50-projects-syndrome intensifies
...has it really been 3 months since the last update? It's not quite an '8 months later' thing, but oh man it's been a while. Uh, what has happened since last time?
a short walk in the spring
The answer is 'I released another game, and promptly forgot to tell people about it'.
Anyway, in March I updated and released a short walk in the spring, which is a surreal piece of interactive fiction about honoring your ghosts, or walking away from them.
It is also mostly procedurally generated; I wrote a computer program in Javascript that created the files for this story, so the content gets pretty spoony sometimes.
You can play the game here, and find the source code here.
recording the predestined time
I mentioned this last time, but I also recently released a visual novel called Recording the Predestined Time, which you can play here if you haven't already.
I decided to enter this game into the Seattle Indies Expo (SIX), which is an exhibition for indie games that runs next to PAX West. Anyway, the application required a trailer. So I, with my fairly non-existent video editing skills, decided to make a trailer. It starts pretty normally but then it goes through the entire game in 10 seconds:
I'll know in July whether or not I got in! Regardless, if anyone is going be at PAX West in September, please let me know! (Also, check out SIX! There's always a lot of cool indie games there.)
Life Updates
Computers and stuff
I never actually finished my writeup for my bluetooth keyboard build. It's almost there, it's just that everything turned out much longer and more complicated than I wanted it to and I need to edit. I do not like editing.
I also decided, at some point in the recent past, that I wanted to play Nier:Automata, and decided to stream it from my laptop. Which is decidedly not a gaming PC, and also doesn't have a dedicated graphics card.
This turned out to be unwise.
Anyway, after possibly near-melting my laptop and still only getting cobbled-together performance, I decided that I should probably actually build a gaming PC. And so I did just that:
(Pictured: the boot screen complaining that 'no keyboards detected', while there are approximately 4.5 keyboards sitting on my desk)
This was my first time building a computer! I ended up having to put it together three times, the first two times failing until I realized that a stray hair had gotten under the CPU.
And then one of the RAM sticks I ordered turned out to be faulty, and so I procrastinated for literal months finishing it up.
But it works, and I've got Windows on it, and maybe now I can actually play PC games without worrying about blowing up a computer.
Work
I've been at Oculus for 1.5 years! It's kind of amazing to think that I've been out of school for two years now.
Also, the Oculus Quest, which I've been working on for the entire past year, is released! ...okay, it released in May, so I'm late here too, but yay! I shipped a thing! I've got bigger projects in the coming months as well, so I'll announce them (probably a month or two after they ship, let's be honest here) as well.
Theater
I mentioned at the beginning of the year that I wanted to get into theater, and so in the time since, I auditioned for and joined a theater troupe!
The troupe is Hello Earth Productions, and we'll be putting on an outdoor play of Star Wars Episode V in the park. It's a really DIY-aesthetic production that's extremely faithful to the script and extremely not faithful to the special effects, and it's going to be a lot of fun!
For anyone that's in Seattle this summer, the shows are going to be every weekend in August, but I don't know specific times yet. I'll let you all know when I figure that out, though!
Projects
Time to finally talk about my 50 unreleased projects! (...okay, I don't have that many. But it does feel like it sometimes.)
Site Update
I updated my personal website, mostly because I could. I might have over-engineered it, but oh well it works.
(besides that part, the main changes are that I added my new games to the site: https://amorphic.space/)
Games (in general)
Most of my game projects have been stalled for a while now. Part of that is because Game Maker broke everything from the last four years, and so I've had to find a new engine to work with, and part of that is that I did just recently release 2 games and that's a lot.
I've been learning both Godot Engine and Unity to replace Game Maker; I find Godot to be a more natural fit to my learning / thinking style, and it has a great 2D engine. But for collaborations and 3D work, many more people know Unity, so I figure it's a good thing to learn that as well.
(I haven't done that much 3D in the past, but Blender's new version looks like it's actually somewhat easy to use, so I'll probably work more in 3D in the future!)
Recital
After making Recording the Predestined Time, I've come to realize that I quite like making visual novels (and just combining prose with graphics in general). This, coupled with my realization a few months back that I don't actually want to publish novels as straight prose, led me to do a lot of exploration into interactive fiction as a medium. Add in my recent fascination with theater, and the end result is that I've had a lot of ideas about storytelling stewing around in my brain.
As a result, for the past few months I've been working on an interactive fiction / visual novel engine I've been calling Recital. (I'm not good at naming things and I was on a stage kick.) It's written in Typescript, and runs on React.JS.
The primary reason why I wanted to build my own engine is that I wanted something that 1. leverages web technology, and 2. explores how text and images in different spaces on screen can be a part of the storytelling. That second point is mostly inspired by my exposure to stageplays and how different scenes or actors can be on stage at the same time, and I was wondering if it's something that can be translated to text and images.
I'm also making this engine partly for learning purposes, as I figure out how different mechanics and stories can work together, but I also plan on porting a bunch of my work in progress stories to Recital and release them as web or desktop games.
I don't have a demo quite yet because everything's a bit of a mess, but it's at the stage now where I can seriously start developing with the system, and I'll probably be talking about it more some in the coming months. I'm also considering open-sourcing the code, but I'll have to work more on what that will look like.
Anyway, that's all for now! I'll probably write another email in a few months. As always, if you have anything you're working on you want to show me, please let me know! I'm very good at checking things out, even if I'm not very good at responding to everyone.
Doodlin'
Have I mentioned that I really like drawing on the iPad? I'm not normally a big Apple person, but somehow this thing just feels good to draw on.
anyway I got really into the anime Revue Starlight, so here's a sketch of Junna from the show. The characters wear entirely excessive outfits where they wear a jacket cape on top of a jacket, and that's honestly what got me into it.