Just because there's nothing more you can do doesn't mean that it's over.

Things are...okay.  I wasn't feeling so hot today, so I spent a little time on self-care.  I think it seems to have a helped a bit, maybe?  I read a letter from The Past (with a capital P) and then lied down in a bath for a while.  There have been various thoughts going around in my head, about things, about The Past, about people and different perspectives on things, about self-expression or the lack thereof, as well as just about what I want; what would make me happy.  Just, stuff.

I've got a week more of letters to write, and then another week after that to work hard.  Or, maybe I shouldn't look at it that way.  I've got my next thing to work on for Rhythm Quest as part of my (potential) graphics makeover, which is putting all of the level graphics onto a combined spritesheet (as in, authored as a combined image) rather than just single images that are later combined automatically.  That will let me author all of the graphics (and palettes) for the level at once rather than editing each individual image.  Not really sure why I didn't do that already (or maybe I had at one point??  I don't even remember, really...).  It's sort of more of a "busywork" task than any actual creative challenge, but honestly I feel like a lot of what keeps me making forward progress on this game is breaking down all of the work into small enough little bits that all seem like they're more or less straightforward.  It's way easier to stay motivated when the task ahead of you seems really simple; it helps avoid operational procrastination...

Well, tomorrow I get to pull 3 heads off and then attempt to turn some bodies inside out.  So maybe that will be fun?

Mega Man: Super Fighting Robot

This is the latest Mega Man fangame that I decided to play through.   This one was quite enjoyable!  All the standard stuff is there -- you know, 8 robot masters, NES-style music, etc etc etc.  Physics and movement felt just fine, although one nitpick is that you can't shoot additional buster shots if a half-charged (not fully-charged) buster shot is on screen, making that by far the worst level of charge to use against normal enemies.  Normally in most Mega Man games, the small charge shot can still be fired in tandem with normal pellet shots.  Eh, again, just a minor nitpick.

I played on Normal difficulty -- I tried hard difficulty briefly and it seems like it basically doubles the damage that you take(?).  Normal difficulty was actually a bit easy for me, I only had to retry a stage once or twice and I hardly ever had to use e-tanks at all.  Part of this may be because of the game's upgrade system, which lets you purchase minor upgrades to several facets of Mega Man, giving you a bit of damage reduction, better charge shots, and even faster movement and slightly higher jumps (!).  Granted, there are bonuses/achievements for not using any of the upgrades.  Maybe I ought to have played on Hard instead?  It's hard to say whether the extra damage would have felt difficult in a good way, or whether it would have just felt annoying.  I can't really fault a game too much on its specific difficulty level, especially given that it has added challenges and hard difficulty, but I did find it a little too easy, just as a personal experience.

Besides that, this game does a lot of things right.  The music might not be as "catchy" as some of the classic MM tunes, but it's certainly good (and honestly, it's hard not to be biased since a lot of us have played the old MM games multiple times).  The enemy designs are very good and the levels are all both interesting and challenging.  The challenges feel very fair for the most part as well, and even if you lose a life due to a "gotcha", the rest of the game is forgiving enough that it's sort of within my quota.  The weapons are all very unique, and the bosses are fun to fight as well, though again, a bit on the easy side sometimes.  Maybe I'm just miscalibrated from playing other (harder) fangames...

All in all, it was a good time!  I got through it pretty quickly, and decided not to pursue any of the additional content (I'm not really one for replaying stuff).

I dunno what I'll play next...maybe I ought to try out Emperor?

Time for another update...

Ludum Dare 49 Results

The voting period ended for Ludum Dare 49, and our game took 11th place overall out of 2,204 jam entries.  Worth noting that Ludum Dare has continued its downward trend -- LD46 had 4,959 submissions, LD47 had 3,206, and here we are in LD49 with 2,939 total submissions.  That's a 40% dropoff in under 2 years!  Meanwhile, Game Maker's Toolkit jam is continuing to rise, currently at 5,750 submissions for the most recent event (higher than LD has ever had, I believe).  We'll try for GMTK jam next year, maybe.

Anyways, LD results are always a crapshoot, but this is our best placing since taking first place in LD40 (I also managed a bronze by myself in LD45), so that's pretty cool.  I'm pretty happy with how things turned out, and the jam itself went very smoothly as I mentioned last time.  For a while I was going to maybe try and iron out some small improvements to it, but I decided that it's probably not worth it.  This is a very odd-feeling departure from my usual perfectionism, and I still don't know how to feel about this new attitude.  Overall I think it's healthy to realize that some things are less worth the effort to work on than other things, and that there's no need to be perfect, especially for things that not a ton of people really care about.  However, I don't like the idea of complacency potentially creeping into more different aspects of my life.

Room Stuff

I guess on a somewhat related note, I've finally started redistributing my prints and decorations across my walls.  I have most of the big stuff put up, but I'm a little baffled at what to do with the smaller stuff.  There is a lot less of it that I care about now, but it still doesn't really seem like it belongs anywhere up on the walls anymore, so I haven't figured out what exactly to do with it yet.  On the plus side, I have these sweet new DDRKirby(ISQ) prints:

I've got some people who I guess are pretty into my work, but I'm not going to lie, I'm definitely my own #1 fan...

Music Production

I went through and did a huge cleanup of my VSTs (virtual instruments and effects) and samples, cleaning out everything (there was a tooonnnnn of old stuff that I never used) and attempting to reorganize things so there wasn't so much clutter.  There are a lot of great sounds out there now, for free even, but I've found that if they're not easy and efficient to load up and get to then they may as well not exist...

Anyways, that took a while, especially as I found a bunch of interesting new sounds and effects that I threw into my toolbox, but I'm happy to report that it really paid off.  I made a really nice lo-fi chillhop track for One Hour Compo today (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep_I2iR03wk) and was really pleased at how all the new sounds were working out.  Though, my computer was struggling to run it all near the end, haha.  Some of these new instruments are a bit CPU-heavy!

Dance

I continue to work on my freestyle dancing every once in a while.   Interestingly, I've stopped posting videos of all of my glowsticking sessions -- for whatever reason I feel like I only want to put out stuff that I'm actually happy with now.  I'm definitely seeing improvement; there are moments where the body movement and isolations really play into good effect, but there's still a lot that I need to clean up.

Cooking

I spent like the entire day on Tuesday cooking up various stuff in the kitchen....a bit part of that was making a really rich and intense broth for tsukemen dipping noodles, which involves boiling bones (I used the pressure cooker), then blending a bunch of meat into the broth and straining it out.  It was....certainly an interesting process, and kinda weird/unappetizing at parts, but the end result is certainly very rich.  I'm interested to see how it'll pair together with actual ramen noodles, along with some shoyu tare and some accompaniments (pork belly, green onion, fish powder, maybe some lemon zest).

 

Rhythm Quest

I can finally say with confidence that I've gotten back into the swing of working on Rhythm Quest (my indie game).  Right now there's a lot of design improvements, reworks, and new features that I don't exactly know to best do, which means I've pretty much accepted that I'm just going to have to try different things and just iterate on it.  It's sort of an approach where I need to "just try stuff, anything", and then once I see it in action I can then start to actually get a better idea of what I actually need to change (if anything).  It's not exactly confidence-inspiring to not know what exactly I'm working towards, but it's a good thing, I think, to be iterating like this and just trying things.  Better than just doing nothing and being out of ideas, that's for sure.

 

Median XL

I'm not really 100% sure what all I'm doing in Median XL.  It does seem way less fun than the times of yesteryear when I played together with my brother, but at the same time I do still color myself interested in all the different skills and what the midgame/endgame has in store for me.  Right now I'm still sort of just playing around with different characters and seeing what there is.  I took a melee Sorceress all the way through Normal mode, but then I realized that I should probably try some different things rather than just settle on a single build without really trying that many other things.

The real question though is whether I should really be spending my time on this, or should I be playing Deltarune Ch 2, Omori, Impostor Factory, Symphony of the Night, etc.  We'll see, I guess.

Life in General

I feel like was a little down for a few days, but right now I'm feeling pretty good about it.  I guess it helps that I've been sort of in my groove as far as bouncing around getting various different things done -- the music production cleanout (and resulting successful track), putting up my prints, working on Christmas letters, starting up Rhythm Quest work again, etc.  All that stuff feels good.  I've even had a little bit more company than usual these past few weeks, it feels like, which is actually welcome.

Ludum Dare 49

As I mentioned in the last post, the weekend-long "Ludum Dare" game jam took place again last weekend.  We made it out alive with another game under our belts, and things actually went pretty smoothly this time!  This is our 16th game working together and my 25th time personally, so it's all old hat by now, but still remains fun (I mean, One Hour Compo is also still fun, and I've done literally hundreds of those...).

We came out with a fun two-player cooperative game, which people seem to have been enjoying!  I'll be continuing to rate other games for the next 10 days as well as take care of various things like the soundtrack release, small fixes, and cleanup, and then we'll see what the results are like.

Day-to-day Life

Since then I have been taking things really easy for the past week and just trying to relax (while still taking care of things here and there, like my Inktober letters and Vote Forward letters, etc).  I drove up for an hour or so to see one or two friends the other day and it ended up being a very lovely day for me; that's something I'll have to look to do again sometime for sure.

Baldur's Gate

I'm calling it quits on Baldur's Gate after finally reaching Sarevok (the big bad guy in the original game) and taking him out.  There of course is a slew of additional BG content, including the expansion, as well as the entire sequel, but I think I've seen and had enough for now.

Overall, it was enjoyable to go back and actually play through the game fully since I really didn't spend much time with it when I first encountered it.  As always, I enjoy going deep on any sort of game, so I did a lot of research into stats, spells, characters, and the like to inform my playthrough.  In the end, though, I didn't think it was fantastic.

BG does a lot of worldbuilding, setting up an elaborate plot involving schemes and multiple organizations, and there is a LOT of dialogue and journal entries to go through if you so choose...which honestly was a bit too much for my tastes.  I appreciate that there's a very rich world full of different people, but it's a little much to take in.  It's fun to go through random NPC houses and such for a while, but there's rarely anything of super high value in them, and once you reach the titular city of Baldur's Gate, there's definitely a LOT to slog through (if you do choose) since the city itself is massive and divided into 9 different separate areas.

Combat is sort of an interesting hybrid of turn-based and tactics, as you're constantly pausing to issue new commands.  With mages in the mix, there are quite a few different strategies at your disposal (direct damage vs disabling spells, etc) but in the end a lot of the combat turns out relatively similar in vibe.  That doesn't mean it's not enjoyable though, but after a while it perhaps does get a little old.  I will note that with all of the different spells and buffs things do end up getting a little confusing.  There are a lot of different "rules" and effects that go on in the battle system (e.g. if someone has mirror image cast on them, you need to damage them X times before they can be hit), and unfortunately it's not very easy to get access to that information unless you're already kind of in the know.  You can run into an enemy mage that has a swirling blue / red orb covering them, but I don't think there's any facility to really learn what that does or how you should best interact with it besides just trial and error.

Some quality of life features are sort of missing, including more sensible quest reminders (though I think that got added in the enhanced edition), better interfaces for buying large stacks of ammunition, certain auto-pause triggers (upon completing a spell cast), and automatically detecting traps, among other things.

So yeah, that's that.  It also seems like I probably won't be finishing up Terranigma (maybe will just skim through a playthrough of it?), so that leaves me to move onto whatever the next thing is, which could be Median XL, Symphony of the Night, Deltarune ch 2, Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, or any number of other things.

Space Alert

I took a crew of 3 -- myself, a rookie that I had brought up to speed years ago, and a new recruit -- out into space with remarkable success.  My hopes started out low as on our first mission I assigned them to work together to take out a leviathan tanker (a tough threat, to be sure) and the energy/laser coordination seemed to be going awry.  Despite my best attempts at warnings, the newbie tripped on their way to the laser station, and it was only due to some extra missile fire from my android that we were able to survive.  Things got much better from there, though, and we ended up finishing no less than 6 successful missions in a row, ending off on a white/yellow mix of threats and making it out alive with nonfatal damage.  It was a good run.