fuzzy notepad - dev

fox flux, three years later

2020-08-04T13:50:00-07:00

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:

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.

Weekly roundup: Somewhere

2019-10-02T10:00:00-07:00

I would not say I’ve been having a great time.

fox flux: I fixed some bugs with pushing on flat ground, and did a bunch of math.

Weekly roundup: Foglights

2019-09-22T19:06:00-07:00

Hello!! This is just the year of endless interruptions. I switched medication and I’m functional, but I think I have withdrawal from going off the old stuff, so I’ve been a little spacey for about a week. Hoping it passes soon! Also some other distractions happened. But in the meantime I’ve been drawing a lot.

art: I’ve been joining Ash’s commission streams for the past week or so and mostly doodling porn, but after doing that for a while, I decided I should try coloring stuff again, so now I’m doing that also. Definitely need the practice, but really enjoying seeing myself produce more finished work again. I guess I could go put some of that work in the canonical place, too.
blog: I did a whole bunch of work on a blog post which is going to be preposterously long, but hey, what a way to come back. Hoping to finish it by the end of the month, if I can get my brain working again.
alice: Still writing for this…

Weekly roundup: All that glistens

2019-09-12T11:16:00-07:00

fox flux: I’ve been kind of taking a break from physics, but I did have some ideas about how extrinsic velocity could work, got them working for a conveyor belt, and then extended the same concept to a rough rework of pushing. It works surprisingly well given how little time I spent on it, so that’s very promising.
gleam: I put together the first production VN with it, and although I had to cheat and hand-edit a bit, GLEAM grew a bunch of useful stubs of features along the way! It’s getting there. Also I discovered a fascinating edge case in Firefox when you have 800 images visible but all but one of them have zero opacity.

Weekly roundup: Waste not, want not

2019-09-05T08:14:00-07:00

Wee bit late, but I’ve been busy.

fox flux: I wrote some push physics tests, now that it’s possible to do that. Removed some old obsolete garbage I’ve hated for like a year, hooray. And then I got stuck in a horrible loop of coming up with a new idea for how to do pushing, realizing it won’t work in some case, making a thousand notes, rinse and repeat.

I can’t even fall back to spriting, because my tablet broke! Argh.
doom: I made WasteNot, a ridiculous ZDoom mod that tracks how much ammo/health/armor you lose by grabbing items when you’re close to the max amount you can carry. Also I put some Doom stuff on Itch and the landing page here.

Very exciting week. I spent a lot of it exhausted, after rushing to invert my sleep schedule in not very much time.

Weekly roundup: Breaking up (code) is hard to do

2019-08-28T01:42:00-07:00

irl: I went to the dentist, which I think was the last of the errand backlog, hallelujah.
fox flux: Continuing on from last week, I threw myself headfirst into this idea of splitting up base actor code.

I tried it against Isaac’s Descent HD (my LÖVE port of Isaac’s Descent that I only ever released on Patreon), since it has a very small number of abilities and objects, and just went hog wild.

The results have been promising! Most of it went much more smoothly than I expected. A little bit was much more horrible than I expected. But within the space of a week I’d gotten a rough first attempt working, ported it to fox flux, and gotten the game… um… mostly limping along. There’s still some lingering fallout, and I haven’t even gotten to Lexy herself yet, but it seems like this will be an overall improvement. I can even write tests now! Tests!

I also did some more work on the revamped Lexy sprites, but then my tablet broke — again — so that came to a screeching halt.
blog: I started on a second post (without finishing the first, hm), or more specifically, I started on a complicated but very cool interactive doohickey to accompany the second post. Very excited. Should probably, like, finish one of them.
alice: Planning, writing.

Weekly roundup: Chugging

2019-08-19T20:43:00-07:00

I’m discovering all kinds of ancient damage in myself, but I’m chugging along!

irl: We’re making our way through an endless backlog of errands. There are so many. But they’re getting done, which is good! Also the internet was out for a day so that was fun.
gleam: It got a big ol’ refactor, which left it working exactly the same, so that’s fun! Stubbed out enough features that it’s now (technically…) possible to use it to make a VN from scratch, rather than just previewing and making minor edits to an existing one. I split apart the player from the editor and ensured the player works standalone; I added a loading screen; and I finally got around to adding back music support. It’s coming along!
art: I did like half a dozen daily comics? You know. “Daily”. The last one was… oops, almost a week ago. I’m sure I’ll get back to them real soon now.

Also some sketching! I’ve almost filled a real physical sketchbook for only the second time in my life.
stream: I took a crack at Sigil on UV, trying for 100% kills and secrets, with… mixed results! Great fun, I guess.
fox flux: I am admittedly struggling a bit.

We played Cadence of Hyrule; I found the art style inspiring; I tried to glean something from it that I could apply to my sprite work; and I realized basically everything I’ve drawn is counter to what I most like in pixel art. It was a struggle just to produce the few tiles I have so far, so I don’t know what to feel or do here.

At Ash’s suggestion, I started trying to draw some Dewclaw tiles, but boy! That’s difficult. How do you design small pieces that can be put together into something sufficiently reminiscent of a city? I don’t even know how to draw a city, not really; I’m remarkably terrible at filling in small details of a concrete place or situation.

And then I tried to do something technical and split up Lexy’s code — since historically it’s been littered with a ton of if self.form == 'foo' then ... special cases — only to discover that it breaks everything. Now I’m trying a different approach, which is not breaking everything quite as badly, but which has massive repercussions and possibly slows the game down by double-digit percent. Love game development.
alice: Still plodding along on Alice’s Day Off. I wrote a half-draft, half-outline of another route. Just been hard to get in the right mood, lately.
blog: I started on a post! Wow! Remember when I used to write posts? I’d like to do that again. I’ve got one half-done and ideas for a few more, if I can just get some momentum going again.

I’ll get there.

Weekly roundup: GLEAM

2019-08-04T18:24:00-07:00

Hello. I don’t know how I am! But I did some stuff.

fox flux: Workin’ on a new walk animation.
gleam: After years of saying I should totally do so, I finally started making a little editor for the Floraverse web VN engine. I’ve been gradually teaching it to load and play back the existing VNs (from scratch, because the old code is Quite Bad), and it’s finally hitting the point where it’s possible to make something from scratch. Sort of. I mean, there’s no saving or loading or exporting, and a bunch of stuff is broken, but you know. Getting there. Maybe I’ll even make a VN myself.
art: I started doing daily comics again and then forgot after day 1.

GLEAM has basically taken up my whole week; turns out that while client-side web stuff has improved dramatically, writing an editor is still an incredible pain in the ass. Getting somewhere, though.

Oh, and that marks the end of my journal! Cool, I guess. I don’t tend to fill up notebooks very often.

Weekly roundup: Recharging

2019-07-28T15:03:00-07:00

Hello. I’m kinda up and down but recovering, I think.

art: I drew a bunch of porn, most of which is on my porn gallery (warning: porn). I even wrote some stuff, which will never see the light of day.

I also finished putting all my 2015 art on my clean gallery, if you want to see the arc of my art journey, which slowed considerably after the first couple years. Kinda bummed about that.
irl: We have done so many fucking errands you have no idea.
gleam: I put together another Floraverse VN, but more importantly (to me anyway?), I’ve actually made some inroads on making a little editor for these things. It’s not entirely functional yet — did you know that drag-and-drop is a huge pain in the ass — but it resembles something and I’m making swift progress. Hallelujah.
fox flux: I gathered up like a dozen pages of dense notes and kinda consolidated them into one place, which is nice.

I also, accidentally, uh, okay funny story, I was taking notes on paper and I doodled Lexy pulling a lever, and later I tried to sprite it based on her current sprite, and I didn’t like it a lot, so I pixel-traced over the drawing instead, and it was way better, and this led me on a journey that ended up with a completely different sprite design. It’s a thousand times better in every possible way, but I’ve also invented a massive pile of work for myself, because now I have to redesign a dozen variants of her and redraw like 200 sprite frames. It kind of feels like I’m back to square one and have accomplished nothing at all on this game, in fact! But fuck me it’s so much better

Next week marks a fun milestone. I’m now on the very last page of the book I’ve been using to jot this stuff down, one week per page. It spans almost four years. I should probably find another one real quick.

Weekly roundup: Vacay

2019-07-16T16:59:00-07:00

I’m burnt out. I just can’t get into anything. And I’ve been dealing with a huge stack of accumulated errands from last month. And it’s fucking hot in here and that just pisses me off all the time???

So I’m trying to step back and chill and draw and hang out with folks and whatever. Sorry. I don’t know why I’m apologizing.

fox flux: Added some sparkles to a key.
mario maker: Made Star Anise’s Dream Land (5TQ-JG0-MNG), a happy-go-lucky level inspired by my cat, and Koopa Valley (463-9CJ-PVG), an attempt at some standard friendly SMW-like fare. Also made half of like six other levels, but I’m having trouble even finishing those.
art: I’ve been drawing, just, a bunch of porn. It’s nice to be getting back into that. Drawing, I mean, not porn. But porn too.

See you next week.

Weekly roundup: Let’s try that again

2019-07-02T19:33:00-07:00

Hello, hello! It’s been a while. June ended up being an avalanche of errands and personal problems that neatly segued into each other, over and over. Good times! I think everything’s settled down now, but who knows.

Anyway, that gives us three weeks to catch up on:

fox flux: Finished and committed a bunch of half-implemented ideas in an attempt to get git clean for once (still more to go though); took a crack at porting sound effects from MilkyTracker and sfxr to Sunvox, which was much harder than expected; experimented with a nighttime palette; drew some new vastly improved swimming sprites from scratch.

Did some work on the camera, which has always been pretty lazy. (I’ve improved it a lot since that recording, so don’t judge it too harshly.) Started on a redone menu, which should be a great improvement over the demo’s menu which was just “resume” and “quit”. Redrew the base dialogue portraits, and they look fantastic, but apparently I never tweeted about that, but you can see it in the next link!

After spending all this time on miscellaneous mechanics and other bits and pieces, I decided it was finally time to get a basic gameplay loop going — enter a level, get some stuff, leave the level. The results are extremely rough, but I’ve made a start! It’s turning into a game! Which is weird because it was already a game once!
secret game engine thing: Not a lot, but I’ve cleared some design roadblocks that were seriously getting in the way.
art: Some doodles. Also I drew some beautiful gift art for my and Ash’s Metapodth anniversary.
alice’s day off: Wrote some stuff! It’s a miracle.
gamedev: I ran GAMES MADE QUICK??? III-2, and 28 fine folks managed to produce something game-like within a week! Please give some of them a try!

Currently attempting to get my ass back in gear, with moderate success.

Weekly roundup: Ironically stable

2019-06-12T14:10:00-07:00

I remain on a fox flux kick. Keep trying to do other stuff as well and then not doing that? Hm.

fox flux: Documented the hell out of all my rewritten collision code, removed some old hacks, put some methods on a new type that was an ad-hoc table before, and fixed a final remaining edge case in a satisfying way. Did kinda start writing about all this but didn’t finish it yet.

Then I fixed all the stuff I’d broken about pushing in the process, and cleaned it up somewhat.

Water is gradually improving but still kinda rough.

Also added some experimental candy? Candy is pretty good.

I did some more overhauling of the palette; I’m really really liking how it’s coming out.

And also a preposterous amount of brainstorming. Like I’ve got half a dozen sheets of paper with tiny 8pt notes crammed on them. This ought to be a fun game.

Welp, back to that, then.

Weekly roundup: Exactly at the top

2019-06-05T04:52:00-07:00

Hello! I’ve been a little preoccupied with meatspace things again, but here is some digital stuff.

fox flux: I have been a busy little beaver. I consolidated 1D and 2D motion, made ground adherence more conservative about how far it tries to drop you, and totally overhauled climbing to not incredibly suck. But who cares about any of that.

What I really did is spend like a solid week overhauling collision detection. Finally, after years of wanting it, I have overlap resolution and nearly zero-cost contact detection! Which means that if objects overlap by some horrible twist of fate, instead of freely clipping through each other, they’re now free to move apart but not closer together. It’s god damn magic. Also I now know exactly where you’re touching objects which will probably come in handy for like, critters that walk back and forth on a platform without walking off it? Or something? I forget exactly why I wanted that but hey it’s nice.

As an added bonus, I can finally fix climbing off the top of ladders — instead of hopping off the top and then landing, you stop at exactly the top, which is incredibly satisfying.

I will almost certainly be wringing a blog post out of all this.
art: I worked more on that animation and then kinda forgot about it. Hm. Also some doodling or whatever?

I drew a little… comic? Series of panels? I drew a thing about a ground adherence bug I ran into, and also a general explanation of ground adherence. It’s on Twitter, though it seems worth preserving elsewhere, once I figure out where that is.
gleam: I finally made some kind of real start on an editor for the little Flora VNs I put together. It doesn’t do a lot yet, but it has some UI, which is backwards from how I usually make these things, so that’s promising.
stream: Ash streamed some Spyro while I commentated, and then I streamed some Hat in Time while they commentated, and that was all great.

I am juggling too many things but I extremely want to get them all moving so I guess I’ll get back to it!

Weekly roundup: Push it to the limit

2019-05-21T17:29:00-07:00

fox flux: Messed with collision code in an attempt to get contact points out of it, but that turned out to be a bit more laborious than I was hoping.

Finished an animation and generally did some other art.

Finally finished box pushing, hallelujah.
art: Doodled. Started on a ridiculous ambitious animation; we’ll see how that goes.

Weekly roundup: Pushing it

2019-05-15T09:42:00-07:00

I remember saying something about balancing my time better, and that did not happen.

fox flux: I basically spent the whole week working on push physics. It was tough going at first, but I finally got it working correctly which feels like a goddamn Christmas miracle.

I probably did some sprite work in there somewhere too, to let my brain cool down a bit.

I’m excited about this game, ah! There’s a ton of work to go but I’m actually starting to see some mechanics come together.
stream: Ash and I played a ridiculous adventure game for a bit. Hm, maybe we should finish that. It’ll be on YouTube, uh, eventually.

Not so much this week; I ended up nocturnal and that threw me entirely for a loop. Back to waking with the sun now and feeling pretty good, so, fingers crossed.

Weekly roundup: In flux 2

2019-05-05T16:15:00-07:00

fox flux: I’m not sure what happened but I mostly did fox flux this week! It’s kind of a huge mess at the moment — I have a thousand lines of uncommitted changes from a dozen different half-finished experimental ideas, which makes starting on a new idea a bit daunting. So I spent some time finishing up and committing about half of that stuff, and then… um… started a few new half-finished experimental ideas. I am good at software development.

I got a bit lost in the weeds trying to make the physics of pushing blocks work a bit better, which I’d still like to do, but I think it might require completely rethinking how pushing works (mainly in order to avoid a two-pixel gap in some situations, sigh, but that kinda thing’s important to me) and also redoing how friction and whatnot works. I can’t wait.

Also been finishing up some visual effects I started ages ago but didn’t quite figure out, filling in some missing pixel art (which I think I got a little better + faster at), and fleshing out mechanics + trying out some new ones. It turns out, if you think your game needs more mechanics, a good place to start is to implement the existing ones so you can run around and play with them freely and see what new stuff comes to mind. Who knew?
art: I painted a picture. Not porn, for once! I’m definitely gonna do this more often; it was quicker and easier than I expected, and came out better too.

I missed working on fox flux and am glad to be doing it again, but I’ve clearly gotta balance my time across other stuff a bit better, too.

Weekly roundup: Bit of this, bit of that

2019-04-29T16:56:00-07:00

I don’t have a cool theme or pun this week!

irl: I did a whole bunch of errands, aggressively slashed my tab/email count, and went hiking. Very exciting for you, I know.
secret thing: I taught it to animate tiles and movement, and tried this out with a conveyor belt, which instantly threw a wrench in my whole plan. Hm, well, I’ll figure it out. I wrote about the concept for $4 patrons (who will also be getting a bunch of beta builds when this is usable), if you’re interested.
cherry kisses: I have like four logic bugs reported by several different people, and they all feel related, but they’re also completely impossible. Like there is no way any of these could’ve happened. Except they did. And I have no goddamn idea how. I’ve spent like a day and a half wrestling with this and have barely made progress so far, but I would really like to make the game not randomly crash for folks.

At least it autosaves, I guess.
art: I drew more things and I increasingly like them! I don’t know what happened, but I hit a point where I’m aggressively attacking all kinds of small details that I don’t do quite right — details that, formerly, I’d just glaze over because it was hard enough getting the general pose right. So that’s good.

Still working on categorizing old SFW art, too. There’s just a whole lot of it.
fox flux: I picked this back up, but didn’t actually make tangible progress until Sunday, but I’m listing it anyway to pad this list out a bit.
streaming: Ash played through Doom II totally blind, while I provided commentary, which I guess doesn’t make it totally blind. Anyway we have a whole playlist of this nonsense now.

I’m juggling half a dozen things and am generally excited about all of them! It’s a nice way to feel.

Weekly roundup: Back to normal

2019-04-22T15:40:00-07:00

As I said before, I was occupied for a bit, but now I should finally be able to get back to doing these weekly! I did manage to get a few things done over the past three weeks:

flora: Finished up and published a Luneko species sheet! Happy April Fool.

That’s Anise. Anise is the April fool, and also he’s happy.
blog: I wrote about how the particle wipe generator works, in lurid detail! I think it’s an interesting little read, even if you have no use for the tool itself.

I also spent a lot of time backfilling old art on my (clean) art gallery. It’s not updated quite yet; there’s a lot to go to, shockingly so, and I haven’t even made it through year one yet. Honestly, I’m kind of embarrassed by how much my output declined over time.
art: Speaking of, I’m back to drawing regularly, instead of just saying I wish I were drawing regularly! I think I’ve actually been drawing pretty regularly for like two weeks now. Most of it is porn. I should probably draw some not-porn, too. It’s just, you know, porn is a lot of fun to draw.
secret thing: I laid some groundwork for the little game engine I’m writing and haven’t really talked about yet. More on that, including maybe even a name, once I feel like I have some kinda proof of concept.
sudoku thing: I taught it about extra regions so now it can be used to play hyper sudoku? I don’t know why I’m even making this. It’s kind of unusable until I add undo/redo and puzzle generation, and both of those are effort. I guess I’ll see if my spite is strong enough to power me through both.
streaming: Ash and I played video games on the internet while high and you can watch it if you really want to for some reason.

Hey, that’s not too bad a haul, considering I didn’t even have time to work for most of the month! Got some good stuff going on, glad to see I’m up to speed again at last.

Weekly roundup: Cherry Kisses

2019-04-01T19:32:00-07:00

Hello hello! I finally finished that game I was working on, so now I might actually be back to some sort of normal dev schedule.

Except I’m gonna be kinda occupied for the next week or so. So.

cherry kisses: Hey hey I finished making Cherry Kisses, which is super duper NSFW! It’s probably the most well-designed and polished thing I/we have released, though. Whoops! I gotta stop accidentally making sex games.

There’s some little niceties in there. Maybe I should, like, write about it sometime.

Also attempted to get it to work on Android, which… is… non-trivial, despite LÖVE being “able” to target Android.
particle wipe generator: Cherry Kisses includes a cool heart transition between scenes, which took a surprising amount of effort to create, so I packaged up the code and put some dials and knobs on it. Now you can use the particle wipe generator to make your own particley transitions! Also hosted locally.

Maybe I should, like, write about how this works sometime. Can’t wait for someone to tell me how I could’ve done it a thousand times more easily.
irl: We did some spring cleaning! Very exciting for anyone who doesn’t live here, I know. Our bedroom is no longer half-full of half-unpacked boxes, which is pretty nice.
sudoku: I occasionally waste time with a nice sudoku app, which has a free ad-supported version and a paid version. It has a sequel now, which is even better, but which only comes free with ads. I am incensed by this so I started writing my own JS player out of spite. Unclear whether my spite will last long enough to produce something usable.

Pretty happy to be back to makin’ things! I love that I could spin off some throwaway helper code into a little gamedev tool, and I’d definitely like to do more of that sort of thing in the future.

Weekly roundup: Strawberry Jam 3

2019-03-07T13:14:00-08:00

Another double feature. Surprise, basically all I’ve been doing is working on a jam game. Should be back to normal once I get this out the door.

art: I doodled, like, once, but then was lost in gamedev all day every day.
cerise: I finally, like, planned out the progression of the game, and sat down to write it. Prose is harder for me than you’d think, and there’ve been a number of interruptions over the past month, so it’s taking a little while. I’m nearly done and am pretty happy with what I have so far, though.

Actually, reading my notes here, I’m amazed how much of the game was done in only the last two weeks of February! I didn’t even have the passage of time working yet, and that’s the most fundamental part of the game.

I did also cobble together a thing for generating particle wipes, which I think is pretty cool; I’ll probably write about it and release a web version in the near future.

Should be done in a day or two, but I’ve been saying that for a week, so who knows.