hi, this is your gentle reminder and PSA: there are ELECTIONS happening in November 4th. PLEASE GO VOTE. Trump is the most unpopular he has ever been, but does that mean your average independent, or republican will vote for a dem this time around-likely no- they probably will just skip the process entirely if they donāt have a candidate they feel strongly about. this is why iām asking YOU SPECIFICALLY to make sure to go vote. and i donāt wanna hear any doomerism shit about how voting is a waste of time bc of whatever, guys voting is the last of anything we have it is clear most of these people who represent us do not actually care, HOWEVER trump currently has the house, senate and courts and making it even slightly harder to do anything or having a large enough group to speak out against what heās doing will help hundreds of thousands of people in the US. now more than ever is it important to make sure that they know that we do not stand for this
You can be talking to someone and she'll be like, "Oh I made a silly mistake. Women don't deserve voting rights teehee." And you'll be like, "What." And she'll be like, "Oh I'm sorry! That must sound so bad out of context. No it's this Tiktok meme where, if you're a girl and you do something dumb, you say 'Women don't deserve voting rights teehee.'"
And you'll be like, "That sounds bad." And she'll be like, "No no. It's totally not that bad. It's just a meme. Men say it too. Like if a man does something silly he'll be like, 'I am like those women who do not deserve to vote.'" And you'll be like, "Does that make it better?" And she'll be like, "Well there was one guy who tried to make 'Men shouldn't vote' a popular meme. But it never caught on and also he got yelled at a lot."
And then you drop it there because like, you're harshing the vibe.
StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.
The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."
The Useless Web
Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)
Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."
Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."
Yeah I getcha. I was once like you. Pure and naive. Great news. I AM STILL PURE AND NAIVE, GAME DEV IS FUN! But where to start?
To start, here are a couple of entry level softwares you can use! source: I just made a game called In Stars and Time and people are asking me how to start making vidy gaems. Now, without further ado:
SOFTWARES AND ENGINES FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO CODE!!!
Ren'py (and also a link to it if you click here do it):
THE visual novel software. Comic artists, look no further
āØPros: It's free! It's simple! It has great documentation! It has a bunch of plugins and UI stuff and assets for you to buy! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch) You can also port your game to a BUNCH of consoles!
āØCons: None really <3
Some games to look at: Doki Doki Literature Club, Bad End Theater, Butterfly Soup
Twine:
Great for text-based games! GREAT FOR WRITERS WHO DONT WANNA DRAW!!!!!!!!! (but you can draw if you want)
āØPros: It's free! It's simple! It's versatile! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch)
āØCons: You can add pictures, but it's a pain.
Some games to look at: The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo, Queers In love At The End of The World, Escape Velocity
Bitsy:
Little topdown games!
āØPros: It's free! It's simple! It's (somewhat) intuitive! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! You can make everything in it, from text to sprites to code! Those games sure are small!
āØCons: Those games sure are small. This is to make THE simplest game. Barely any animation for your sprites, can barely fit a line of text in there. But honestly, the restrictions are refreshing!
Some games to look at: honestly I haven't played that many bitsy games because i am a fake gamer. The picture above is from Under A Star Called Sun though and that looks so pretty
RPGMaker:
To make RPGs! LIKE ME!!!!!
NOTE: I recommend getting the latest version if you can, but all have their pros and cons. You can get a better idea by looking at this post.
āØPros: Literally everything you need to make an RPG. Has a tutorial inside the software itself that will teach you the basics. Pretty simple to understand, even if you have no coding experience! Also I made a post helping you out with RPGMaker right here!
āØCons: Some stuff can be hard to figure out. Also, the latest version is expensive. Get it on sale!
Some games to look at: Ib, Hylics, In Stars and Time (hehe. I made it)
engine.lol:
collage worlds! it is relatively new so I don't know much about it, but it seems fascinating. picture is from Garden!
NOTE: There's a bunch of smaller engines to find out there. Just yesterday I found out there's an Idle Game Maker made by the Cookie Clicker creator. Isn't life wonderful?
āØmore advice under the cut. this is Long okāØ
ENGINES I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT AND THEY SEEM HARD BUT ALSO GIVE IT A TRY I GUESS!!!! :
Unity and Unreal: I don't know anything about those! That looks hard to learn! But indie devs use them! It seems expensive! Follow your dreams though! Don't ask me how!
GameMaker: Wuh I just don't know anything about it either! I just know it's now free if your game is non-commercial (aka, you're not selling it), and Undertale was made on it! It seems good! You probably need some coding experience though!!!
Godot: Man I know even less about this one. Heard good things though!
BUNCHA RANDOM ADVICE!!!!
-Make something small first! Try making simple: a character is in a room, and exits the room. The character can look around, decide to take an item with them, can leave, and maybe the door is locked and you have to find the key. Figuring out how to code something like that, whether it is as a fully text-based game or as an RPGMaker map, should be a good start to figure out how your software of choice works!
-After that, if you have an idea, try first to make the simplest version of that idea. For my timeloop RPG, my simplest version was two rooms: first room you can walk in, second room with the King, where a cutscene automatically plays and the battle starts, you immediately die, and loop back to the first room, with the text from this point on reflecting this change. I think I also added a loop counter. This helped me figure out the most important thing: Can This Game Be Made? After that, the rest is just fun stuff.
So if you want to make a dating sim, try and figure out how to add choices, and how to have affection points go up and down depending on your choices! If you want to make a platformer, figure out how to make your character move and jump and how to create a simple level! If you just want to make a kinetic visual novel with no choices, figure out how to add text, and how to add portraits! You'll be surprised at how powerful you'll feel after having figured even those simple things out.
-If you have a programming problem or just get confused, never underestimate the power of asking Google! You most likely won't be the only person asking this question, and you will learn some useful tips! If you are powerful enough, you can evenā¦ Ask people??? On forums??? Not me though.
-Yeah I know you probably want to make Your Big Idea RIGHT NOW but please. Make a smaller prototype first. You need to get that experience. Trust me.
-If you are not a womanthing of many skills like me, you might realize you need help. Maybe you need an artist, or a programmer. So! Game jams on itch.io are a great way to get to work and meet other game devs that have different strengths! Or ask around! Maybe your artist friend secretly always wanted to draw for a game. Ask! Collaborate! Have fun!!!
I hope that was useful! If it was. Maybe. You'd like to buy me a coffee. Or maybe you could check out my comics and games. Or just my new critically acclaimed game In Stars and Time. If you want. Ok bye
Seriously cannot recommend GBStudio enough for beginners, it makes making a gb/gbc game pretty simple, it's also FOSS (free, open source software) and the devs in my experience are very responsive as is the community
A quick and easy to use drag and drop retro game creator for your favourite handheld video game system.
Worth noting that ren'py and gb studio will happily let you add whatever ridiculous code you want on top of their frameworks. GB Studio will straight up dump the entire engine as a CMake project if you want to work in assembler or C, so if you don't like the way something works you can change it.
A while ago, I made a doc filled with pretty much evwry cheap and free resource I could find for game dev, and Im still working on it. Highly reccommend checking it out.
There were a lot of freshwater mussels on the 2021 US extinction list. They didnāt leave us with haunting recordings of them calling out for a mate theyād never meet, there were no drawings in vivid color. They were extremely important nevertheless and their loss is frustrating too. Thatās why stream ecology and mollusks have always fascinated me. They were silent, stalwart little heroes and entire species were lost to pollution.
There are so many extinct mussels in just the southeast USA that the Center for Biological Diversity made a poster. It's outdated by at least 13 mussels that I know of but probably more by now. All of them mattered in unique ways we can no longer appreciate.
Guys freshwater mussels are fascinating. They can't move as adults, so they use this crazy method to spread their young. Baby mussels are called 'glochidia', and they live as parasites on a freshwater fish. However, glochidia cannot swim to a fish, the fish needs to come to them. To get close enough to the fish, the mother mussel (which has already incubated her eggs and hatched them) grows a lure, which comes in diverse shapes and often looks amazingly like an insect or a small minnow.
Lure^
Some species use a mucus 'fishing line' with the lure at the end, or 'lay' a lure on its own that looks like an insect larva, or forsake the lure and use a 'net' of mucus, or even just grab a fish that gets too close!
When a fish tries to eat the lure, it gets a mouthful of baby mussels for its trouble! The tiny glochidia live on the fish for a while, then drop off and metamorphose into an adult mussel.
Please care about freshwater mussels. These adaptations are super cool, and worth protecting! Every species is unique! Also they are vital filter feeders (water cleaners) in freshwater ecosystems! Also they were historically important sources of freshwater pearls.
Recently theres been a ton of projects and research into freshwater mussel reintroduction and conservation, and one of the big issues is there aren't enough actual specimen shells to train professionals and volunteers on how to identify freshwater mussels (which is notoriously hard without practice)
So the solution? Release a HUGE library of free to download 3D models of freshwater mussel species! These can either be used to train people virtually or 3D printed and painted for in person training sessions. I've personally gone through the models they've uploaded so far and they're really well done! They use photogrammetry to create the models. The models aren't released yet for download but you can look at them on sketchfab here.
Scientists and imaging specialists have teamed up to help save one of the worldās most endangered groups of animals: freshwater mussels. Wit
