Icey’s Cringe Cabin

Full of ideas. Always out of time. Delusional perfectionist, visionary, and game designer in progress. 18yo He/him thing. Will be back to posting soon!

[icey-dev]

ALMOST FORGOT TO POST AGAIN

Here’s the latest two knight drawings. At this point we’ve pretty much got the basis of what his outfit is meant to look like all settled, and all that would be left is to make it into a real ref sheet.

The Knight’s design took a little more trial and error than I would have liked… it helped that Michael is absolutely goated at his sketches even if they don’t match up to my blurry excuse of a vision per se.

The left design was almost perfect; just the waist and the arms needed change and it would be perfect, and the design on the right delivered that. With all these sketches, we should be pretty much set now on what this dude is supposed to look like.

Potential code update next week. Sorry for late post again, though It’s still Tuesday in California so who cares. Thanks for reading if you did.

Everyone say “thank you Michael.”

[icey-dev]

Hey guys, back with an update on the whole being alive situation.

First off, I graduated! (Yay!) I’ll have waaay more time for focusing on game projects now after I finish moving between houses. I’ll get a job eventually though so this extra free time won’t be forever.

On the topic of making games, however, I have a slightly less fun announcement.

The current untitled project I was working on before and that Michael was making art of is going to have to be shelved for now, likely indefinitely. There’s no telling when I’ll come back to it, hopefully soon, but by then the details of it all will have probably completely changed, which is fine since I never gave away that many details to begin with (though I’d hope to at least hold on to some of the character designs we’ve already done)

This decision was made for 2 reasons.

1, because I am a moron and this project was way bigger than I thought it would be, and thus would’ve taken way longer to finish than I would’ve liked; and 2, because the narrative of the game didn’t click with me at all. I couldn’t get it the way that I wanted it to be, and when it comes to the game ideas I choose to pursue, narrative is everything to me. If the story is weak, then to me it doesn’t matter how good the gameplay is. I didn’t want to continue on with something like that, so I apologize.

So what’s next then?

For starters, we’re scaling things way down in scope. Working on smaller games instead, the kind of stuff that you could play on your browser (The idea of publishing a game to CoolMath has been tickling my mind for a while now.) It definitely won’t be as impressive in scope, but hopefully it’ll be something that we can actually *finish* in a timely manner…

Secondly, I’m hoping to bring back weekly updates as soon as possible. I was already working on a small prototype on my laptop that I just need to port over to my PC to continue with. Weekly updates were one of the best things I’ve ever done for my health and productivity, as short lived as they were. It made me more conscious of the passing weeks, which, when you live in a period of infinite free time that’s so easily wasted, being able to keep track of it means everything to me. There’s a lot of joy to be had from looking back at a good week of hard work.

That’s all I got for now, sorry for the disappointing news but hopefully that’s been balanced out by my inevitable return (possibly as soon as next week!) I look forward to sharing more of my (and Michael’s) progress on our game development endeavors :)

Sorry for the lengthy post, see you soon!

- Leon

[icey-dev]

Hi guys! Goodness it’s been a while…

I’m making this post to inform you that I’m nearly done with school! And that around the start of June, I’ll finally have enough free time to get back to making games, though this doesn’t come without its caveats.

For one, I still won’t be doing weekly updates yet, at least until I can get a solid flow going for my work. And second, more importantly, it’s most likely going to be a different game.

After a lot and a lot of evaluation and banging my head against a wall, I’ve decided to postpone this current project in favor of working on something smaller with fewer moving parts, just as Michael had advised me before. After sufficiently fucking around in godot, I have finally found out: making games takes fucking forever.

I was months into development all for a single prototype, which is should have been enough of an indicator that this project was going to take too long, but I chose to ignore it then. Now, I am a little wiser, and more aware of my abilities as a programmer and designer. Like Socrates, the more I know, the more I realize I know nothing.

Once my schedule is cleared up more and I’ve played the fuck out of Subnautica 2 and DRG Rogue Core this month, we’ll be right back to sharing cool art and yapping about incomprehensible code with y’all. Thanks for your patience, to the 2 people that care.

-Leon

[icey-dev]

hey guys,

making this one ahead of time for once. to inform of some not-so-awesometastic recent developments.

I am being forced to put the weekly updates on hold, probably for at least a month. Not for any super terrible reason, don’t worry, but because I am simply too stressed with schoolwork to juggle both this and game development. Additionally, I am moving houses soon, which just makes things even harder.

I certainly am not giving up just yet, but I definitely do need some time to clear up my schedule. Not that I’m short on time, I just like being able to have fun and get quality sleep, is all. Of course, I’ll still be posting if any progress does appear, just not weekly anymore, since I can already tell that updates are gonna be sparse for the next 6 weeks or so.

Apologies once more. I really wish I could keep doing this, but otherwise I’d just be posting apologies every other week, and I don’t wanna be doing that. Graduation first, game development after. Thanks.

- Leon

[icey-dev]

I FORGOT AGAIN

We actually have something this week though! This is still a very much in progress design for another character we wanted in the game. We don’t even have a name for her and are still mostly unsure on details other than what kind of general vibes she gives off.

In the first image Michael proposed that she had a little ponytail thing and honestly I’m kinda in love with that. Michael always comes up with these extra little design details that I never would have thought of on my own and it never fails to amaze me.

Everyone say “thank you Michael.”

[icey-dev]

Late update because the tumblr post button wasn’t working, apologies for the delay

Nothing to report *yet* unfortunately, at least not this week. We do have some sketches that we could show, but I’d prefer to wait until the designs are in a more finished state before showing them off.

As per the programming side of things, hardly any progress has been made since last update just due to how busy I’ve been and how badly I’ve needed a break from life’s chaos (don’t look at my Deadlock playtime.)

Next week isn’t looking super bright either, but worst case scenario we’ll just show the sketches early if we really need something. I just realized while writing this that I totally forgot to get my game files off my laptop to put back on my pc… whoops.

Anyways, apologies again for the nothingburger. Heres hoping that next week will be better to us.

- Leon

[icey-dev]

Apologies for a VERY late post once more, this is my fourth time writing this post since Tumblr loves to keep deleting my drafts, so at a certain point I just kinda gave up. This update was meant to come out yesterday.

Over the last week, I've (probably) made more progress on the game than I have in the last month, which is kinda hilarious to me. The picture above (was going to be a gif but I don't have access to OBS right now) doesn't really do justice to just how much progress that was.

A few things that changed:

Made an action list for the knight that can be read using a function

Added a way for the character queue to take that list of actions and set the text of the buttons using entries from the list

Made the buttons ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING (kinda) (for now they just return a number so that the character can tell which button was pressed)

Rewrote/deleted some older code that didn't really make sense anymore

...and a few other things that I'm probably forgetting. Either way, the current systems in place should be better suited for use in the future compared to what I had put together before. I may have to do a slight amount of planning before I continue from here since there's a lot of steps to this kind of process.

Thanks for reading my slopblog. Michael may or may not be cooking up some character drawings so next week might be an art update. Things will probably get busier since school is starting again though so bear with me if I miss a week or 2 because of it. (Also my Deadlock addiction never went away, it was just interrupted by this vacation...)

Thanks again for reading.

-- Leon

[icey-dev]

Hi chat,

I am now on vacation. And as expected, Slay the Spire 2 is a very good game, and will be taking up some portion of my time. The good news is that I’m getting back into the swing of things when it comes to programming. The bad news? Well…

The bad news is that this game is a lot more complicated than I once thought it was, and I’ll need to do slightly more planning before I can continue coding. Shouldn’t be too much at least, but this *does* mean that I won’t be able to have something finished in time to show tonight. Sorry bout that!

Next week for sure, we’ll be right back into things. Who knows, maybe by then the combat system will basically be finished! It probably won’t be, but I can dream.

Til next week!

- Leon

[icey-dev]

Hello loyal fans, the king of late progress updates is back at it again.

For starters, some bad news:

Unfortunately, I been terribly addicted to this… “Deadlock” game… (like seriously I’m even having DREAMS about it. This is not healthy at all!) Because of this, I will be completely honest in saying that I have made absolutely no progress on the game whatsoever for like… the past 4 days.

In general, Me and Michael both have not really been doing much. Though, his productivity correlates with mine, so it’s my fault that he isn’t working either.

Anyways, Good and (more) bad news ahead:

The bad news is that unfortunately i will be on a long ass vacation for 2 weeks, which means I’ll be away from computer that has all the game files on it.

The SPLENDID news is that Godot seems to work seamlessly between OSX and Windows, meaning I can simply move my godot project over to my laptop and work on it over vacation!

This “vacation” will honestly be such a perfect time to get stuff done, since I won’t be able to have silly things like Deadlock to distract me. I look forward to making some kind of post next week, where I may actually have some profess done!

See you next week,

- Leon

(Edit: I totally forgot that Slay the Spire 2 releases into early access this Thursday, so I may not be able to get shit done over break after all since the game has Mac support…)

[icey-dev]

hi chat, making a preemptive tumblr post today to say that I am not getting SHIT done for these next 2 weeks. Ultrakill Fraud drops today, and Slay the Spire 2 next week. I’ll probably be busy throughout the week or so after that as well since I’ll be traveling then, and I’ll elaborate more on it next week.

Apologies again for the lack of progress updates.

[icey-dev]

Progress Update 2/17

(well, more like 2/19.)

Sorry again for late-posting, for the like 1 or 2 people who actually care.

Progress definitely has slowed down a little since both me and Michael are busy with school stuff, and any progress that has been made isn’t really interesting enough to show off to anyone who isn’t interested in code or whatever.

Between the aforementioned school, and being addicted to various video games, getting myself to devote any actual serious time to the game has been rough, and I do need to try a little harder at forcing myself to be productive like that.

For now though, we’re working out scheduling stuffs and continuing on what we can. Hoping in the coming weeks we’ll have a little more to show, but we may still be stuck in purgatory for another week or 2.

To the people who have acknowledged our existence, thank you so much for the likes on previous posts, it means a lot to see the numbers go up like that :)

See you next week,

- Leon

[icey-dev]

Hi guys, No post for this Tuesday

Apologies for having nothing to post this Tuesday (and for being late again.) I have nothing to show off for a code update, and there’s no new art either. Any work that I’ve been doing has been mostly boring stuff. Even more boring than the gifs I’ve been posting already.

Also, me and Michael were both hit by a pretty bad case of Elden Ring fever, and we are currently playing the seamless co-op mod with each other so that I may help him beat the game for the first time.

Just know that I do still want to work on the game, it’s not going to go anywhere, especially since I’m betting everything on this being my career someday.

Might take a while before we have something to show again, but I’ll still be making posts every Tuesday as usual, even if there isn’t much to show.

Thank you to all who have shown us support these last few weeks, seeing the funny heart counter on my posts go up makes me smile real big n wide. :)

[icey-dev]

Today’s lesson: If it works, it works.

A bit late, but here’s this week’s code update.

Again, not a whole ton, but you had no idea how much work I’ve had to do these last 2 weeks just to get a button to move when I press on it.

In addition to school kicking my ass last week, I was also struggling really hard with the code structure of it all. I wasn’t sure what the “proper” way to relay information between several nodes was, and me, being a perfectionist, wanted the code to be written “perfectly” so that I could easily add things later.

All this time I was unable to put my exact problem into words, so I kept looking into tutorials that were either too complicated or not the solution I was looking for. All along, all I needed to google was right in front of me: “how to make sibling nodes talk to each other.”

Anyways, progress on the code will be resuming shortly. And of course, as per tumblr user randopsjgktke’s request, the sprites turn weezer green now. Remember, kids: perfectionism kills.

[icey-dev]

Very first concept sketch for our plague doctor character (I haven’t decided on a name yet.) It wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but it was simply too cool not to make use of, so now it’s a part of her backstory! (and also this post!)

I’m also using this post as a reminder that you can ask me about any of these characters and I will yap to you about them to your hearts content, but only upon request! I wouldn’t want to clutter the blog too much.

Everyone say “thank you Michael.”

[icey-dev]

Concept sketches for a potential party member you may encounter in our game.

The design on this one was a lot easier compared to something like The Knight, who we STILL don’t have the final for yet… I mostly let Michael just do his thing and he absolutely cooked. Her little hat is something Michael added and I absolutely LOVED it.

I will admit that her design is a little self indulgent on my part. Her outfit was definitely meant to make her look cute and friendly. (though don’t let her looks deceive you, she still wears the mask of the plague doctor after all…)

Will probably post follow up with some more art or lore later. Feel free to ask questions about her.

Everyone say “Thank you Michael.”

[icey-dev]

can you make the buttons turn weezer green

Yes, next time I post a code update, the sprites shall be weezer green.

[icey-dev]

friend said I move like an NPC that’s slower than your running speed but faster than your walking speed.