Things have been okay, I guess.

There was another goodbye.  I guess it is perhaps fitting that it fell on the same week that I wrote one of my annual letters-that-will-probably-never-get-read-or-replied-to.  It is interesting, in the grand scope of things, to think about which goodbyes impact me the most and which brush off without too much meaning.  So often we don't really even get the chance to say goodbye in the first place, until perhaps we finally realize that someone is truly gone.  Does the goodbye make things easier, or harder?  Would things have been different, if they had truly said goodbye all those years ago?  And even if they did, would I even have been able to accept it?

I've played through more of Terranigma and I'm beginning to think that this game is perhaps overrated.  Illusion of Gaia was an enjoyable experience, even having already played it before, but I'm not really getting the same feeling with Terranigma.  The characters and world are less interesting, the combat feels clunky despite having more options, the dungeons don't feel as enjoyable, and the cutscenes would be a slog to get through without a fast-forward function.  I'm still ok going through with it, but so far I haven't really been too impressed with what I've seen.  We'll see how it goes for the rest of it, but afterwards I'm ready to just move onto playing Mega Man X2 or something.

In the meantime I've been playing Descent: Freespace, as well Silent Threat -- or more accurately, Silent Threat: Reborn.  You see, Freespace has an open-source port now, based on the Freespace 2 engine, and the first game (The Great War) as well as Silent Threat have both been ported over to the new open-source engine -- with Silent Threat being completely revamped.

Freespace is an interesting game, probably the most well-known of these sorts of space sims (they seem to have fallen out of favor, I guess?).  One major flaw of the game is the varying difficulty in the different missions, particularly those with secondary objectives and/or bonuses, especially when they involve protecting other craft or some sort of time limit.  I found myself altering the difficulty level frequently to get past some of the harder ones.  The final mission in the first game also suffers from the issue where the suggested loadout doesn't really work out, as the rest of the bombers in your squadron never end up getting the job done on higher difficulties, so you're forced to fly in a bomber and blow up the 5 reactors yourself.  The problem is that you need to use the same ship and loadout that you flew in the previous (and lengthy) mission, so it's sort of a feel-bad moment when you finally realize that you need to go and do it all over again.  I imagine that the freespace open port authors and the silent threat revamp and associated projects probably have tried to do a better job at maintaining consistent difficulty, but I still found some missions to be way harder than others, even in Silent Threat.

The other problem with Freespace in general that I'm seeing is that the experience does tend to be rather one-note.  There is =some= variety, in that you are sometimes dogfighting other fighters, sometimes attacking larger cruisers, sometimes trying to defend ships from attack, sometimes trying to disable the engines of a large capital ship.  But in most cases 90% of the action is basically dogfighting other space fighters, even when it's in service to some larger goal.  There's a ton of different mission setups, but not really so much in terms of "level design" as say, Descent 1 / 2, since, well....then missions are flown in free space -- that's the whole premise of the series, anyways.

The good thing is that the dogfighting really is done quite well, and there were some moments during the Great War campaign where I really =felt it=.  Large cruisers fight off against each other as a dozen fighter pilots from both sides fly by, chasing each other.  You've got an enemy fighter in your sights and you maneuver as best you can to track it with your primary beam weapons as it twists and turns, flaring its afterburners.  The missile lock signal chimes and you launch an interceptor missile, which finds its mark and blows your now-shieldless target to pieces.  "Nice shot!", one of your squadmates calls out over the comm, but your computer has already targeted another hostile and you sweep your view to go on the hunt again, triggering your afterburners lest you become an opportune target by remaining still for too long.

So yeah it's been relatively enjoyable, but I will say that the weapon loadout and ship selection does get a little stale and I think that is something that could really have been improved (perhaps it is in FS2, I don't remember quite enough to recall).  This is doubly true in Silent Threat, which -- as an expansion to the first game -- features only a few new weapons which are mostly ineffectual.  Most of the weapons in freespace 1, in fact, have quite limited use.  The Avenger is the second new gun that you unlock (after the basic basic laser, and the disruptor) and it's actually the best primary weapon overall throughout the entire game, as it does comparable hull DPS to the Prometheus, fires faster, does more shield damage, and takes less energy.  At least the missile/secondary weapons have a little more in the way of nice tradeoffs, as they each have their own specialized roles (huge slow missiles for targeting capital ships, medium-sized missiles for targeting bombers, and fast small lock-on missiles for dogfighting agile fighters).  But it would have been nice to have more variance in the primary weapons, even if it was just cycling through a sequence of strict upgrades.  Ships are sort of the same way -- they've each got their strengths and weaknesses, which is great, but after a while there's not really any more new toys to play with.  And I think consistently having new toys to play with every couple of missions would really help to reduce the feeling of same-ness.  Silent Threat at least had the shield breaker weapon, which seems useful as a complement to the avenger, and an interesting mechanical changeup in that they introduced enemy fighters which can't be targeted by your ship's computer and thus need to be identified by sight.  Your computer also can't shot-lead for you for these ships, so you need to correct for their velocity by eye.  It's a neat mechanic, though I wish the ships were colored a little more distinctly so I didn't have to always just spam the "try to target thing under my crosshair" to ensure that I wasn't about to open fire on a friendly ship.

I finished up the final mission of the main Pharaoh campaign a while ago -- it lasted quite a while, given that you need to build the largest pyramid in the entire game, as well as build a huge city while you're at it.  I was pretty happy with how I ended up, though I found it hilarious just how many jugglers I needed in my city in order to meet the required culture rating for my large population.  I ended up just having a huge plaza full of nothing but juggling booths in the middle of the land...  Anyways, the Cleopatra expansion missions will be next, but I've taken a break from that for the time being.

Work on Rhythm Quest continues and is going...actually pretty well despite basically needing to take a week or so off from it due to other life stuff getting in the way.  I've been making Friday my weekly devlog-writeup day as a way to show off what I worked on in the week and also as a way to do something a little lighter and stress-free.  There's still a ton to get done, of course, but seeing myself be able to make notable progress is always good.  Now if only I could get to the point of feeling the same way about Far Side of the Mirror...

Been inputting more data from the handwritten "Making My Day Logs" into digital form.  I've gotten through all of the high school years and am into my sophomore year at college now, it seems like.

Finished all of the "night mode" songs on Rhythm Doctor.  I'm happy I went through the game when I did, as it was good reference material for thinking about mechanics for my own game (which is admittedly a different sort of beast).  Again I can't help but think "surely I can make just as many if not more levels than this", but also at the same time "please god it better not take 7 years for me to make 30 levels", ha ha ha.  It's interesting though, I feel like looking at Rhythm Doctor and ADoFaI together you can really see that they have a certain "style" to them.  No, I don't just mean the fact that they're both one-button rhythm games, silly.....I mean the pacing and presentation of the mechanics and their associated levels.  It's sort of like how Undertale and Deltarune both share a sort of similar pacing to their humor and storytelling, you can really recognize toby fox's characteristic "style" in both of these games.  I feel like it's the same way for Rhythm Doctor and adofai, you can sort of begin to recognize after playing these two games, "oh yeah, this is the 7thbeat games way of doing things".  I think it's especially apparent to me because I can say for sure that if I were the one making this game I would have done a lot of things differently.  But that's why I'm making Rhythm Quest and not Rhythm Doctor ;P

Of course, you might wonder whether I also have a distinct "style" in the games that I make.  Putting aside the obvious caveat that the DDRKirby(ISQ) games and the Cocoa Moss games basically have separate artistic and mechanical identities, I do think there is sort of a stylistic commonality.  The Cocoa Moss games tend to have a way of blending familiar elements with something that is a bit off-the-wall (which makes perfect sense given the nature of the team).  Birdie Burglars, for example, is just a shooting-gallery game, but the meowmies add a sort of different vibe and mechanic to it.  Hide and Seek is pretty standard fare, but it tries to do something new with the audio / "listening" mechanic.  Nyamo's Adventure is a really standard Metroidvania exploration adventure, but the transformation forms are a little unexpectedly charming.

The DDRKirby(ISQ) games are a lot closer to just being "standard fare", which is of course also to be expected.  Although you could say that Ripple Runner is innovative, it's not innovative in the sense of being completely unexpected and off-the-wall.  It's a natural synthesis of things that are already well-established (rhythm games, platforming).  There are certain mechanics in Ripple Runner (speed changes and the long jumps in stage 2) that if anything I would say are actually atypical of my style; I don't tend to enjoy "cool unexpected unexplained new things", especially in music charting design.  I want to just take a basic concept and just execute it really well in a way that I know best.

You can sort of feel that Rhythm Doctor has a sort of design philosophy of always trying to throw something new at you.  I quote:

"...in some cases a boss level might have taken hundreds of hours to iterate and perfect. 'There’s tons of concepts and even full levels that we threw away, a lot of times it’s because the level isn’t delightful or surprising enough,'

'It gets difficult to squeeze out the surprise from a simple mechanic, but I think that struggle is also necessary. I read somewhere that the writing team behind Breaking Bad held to that principle of writing without looking ahead too much — they’d write themselves into a corner that they had no idea how to get their characters out of, and then sit in the writing room and struggle until they figured out something. The end result would be surprising to them, and as a result, surprising to the viewers too. I guess we ended up following that philosophy by sticking so adamantly to our constraints.'"

Rhythm Quest, and my games in general, I think take a different approach.  Of course, I hope that Rhythm Quest will be delightful to new players, and that each time a new mechanic is presented, it would be great if there is a moment of "whoa, that's so cool!".  But that initial impression isn't necessarily the end-goal, it's simply the ramp-up to the core experience of zoning out and flowing to the rhythms like you would in DDR or IIDX or any of these other rhythm games.  It's important to me that each level offer something different, but it's not important to me that each level offer something =qualitatively= different.  Whereas I think that qualitative difference seems very important to the design of Rhythm Doctor.  As an overgeneralization, I do think this sort of obviously speaks to my approach to life as a whole, so it's not very surprising to see...