thing I Do for a while. To that end, I’m in the middle of setting up some infrastructure:

• A dedicated Twitter account
• An itch.io page
• A Discord channel

Also, I recently created a secret Discord channel on the same server, where I intend to do planning and design work that I’m not ready to make public yet! Spoilers will abound, but if you’re interested and okay with that, you can get in by pledging at least $4 on Patreon and letting me know to give you the role. (I don’t use Patreon’s native Discord integration because it does rude things like forcibly rejoin you to the server even if you manually leave.)

Specific priorities

I’d like to finish porting the old levels over to new artwork, the new level infrastructure, etc. It’d make for a nice little Patreon demo or something, it gives me a milestone with pretty clear goals, and it’ll leave me with at least a small palette of puzzle elements that I know work correctly.

I’d like to write about what I’m doing sometimes on this dang blog. I’ve found that structured writing is really, really, really hard when my head is a mess, and it has been extremely a mess for the last two and a half years (sorry), but jotting down what I’m already doing should be much easier than the more elaborate posts I’ve written, which need research and tooling and whatnot.

I have a good handful of puzzle elements — some of which even work — and a bunch of ideas for more, but I haven’t actually tried building levels since I made the original game! That’s kind of the important part, so I’d love to do some of it now that the dust is finally settling.

I still have some design decisions to make, though they’re getting trickier since I’ve already decided all the easy stuff. But I’ll save that for the generous folks who give me four dollars, I guess.

The elephant in the room

So. As I mentioned at the beginning, this game was originally made for a “horny” game jam. Given that it’s mostly platforming, you might be wondering why that is. I already feel like I’m crossing the streams somehow by even mentioning this on this blog, so I’ll try very hard not to get TMI here.

I have a foot in “TF” (transformation) kink circles, and one thing that’s always struck me about that subculture is how much of it is completely non-sexual. You can find no end of artwork of, say, someone being turned into one of those inflatable pooltoys — where both the artist and the audience are obviously having a good time with it — yet with no hint of sexual elements whatsoever. It’s a form of sexuality that doesn’t need to be sexual at all.

I started Strawberry Jam because I wanted to see some adult games that were more creative with their gameplay. Much of the genre consists of otherwise regular games that occasionally show you some explicit artwork, and while that’s a perfectly fine way to design a game, I felt that the medium surely had more potential. It turns out that a non-sexual fantasy kink works wonders as a gameplay element; rather than just giving you a picture, the game takes a concept and has you experience it yourself, even figure out by experimentation how it’s altered the way you interact with the world.

This puts me in a slightly awkward position. I do, genuinely and platonically, love these kinds of gameplay themes! I adore changes in how you perceive or interact with a world — the dark world in Metroid Prime 2, the time reversal in Braid, the “dimension” swapping in Quantum Conundrum, etc. I think this is a great concept that anyone can have a good time with, and I feel like this game is a love letter to the Wario Land series.

At the same time, I do also appreciate the kink inspiration. Even Lexy’s collar was originally conceived as a gimmick I could use for drawing adult artwork. The jam game contains a lot of suggestive dialogue, since Lexy herself also appreciates the kink aspect. And that was a lot of fun to write, and I’m sure it enhanced the experience for other folks with similar leanings.

But this is such a good concept that I want it to be playable as just a regular puzzle-platformer as well. I think it would have fairly broad appeal, and I don’t want to hamstring myself by totally fucking weirding people out when it dawns on them that “oh the dev is kinda Into This huh”. And yet I don’t want to completely sterilize the game, either, because… well, ultimately, it’s my game and I like the suggestive parts.

This is a tough line to draw, and I’m not yet sure how to do it. I’ve considered just making alternative dialogue that you can opt into when you start the game, but given that Lexy already speaks differently depending on what form she’s in, I have no idea how feasible that is.

I don’t know how to gauge this. I’ve always been up to my armpits in the side of the internet that just posts porn and talks about sexuality casually, whereas I’m dimly aware that most people see sexuality as this completely distinct part of life that you hide in a small box, far away from the eyes of polite society. But maybe I’m overestimating that? Does anyone actually care if the protagonist of a game comments “hey this is hot” about something weird but innocuous?

Or maybe that’s exactly where the line is. I remember Nier: Automata, a game that is all too happy to show off the protagonist’s immaculately-rendered ass, which is clearly meant for the enjoyment of both the creator and the players. But nobody comments on it within the game, which makes it seem incidental, somehow. I can’t explain why that is, and it feels slightly dishonest to me.

Am I overthinking this? If you’re not involved in any kind of kink circles and played the original jam game, I’m curious to hear how it read to you. Was it at all uncomfortable, like perhaps the game was expecting you to heavily empathize with a feeling you don’t share at all? Or does putting that feeling on a character, rather than aiming it at the human player, make it something you can easily shrug off? The full game will have more stuff going on, so there should be lots more dialogue that isn’t solely about Lexy’s feelings, if that helps.

Hm, I thought I would have more to say here! I have a lot of ideas, but only a handful of them are implemented yet, and I guess it’s hard to show what a game will be like before most of it works.

I hope this is enough to whet some appetites, at least! I haven’t been excited like this about anything in far too long.

I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was.

And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff and put it online where other people could see it was pretty slick, but we did not have very much to work with.

I’ve been taking for granted that most folks doing web stuff still remember those days, or at least the decade that followed, but I think that assumption might be a wee bit out of date. Some time ago I encountered a tweet marvelling at what we had to do without border-radius. I still remember waiting with bated breath for it to be unprefixed!

But then, I suspect I also know a number of folks who only tried web design in the old days, and assume nothing about it has changed since.

I’m here to tell all of you to get off my lawn. Here’s a history of CSS and web design, as I remember it.

🔗 Advent calendar, with links to individual projects

Happy new year!

For December, I had the absolutely ludicrous idea to do an advent calendar, whereupon I would make and release a thing every day until Christmas.

It didn’t go quite as planned! But some pretty good stuff still came out of it.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

In this issue, I bash my head against a rock. Sorry, I mean I bash Star Anise against a rock. It’s about collision detection.

Previously: I draw some text to the screen.
Next: more collision detection, and fixed-point arithmetic.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

In this issue, I draw some text!

Previously: I get a Game Boy to meow.
Next: collision detection, ohh nooo…

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

In this issue, I cannot get a goddamn Game Boy to meow at me!!

Previously: maps and sprites.
Next: text!

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

In this issue, I get a little asset pipeline working and finally have a real map.

Previously: spring cleaning.
Next: resounding failure success?.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

In this issue, I tidy up some of the gigantic mess I’ve made thusfar.

Previously: writing a main loop, and finally getting something game-like.
Next: sprite and map loading.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

In this issue, I fill in the remaining bits necessary to have something that looks like a game.

Previously: drawing a sprite.
Next: a little spring cleaning.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

In this issue, I figure out how to draw a sprite. This part was hard.

Previously: figuring out how to put literally anything on the goddamn screen.
Next: the remaining bits necessary to have something game-like.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

In this issue, I figure out how to put literally anything on the goddamn screen, then add a splash of color.

Next: drawing a sprite.

Hi. Yes. Sorry. I’ve been trying to write this post for ages, but I’ve also been working on a huge writing project, and apparently I have a very limited amount of writing mana at my disposal. I think this is supposed to be a Patreon reward from January. My bad. I hope it’s super great to make up for the wait!

I recently ported some math code from C++ to Rust in an attempt to do a cool thing with Doom. Here is my story.

Here’s a problem I’m having. Or, rather, a problem I’m solving, but so slowly that I wonder if I’m going about it very inefficiently.

I intended to just make a huge image out of this and tweet it, but it takes so much text to explain that I might as well put it on my internet website.