#devstuff

[om2021]

really messy draft of an idea i’m working on for my rpg maker game. this honestly took me way longer than i’d like to admit, but the pain in my hands/wrists has prevented me from working on anything for too long at one time. 

[asanasterisk]

GAME

https://asanasterisk.itch.io/blotwick-building Only the first level, you could probably beat it in like 2 minutes if you skipped everything. Menus might be a little finicky, if the cursor doesn’t appear, press down with the arrow keys to navigate buttons, and enter.

[asanasterisk]

Y’know that post pointing out that the train in this one bethesda game was just someone with a train hat running really fast. After game devving for a bit that kinda seems reasonable now. Like I was figuring out how I was gonna do random enemy spawns after a certain amount of time. And then I figured I should have an object outside of the map doing a one second long animation on loop. Every time it gets to a certain frame, the value on a hidden slider drops by 1, and when it hits zero, it resets and an enemy spawns. I mean as long as it works.

[awiola]

Normal update, spring XXVI

Barely on time. I'm so tired.

Current game stuff

The things I said I should finally work on? Yeah, not done. Instead, we have three projects to talk about, two of which have a real chance of being finished for otome jam. But let's go in order.

Project I - I'm not sure yet whether I'll even link it since I kinda dipped there and left the team. Probably depends on whether it manages to get released fully during the jam or remains a demo. The work seems to progress, though, so who knows. I was supposed to draw BGs but everyone who knows me also knows I don't like working on details so I don't draw them often. Since I dipped, I drew 3 of the 5 bgs I was originally supposed to work on but, like, it seemed significant enough to report here.

Project II - unnamed only because we don't have a proper title yet. In short, it's a story of Vered who plans to move due to her operation - by which I mean getting a replacement eye, it's a futuristic setting but no one can escape capitalism - and focuses on her tour of the neighbourhood. It was basically a way to keep me motivated to read some stuff I had to research so, like, win-win. Genre wise it's otome, cause it's for otojam, fluffy SoL[?] technically set in a post-apo like setting but that part isn't super important. It's present everywhere but y'know. As you could've guessed by my comments, I'm the writer. But dw, I got a proofreader so at least all the dialogue tags should be correct and stuff. The script is fully finished, the art and programming are progressing so it's highly likely to either release on time or soon after. As usual, I prefer writing in nvl so that's what we went with. Tbh, I feel like my style is characteristic at this point. ESLs be calqueing.

Project III - also no working title but oh well. I'm the writer, yet again. And yes, it's a jam game. Specifically, for CGDCT [Cute girls doing cool things] so I watched action and mecha anime claiming it's research. Story wise, we're aiming for something 5-10k words long. A science fantasy. Nothing much considering the wordcount but we'll have humanoid living weapons, researchers, magic battles and all that jazz. The point is to make it cool af. If it's not cool, I have failed.

Other projects are currently on hiatus. Tbh I shouldn't eveen be working on these ones, even if my role for I and II has been fulfilled, but since I make bad decisions, we'll have new games. Such is life.

Pariiish noootiiiceees

I should finally modify my blog theme, the font is kinda small on bigger resolutions...

Underwater jam starts in a little over a month. We've gotten over 100 people already so you could consider it a success. We might even get over 20 entries this year? As usual, I'll announce when it actually starts.

The next year's jam theme is most likely to be veggies. I thought of maybe naming it 'produce jam' or something to also include fruits and stuff but settled on veggies since that allows me to expand the scope to include works focused on plan based diet experiences and such. I don't expect to receive a lot of them, or even one, but leaving the possibility open is my aim here. Of course, it's not fully decided and I considered hosting fossil jam and some other things next year instead but my heart seems to have settled on veggies for now. Tho, of course, we'll know definitely and for sure when the winter update rolls out. So there's still plenty of time.

Nothing more that actually has a chance of coming true for now so that's it.

Over.

[awiola]

Normal update, winter XXVI

Man, you add the adult filter to a post once and now your whole blog is tagged :/ Sucks.

This will be the shortest update up to date because Because.

Current game stuff

Nothing. I had two projects in progress that were supposed to be mentioned here but my teams had real life stuff to take care of so they were postponed... Not indefinitely but enough not to bother describing them here. If/when we get back to them, I'll let you know. They're fun.

Impostor and Void are not dead, I'm just literally behind on everything I could be behind on irl and game dev has quite a low priority, ngl.

Pariiish noootiiiceees

As I already announced, Underwater Jam went live. We still have a lot of time, enough to fit in yet another quarterly update, but I hope a lot of people would join. I planned to finally start my own jam server but I don't have time to moderate. Maybe next year.

Omegaverse jam is almost guaranteed to happen, even though I won't be the host, so I'm working on the promo extremely slowly. Hope you'd join that, too.

The next year's jam theme isn't fully decided yet. If I get no beter ideas, it would be tentacles. That's probably gonna bring in mostly porn so I might think of something else, though. Or not. We'll see.

That's it. Sry it's so barebones.

Over.

[awiola]

Normal update, autumn XXV

Happy solstice, everyone. I don't remember if I said that before but I say solstice/equinox instead of repeating the season cause I always forget about the southern hemisphere existing. But then, my season is still in the title so ig there's no point? I just realised, actually. Oh well.

This time we're actually on time cause I wanted to get this done before my flight and stuff and actually scheduled this post so if this message stays here, it means I forgot to edit it out later and/or add new info. Assuming anything got done within like a week.

Current game stuff

Wellllll...

This is not significant progress by any means but my team decided to try releasing our extended and ported demo of Impostor Syndrome for Winter Jam. I say not significant because the wordcount wouldn't change all that much, I don't think and the port relies entirely on me actually sitting on my ass and working. During crunch and christmas season, no less. So it's highly likely I won't get much done but hey, we're using a template so maybe? Honestly, the biggest issue here is that I don't know shit about optimisation so if it doesn't work well on a potato, all of that is kinda pointless as we decided to move from renpy exactly cause ATL was too laggy. I'll probably make a separate post if we do end up releasing something as I lowkey don't want to make this tumblr seem too dead, especially since I'm not interacting much in dev spaces these days but yeahhh... Wish me luck and stuff.

Not much progress I can actually speak of among other projects, they're just marinating or something at this point but I wanna mention this anyway: I went back to Wedding Crashers which is, like, a project I planned to make for Ossan Jam a year ago. I even had a team and everything but the script was shit and too happy for my mood so I had to delay it. I don't say scrap only cause the idea itself hasn't actually been abandoned. I don't know if I'll join the jam again but I'll try to have some more written and then talk to my team. No idea how it's gonna go but yeah. Meager progress is better than no progress?

As for all the other projects I was supposed to finish years ago? Still nothing. Though, besides me being lazy as usual, I actually lost all my custom SAI brushes and forgot where I put my backup so I'll probably just restore them when I'm back home next month. Not that it works particularly well on linux anyway as Wine has some issues with, idk, copying to memory during emulation or whatever, I'm not a programmer. Buuut at least it no longer crashes/freezes when I'm working on my 8k compound mecha CGs for Void Hyperion so it's not actually all that bad. I love my extra ram. I'm literally using a gaming laptop to dev orz

I just felt like sharing this but I finally found what a specific hairstyle I kinda like was called - bouffant - which means I can finally make a game with people sporting hairstyles no one besides me seems to like on LIs, yaay :D Wait for all the bald and mullet ones, my babies. I still can't draw, especially without refs, so I have a reason to watch all the old french movies that barely avoided being B&W by a few years. Nice. Here's an example if you're curious.

I wasted so much time on a pic [lower right] Junji Ito would crank out in two minutes but that's life...

I'm actually considering making a game in a similar style which either means finding suitable brushes or just drawing everything on paper. Honestly leaning more towards paper since I bought that light pad specifically for that like four years ago and used it five times or so. Gotta get my money's worth. The only issue is my scanner smelling like it's burning whenever it's connected [which is why it generally isn't] but I'll figure something out. I have some ideas that would work with this. They're gonna be so fun if I actually make them :D And would look way better than anything drawn digitally cause after 10 years I'm still ass at using a drawing tablet.

Pariiish noootiiiceees

ᴵ ᶜᵃⁿ ⁿᵉᵛᵉʳ ʳᵉᵐᵉᵐᵇᵉʳ ʰᵒʷ ᵐᵃⁿʸ ˡᵉᵗᵗᵉʳˢ ᴵ ᵘˢᵉᵈ ᵃⁿᵈ ʰᵃᵛᵉ ᵗᵒ ᶜᵒᵖʸ ᵗʰᶦˢ ᵖᵃʳᵗ… ᴬⁿᵈ ʷʰʸ ᵈᵒᵉˢ <ˢᵘᵖ> ⁿᵒᵗ ʷᵒʳᵏ. ʸᵒᵘ ᵈᶦˢᵃᵖᵖᵒᶦⁿᵗ ᵐᵉ, ᵗᵘᵐᵇˡʳ.

Omega Jam did actually receive that late entry so we have 13 entries now, yay! Not much but I do close to no marketing so, like, pretty decent. As usual, I'm sticking to one-off jams but I gave my blessing to someone to host the jam again so we might see it in a few months. I don't know when exactly is that going to be but I'm for sure gonna promote it using Omega-kun just to have an excuse to show him being all smug. >Tfw you like your OC a bit too much more than usual.

Still no page but Underwater Jam is being worked on. This time I'm collaborating with a certain... someone [I actually forgot to ask how to credit them cause of different names on different sites and all that jazz...] so the page can look all nice! And pretty! And water! And stuff! Cause it's underwater. Yes, that means you can have a lot of blahajs, or blåhajar, ig? Idk, I don't know swedish. This is totally not me suggesting trans shark or T4T games. Stay tuned!

I'm working on making a server for my jams. Not super far in cause life aaand preparring everything takes lots of work, especially when I'm not used to writing rules and stuff. But yeah. I think you'd be able to join it for Underwater Jam which is basically gonna be a test run. After that we'll see if I want to continue as I'm gonna be a terrible mod that doesn't bother to mod...

Oh, and I'll probably redesign this blog. I like the webpage like layout but it really is a pain in the ass to read on some screens... I like it, tho. So the new one probably will be similar. I should also update my bio-cv-list-of-projects-whatever while I'm at it...

Over.

PS. If there's a bonus Kyle Hyde being not impressed below, drawn with basic brushes, that means I did edit the post before it got published as scheduled.

[awiola]

The Omega Jam has ended.

Thanks to everyone who participated. This jam wouldn't work without you [literally]!

We've received 12 submissions [+ one confirmed late entry] so I'd say it went pretty well overall. 👈(❛ ᗜ ❛👈)

I feel like I hurt all dark mode users' eyes with my white bgs so have some proper art this time.

You can check all the entries here.

Self promo time ✨

I helped with some colouring for Bite of My Own, a BL cakeverse story. Right now it's still a demo but with your support it might get finished faster~~ Maybe~

Postmortem, kinda, I guess

This year, there was a new rule. Kind of. I mean specifically the genAI rule. To quote

Projects made using AI are heavily discouraged and its use should be directly mentioned on the page.

Pretty simple, isn't it?

Now, let's take a look at why I worded it that way

Generally, at least in my circles, people are strongly against using genAI in game development. Obviously, there must exist some enthusiasts or the opposition wouldn't even exist.

Now, a lot of people using generated content in their games, assuming they're doing it on purpose and aren't simply using unlabeled bg packs and so on, got used to having to hide that fact from others to avoid their game being removed and so on. Which is basically lying by omission.

This is a pretty big problem and I'm not capable enough to say with absolute certainty whether something was generated or simply appears that way. Not a fan of witch hunts, either.

This is why I made games like that still allowed as long as they're labelled properly. It obviously won't stop anyone from using that stuff if they wanted but every player can make their own decision on whether to support a dev like that or not. Transparency is best.

And yet I've still gotten an entry from someone that would rather be removed from the jam than add a whole one sentence to their page. Like... Really, now?

I know it's only one entry and whatever, who cares, but if the jam was bigger? There would absolutely be multiple of them. I gave people a chance and they refuse to read. Or do it maliciously.

Whatever the case, I feel like that's the better approach so the rule would most likely stay as is, at least for now, but honestly :/

Otherwise, the jam actually went pretty well. Due to the subject matter, I thought there might be some opposition but being relatively extremely minor, there wasn't anything. Or at least nothing that I'm aware of. Only people telling me they're not interested in the theme at all but fair enough, it's not for everyone.

We've got some fun entries, though. Some legitimately sound like nukige setups and gotta say, I respect that. Nothing better than making something you enjoy :D Wonder if we'll get more next year.

I'm still producing one off jams only but if anyone wants to continue the legacy[?], you have my blessing. [Would be nice if you let me know first, tho.] Especially since I know it's pretty much untapped market among evns. Or vns in general, I haven't really found much in the jp sphere either... As for others, I lack the language skills...

I can even share both of the mascots if anyone's interested. Maybe even give them a chara sheet or something, who knows. Kinda depends on interest cause I don't really need them for myself.

Well, either way - If you've read all of that - thanks! If not, the pic was all the way up there for a reason.

See you next jam, possibly even in my own server.

[awiola]

Normal update, summer XXV

So I actually planned to write this one the same day I posted the omegajam extension notice but thought it wouldn't do to have two posts on the same day and then kind of kept forgetting... Well!

Current game stuff

Surprising absolutely no one, not much progress on that front. I've mentioned it before and will do so again for as long as needed but - I'm so busy irl, my god orz What wouldn't I do to just laze around and maybe dev on the side. Alas...

Void Hyperion has experienced so little progress on my side I'm not even linking it here. It's extra sad cause the script with more endings has been sitting around for months at this point and it's only waiting for me to actually draw more assets and program all that in. There's also the fact it would be absolutely perfect for omega jam but since I haven't released the update or anything, it's not going to join it, extension or not. RIP

From good news, we've gotten more help and Impostor Syndrome is back to active development, yay! It's gonna take some time to get released, obviously - and also cause of my delays - but we'll get there. An optimistic timeline would be releasing at least the base game [so no nsfw] next year. It's certainly possible but there's no need to rush so I'm not promising anything. We'll see. I don't know if any of the multiple people that follow me on itch only for this title are even reading this but if you do - that's the update. We're still alive.

Wouldn't be me if I didn't have way too many projects at once so I joined something for omega jam as colouring help. It's nothing big, really. I'll probably talk about it more after the jam ends. Right now I can share the title - Bite of my own - and the fact it's set in cakeverse. So not omegaverse per se but it's still allowed, after all I made the rules (☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞

Oh, right, I completely forgot to mention it - had to look at my last update - but the o2a2 game I drew for is out. Presenting Forgotten...forever for your viewing pleasure. Do check it out.

Pariiish noootiiiceees

Well, as you could've guessed, omega jam is going relatively well. Way better than the insect [adjacent] jam fiasco from last year. I still suck at marketing but whatever, it's not important right now.

What's important is the fact that we have some entries and some rule breakers. I don't really want to talk about it here as the jam ends in less than a week and I'll use the announcement post to give you more bad art and, idk, act as postmortem or whatever. I don't think anyone is actually reading these anyway cause they're way too infrequent, I have close to no followers and Bluesky or *spits* bird app are still significantly better for all your marketing needs [I should finally make a bluesky account, ngl] but I heard some people like jam insights so it would be all in once place.

Next year we're having Underwater Jam. As usual, it's pretty broad so as long as it's about underwater beings, takes place there or anything else that probably counts, it's allowed. The page isn't out yet, ofc. I'm actually having a guest artist make it all pretty for me cause they were interested so it should look significantly better than usual. Stay tuned, folks!

From other somewhat important stuff... I didn't want to mention it as I had nothing of significance to say but thanks to the nsfw bans, I'm considering making a spare folder, site or whatever to keep my games. I'm pretty sure they're insignificant and safe enough they should stay up no problem but it's always good to have backups, y'know. I'd have to look up into some stuff, tho, so it's not a priority. The initiative seems pretty good so I'm following their development but we'll see.

Besides that, I'm considering making a server for all my jams as some people suggested to have someplace that lets people actually find all of my jams [outside of my tumblr link list that hasn't been updated in years, oops]. My main issue is that the themes are pretty different each year so no idea how useful it actually would be. That, and I'd be an absolutely awful moderator. Though then again, it probably won't get popular enough to cause me much managerial trouble. So, maybe... I mean, at this point it's a pretty serious consideration so I'll probably start building it slowly and make a test run with Underwater Jam.

I think.

Over.