2020 Update (the first one, hopefully not the only one)
Hi there!
It's been approximately 3 months since the last email, which seems like a surprisingly short time for me to write a new email?
Life Updates
It's 2020, it's somehow already mid February, and a lot has happened in my life, as usual.
Global Game Jam
At the beginning of the month, I participated in Global Game Jam - an event where a bunch of people get together in a room, form small teams, and make video games in 48 hours. (I've done this before in 2017 and 2018.)
This time, through uh mostly extreme coincidence, I joined 3 people and we made a magical girl / idol rhythm game about awakening immortal giants to save the world. One of the diversifiers (extra challenges) was to get a choir of 10 people from the participants and have them sing the soundtrack, and so of course we did that as well.
I was a programmer for the project. Mac wrote the music (in all its anime-opening-esque glory), Colin did SFX and audio programming, and Sam drew the artwork. Our team was pretty lopsided with two people that were traditionally programmers, and two musicians, but it worked and we made a game.
I'd always wanted to make a rhythm game, so it was really cool that I had an opportunity to do so (and indulge in anime at the same time!).
Site Update
I also rewrote my personal site in the last month, now with more space backgrounds!
It still lives at https://amorphic.space.
The site has links to all my games, some of my artwork, and other projects. I also made the static site generator for it, because I'm very good at turning small projects into big ones, which can be found here: https://github.com/dmliao/wanderer
I've been doing some more writing on the site too, highlights of which I might start including here. I'm still figuring out how to link everything, but so far my favorite piece of writing on there is https://amorphic.space/amorphic/past-sites-past-lives/ - which goes through all of the site designs I made in the past.
Martial Arts
I started taking up taijiquan in an effort to actually exercise for once in my life. It's (perhaps unsurprisingly) quite difficult: taiji involves a lot of slow, deliberate movements, and it takes a lot of leg strength. But even after just a month, my leg muscles are no longer dying in the middle of class, so maybe I'm getting stronger?
Upcoming Events
I will be traveling to San Francisco for GDC in March.
GDC runs from March 16th to 20th; I got an expo pass, so I'll probably only attend the conference Wed-Fri. I haven't finalized travel plans yet, and I'm still debating whether to stay the weekend, but if you're around at that time, please let me know so we can hang out!
Projects
Last time I said that I'd gotten into a pretty good schedule with projects, and may actually be consistent with them.
I was sort of half right? I am still working on everything I said I would last time, except maybe I added a few projects to the list. As usual.
Desert Angels
is still a game about blowing up trash and maybe some bad memories in a desert scrapyard.
This is my big 'long haul' game project right now - I'd hoped for a gameplay demo at the beginning of 2020, which was entirely too ambitious (though it was a soft deadline anyway). The actual deadline is May, since I'm hoping that I'll have a demo for the Seattle Indies Expo by then.
Progress is going steadily - last time, basic movement was working, and since then, the cutscene engine was also implemented, as was a bunch of visual effects and breaking objects.
...which means that I kind of skipped over 'implementing basic systems'. Like shooting guns, or interacting with objects, so I'm going back to add them now. For the demo, I'll also be creating the entire environment design, which is a skill I've not used often before, so I'm not sure how that will turn out.
I've also been taking a lot of notes of the development process for this game, but I'm not sure yet how and when I'd want to share them out.
...I also realize that at my normal email schedule, by the time I send the next email the demo of Desert Angels should be completed. So hopefully I'll have something to show then!
Arms Race (temporary name)
Oops, new project.
After Global Game Jam, I had a miniature crisis after realizing that the last time I'd released a non-jam game was a year ago. At the same time, I got a rejection from a games event that I'd entered, so I was powered pretty solidly by spite.
So I decided to make a short game, mostly to prove to myself that I still could.
The game is a bullet-hell shooter where you play as an arm; instead of having your own guns, your only attack is to swing the arm, and rip turrets out of your enemies. I've mostly been doing programming thus far, so it still looks super rough, but I should have an art direction by the end of the weekend, hopefully.
Also, at some point, I'll need a title, because I am not naming the actual game Arms Race.
Recital
Recital is the interactive fiction / visual novel engine I've been working on for over a year now. I'm still working on it, but I haven't had as much visible movement since most of my effort has been put into Desert Angels recently.
I've actually hit a snag with the syntax, in that currently I use flags at the beginning of the line to do conditionals, like so:
$if condition = true <<
Show this block of text!
>>
...which is used to show / hide text based on variables in the story. And this works well enough for showing and hiding paragraphs.
But sometimes, I want to toggle inline text, like inserting an extra word if the condition is met, and relying on beginning-of-line flags there will fail.
I'm currently rewriting that part of the parser (and the syntax) to support more inline logic, but I don't want the end result to turn out unreadable either. I'll figure it out as I go, I suppose.
K
I said last time that I wanted to get the first few chapters out in Recital by the end of 2019. Which didn't quite happen, because I was overambitious.
I've edited the text over and over again, but I've never been happy with K's beginning, and I still am not. So I'm probably shelving this again until I feel ready to take it on, which may be a while since Desert Angels is really my top priority.
Other Stuff
There's always so much I want to do, and so little energy and time to go around. But that's life, I suppose.
Patreon
I keep forgetting about it, but I do have a Patreon page if anyone wants to support my work: https://www.patreon.com/amorphous
I haven't been posting there very much because at that small scale it's a lot easier for me to just talk to people directly instead of going through Patreon's interface, but having some kind of monetary support is more incentive for me to do creative updates more often.
It feels a bit weird promoting a Patreon - I don't really need the money, as I currently have a well-paying full time job.
At the same time, I am technically making a lot of stuff and releasing it for free. And if I ever hope to sustain anything with creative work, I'll have to start thinking about how to make money with that work before it becomes a problem.
At any rate, that's why there isn't really tiers or anything at the moment. The gesture would mean far more to me than anything else, so I'd much rather $1 patrons than literally any other amount (even higher ones).
Doodlin'
I've been drawing a lot of faces lately, and I'm really proud of these two so I'm sharing them pretty much everywhere.