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.