According to my backups, it has now officially been over 2 years since I started work on one of my WIPs. It a big one (I’m doing it in ZIL), and I’m really happy so far with it even if it’s the kind of game most people aren’t going to enjoy.
Sadly, the last backup I made for it was 6 months ago (this isn’t the same game as the one I spoke of 3 days ago - I think I just took an overall break from IF creation 6 months ago lol), which just goes to show how little I’ve worked on it. I hope to ask for testing again soon…
It’s hoodie and two layers of socks weather and I spent my meal prep for today’s lunch listening to a comedy special by possibly the funniest guy in science communication, one chuck Nice of Star Talk fame. If you like science and aren’t easily offended, I’d recommend it:
Not sure what trigger warnings to give as I’m rather desensitized to off color humor, though jokes about race, religion, gender identity, and anti-intellectualism come up.
Also, recently started bingeing a classic of shounen fight anime it feels like almost no one ever talks about online, namely Yu Yu Hakusho, and started the dark Tournament Saga last night. The old show holds up pretty well even though I’m literally listening to it blind without any descriptive audio(do have descriptive audio for the live action version that I have queued up after I finish the anime though) and while I have no way of knowing what the dub changed, despite it being the dub I remember from highschool, nothing stands out as cringey Americanization or pandering to soccer moms like a lot of dubs from the late 90s and early 00s do… Never noticed the crackling electricity sound effect that accompanies Kuwabara’s spirit sword as a teen though.
The Great Midwest Trivia Contest ended with a “super garuda” question, an ARG that had to be solved in 30 minutes, worth 20 times more than a normal question. And my team got it! The last time a super garuda was solved was in 2021, where the solvers got the final password through random guessing.
Why am I mentioning it here? Because I got one part of the answer by seeing a maze of links, going “wait, this is Twine”, opening the page in the Twine editor, and finding the one passage that didn’t eventually loop back to the beginning.
Thanks, Twine!
(The other parts were hidden in a merch store, a page that displayed a message if you left it open for ten minutes, and a block of Vigenère-enciphered base64. That last one was awful.)
My new heat resistant gloves arrived today. The old pair had several holes in its outer layer and many of its silicone grippies had flake off and had gotten kind of crusty from where any attempt to wash them couldn’t guarantee they would be dry by the time I needed to use them again, and I’ve been putting off replacing them for months. The new pair also has usable hanging hooks, so I can hang them from a cabinet door handle instead of just leaving them lying atop one of the bins I use for storing ingredients that are stored at room temperature. The new pair are a bit tight on my big hands, but hopefully they’ll loosen up fairly quickly with daily use, and while the cuffs are a few inches shorter, I’m less concerned about protecting my forearms than my hands. As for the old pair, I’ve already separated the two layers… since the inner layer is free of holes and fairly thick, I’m thinking of keeping them as a normal pair of work gloves and since the outer layer is pretty flexible and already has holes in multiple fingers, I’m thinking of cutting off part or all of the fingers to use them as typing gloves to help keep my hands warm when my room is cold.
Made another programmatically generated Yin Yang image last night… and honestly, I think the logic for flat coloring that does an animated fade might have been more complicated than for doing gradients on the static version… Anyways, the goal was to have it fade between black/white and red/blue, two of the most common color combos for the symbol, while also inverting the colors with each cycle… so both halves go white-red-black-blue-white but start at different points in teh cycle… Also, I think this might have used the most drive space of anything I’ve made as there’s over a thousand frames and the ppms took up 32GB… Am worried I might have made a logic error somewhere though as there’s a notable size difference between the red and blue channels when they should be very similar, almost color swaps of each other… Also, I forewent my usual black background in favor of gray to ensure neither half of the symbol vanishes into the background… a next step might be to try and add outlines… or figure out some way of making a transparent background(animated png supports 8-bit alpha, but ascii ppm does not).
Finally started implementing the Merchant script into Twine, running Sugarcube. I managed to implement the prologue, and I only had to ask like 3 questions on the Twine discord!
Lack of work has been getting in the way lately. I’m applying for freelance motion graphics gigs but they’re getting 100+ applicants in the first couple of hours and no one ever gets back to me.
I can’t create when I’m worried about money, so my IF and other creative projects are going nowhere. Instead I spend my time applying for jobs I won’t get and doomscrolling.
So I’ve decided to look for what my friend Mark calls a “patent clerk” job, comparing me somewhat hilariously to Einstein. Something that pays the bills but doesn’t occupy my mind too much, is the idea.
I worked in a local high school once as Media Studies Technician and it was the nicest working environment I’ve ever been in. I have a teaching qualification. My girlfriend thinks I should work in a theatre, but not necessarily as a performer. I have done clowning and improv and love the stags. I think I would like that too.
I’ve been asking myself how far I could strip down the idea of a Dendry-like engine where the tooling was a plain web page that you could download and run from your own computer if you wanted, and that included an editor that would let you swap between plain-text code and a more scaffolded editor like Twine or Inklewriter or StoryNexus or whatever…
(I know, I know, but look, we haven’t had a new IF system announced in over a week, and anyway I’m just noodling, I’m probably not going to release anything)
…and I’ve been having a great time digging through all my bits and bobs of templating engine and toy programming language experiments to see what I can repurpose. Fun looking back at all the neat ideas I’ve messed with over the past quarter century and how I’ve progressed over the years…
I’m so close to finishing the (third?) draft of my main WIP. It’s still majorly buggy, and I’m not sure the whole game is actually possible fully through (it is possible to softlock, I mean). Otherwise, I hope to get some testers on it soon!
I’ve finished porting all the Merchant script into Twine. Now I get to tackle the really difficult part: the actual programming. I already got a logic error from one of the widgets and had to ask the Twine discord what’s going on. XD
A Bialetti moka pot coffee maker on a stove top. As the bottom of the aluminium moka pot heats up coffee bubbles up into the serving chamber above. In the picture the moka pot lid is open so we can see the coffee emerge. At the point when the picture was taken it is getting quite full with strong bubbly coffee.
I finished programming Merchant a few days ago. Then the last two days I tried to start the dialogue portraits, hated the results and tried again. Finally, on day 3, I can go “screw it, no more redos, this is the dialogue portrait”:
I was walking home today with my accordion and a family were very excited by it, so they asked me to play something. I may have messed up the snippet of a song that I did but they seemed very delighted by and despite the fact I am still awful at accordion, it was a great feeling to be able to bring joy to someone…
(I don’t know if I mentioned it before lol, but I am actually playing the accordion upside down. It feels way easier this way and I prefer it, even if it’s not correct. It’s not like I’m going to be performing with it anytime soon, lol, so I don’t really mind!)
Or do I say “break a leg”?
but they seemed very delighted by and despite the fact I am still awful at accordion, it was a great feeling to be able to bring joy to someone…