let it leave me like a long breath

it's been a while since i posted here! i've definitely been more active on tumblr lately.

anyway so, this month i've been working on a wildmender clone in godot, basically just to try out what it's like to make something without 100% writing all the code myself. get used to using an engine, that kind of thing. there's a bunch of posts in my tumblr archive. i managed to take it from "draw a random heightmap" to "most of a game prototype" in about four weeks, which i'd call pretty decent turnaround having never used any of the tools involved before.

i started to lose steam near the end as the remaining Big Structural Mechanics started to narrow down to "just work on water flow simulation", which is another thing i've never done before. another factor was starting to recognize just how many visual options i had available that i had no clue how to use -- godot has all these color-grading options, and this whole builtin pbr model, etc, and actually figuring out how to make any of that produce an output i thought looked good seemed kind of intimidating. plus, as i started running up against the limits of what i could simulate, it was a little disheartening that i couldn't make something bigger. i wanted a huge map, but in practice once i got to 19x19 chunks, the cost of having them all loaded was starting to eat up all my memory. one of the downsides of using an engine is that many of the allocations are invisible to me -- it seemed like mesh chunks were taking up like, 50%, 100% more memory than they ought to, in part, presumably, because they were doing some internal marshaling.

the other thing i realized is that making a clone is so much easier than having to make all your own design decisions. pretty much all of my game projects have been hamstrung by needing to decide about mechanics: what do i want to do? what do i not want to do? how specifically should this system work? etc. starting with "let's mostly do things the way this other game does things" takes so many decisions out of your hands. for a while i was just going down the list checking things off b/c i would just be coding one thing, finishing up a simple implementation, and then immediately going to the next thing, which i knew exactly how to do. basically it's the first time when coding something where "typing speed" started being a limiting factor.

i'm planning on coming back to it at some point, because... i mean, i really liked wildmender & i'd want to get to the point where i'm completely remixing its systems instead of just having a janky clone. i spent a lot of the month doing what amounts to low-level mesh generation, which is fairly unusual for godot; i imagine doing things like "making a crafting ui" or "adding spline-based builting tools". "making a title screen", etc. would let me work a little more with godot as an engine instead of ignoring most of it to do some very particular rendering stuff. water flow simulation remains a pretty intimidating problem, but i think beyond that the Primary Systems of the game are pretty much done.

it's fic prompt time! i've been considering doing one for a while but i had a bunch of rl stuff happen that kinda knocked me out & i'm only now getting back on the saddle. also this is somewhat dedicated to the republican congress which is once again attempting to make porn illegal. so lets make some gross porn!!

gimmie a prompt with a fandom and some characters and/or a situation, a fetish, whatever, and i might write a short porn fill for it

general rules and regulations:

• fandom stuff only; it's gotta be a fanfic in some respect
  
• there's no particular limit on choice of fandom, but i probably won't write stuff i'm not familiar with. good fandoms: basically any fandoms i've posted fic for; video games released 10+ years ago. bad fandoms: random children's cartoons; most anime
  
• no detailed ocs. 'some guy'/'generic character from the setting' is fine but not, like, your fursona
  
• no asking for further chapters of existing fics i've written, unless they're fics that were also just prompt fills. if i wanted to be working on those i wouldn't be taking prompts!!
  
• i definitely won't be filling every prompt. i'm very bad at finishing things at the best of times

i'm gonna be aiming for, idk 1500-2000-word fills? ish? we'll see

edit: okay i think i'm done taking prompts. i'm gonna try to sit down and bang out a few more fills before i call this one 'done'

fills post here; prior post index over here for reference

it's happening again! gamedev progress post!

i'm still working more-or-less on the same project as last time. i intended to do a little more writing this month (for the barajam ff7 porn game) but i spent pretty much the entire month some degree of sick from something that may or may not have been COVID, so, you know, on the whole output has been kind of low. i'm feeling mostly better now save for a lingering cough, but i'm pretty acutely aware of how fragile 'healthy' is. welp.

anyway, on to gamedev progress!

i guess since last month i did a screenshots blog comparison, here's this month's: from this post, adding tile litter, to this post, finishing up caves. here's the archive link. this includes things like: tile decorations, slightly more involved generation layers, footing sprites, diagonal wall sprites, controller support (kind of), tile animations, walking sprites, and caves. that's actually a pretty substantial list of stuff, all things considered.

i'm pretty enthused for caves, although the part where i'm going to have to figure out how to correctly position them against cliffs is pretty intimidating, given the way the map generation works currently. i've been playing kenshi a lot, and its total lack of caves or even basements really gets to me. it leaves the world feeling a little flat, if you'll spare the pun. so i really wanted there to be the potential for all sorts of weird little cave locations tucked away. plus i'm not really sure to what degree i'm porting over the gheist & their underworld from 'the new hive' into this, so, maybe there will be some kind of huge connected underworld far beneath the surface. who can say. still no building support, which will come... at some point later on. i feel like i should actually work on game content, like npcs and mechanics, for a while just so there's something to do in the game besides walk around a barren wasteland.

uhhh i tend to keep my cards close to my chest when it comes to talking about what stuff i'm working on, maybe to my detriment when i just stop posting for x months and then post whatever huge thing i've been working on. (and/or announce i'm working on something and then immediately run out of energy for it and then stop. that's also an option.) so i don't really know if i want to post ~game concepts~ stuff about this game, or if that's something people would even be interested in hearing about.

two-week projects! it's weird when i do them these days! the weight of unfulfilled history has crushed their structure!

for the first half of this month i did a little work on an ai scheduler, in the sense of a npc action/reaction system, not like, llm generative-ai stuff. this mostly had me reading a bunch of papers about GOAP and not getting an enormous amount actually done. i wrote a little demo, but it never really worked properly or modelled the world in the way i'd want it to work

the latter half of this month was a little bit more fruitful. worked on some game stuff. specifically, the posts over on my dev screenshots blog, from this one to this one. covering: rudimentary worldgen, drawing a bunch of tile sprites, adding jumping & drawing a jump sprite, and starting (but definitely not finishing) the lighting buffer. also i restructured the worldgen code so that it was fast again & i was back to getting 56fps on the moment of chunk load. actually keeping loading fast is something i care a lot about for this thing, since i would really like this to be practically playable.

as you may have noticed, i've kinda eased back from all the hell game 2 development, mostly because i'm pretty burnt out on writing porn right now & (if you recall) after i wrote the whole scene parser thing i was like, oh yeah, writing actual content for this would involve so much writing. which is why i started messing around with the map rendering code for several months instead. so this project may or may not be the thing i dig into for the next, uh, year-or-so; we'll see. it's certainly the thing i'm working on right now.

currently the idea is kind of a redux of 'the new hive', only with actual graphics and game mechanics. the 'world map' i dumped into the game for testing is a tweaked version of the one from 'the new hive'. you know, whitesand ash wastes to the southeast, acid sea to the south, glass mountain to the northeast, rusted ruins to the west, etc, that kind of thing. turns out it's a lot more work to actually generate and render all that in (isometric) 3d vs. just writing a few lines of description. i'm kinda considering to what degree i want it to be like, porn game vs. game with monstery porn elements vs. Standard Farming Sim Heart System vs. whatever else. i mean, some of my favorite scenes to write in the new hive were the ones where you explain to the gheist how human reproduction works / the ones where the human squad leader has to explain the concept of legal marriage and divorce to you, so like, regardless of explicitness there is gonna be a certain level of sexual weirdness. but also, all of that is still undecided b/c the game as coded does not have npcs in it yet. i'm hoping to add in buildings and caves soon.

the thing with text games is that there aren't really "assets" as such. most of this two-week expanse has just been the process of drawing landscape tiles & implementing them in-game. which is critically important! but it's not really as conceptually interesting as, like, plot & gameplay design.

overall, what i did is like... drew wasteland sand tiles. drew wasteland rock tiles. drew red sand tiles. drew white sand tiles. drew rust sand tiles. drew fused glass tiles. made half-slab variants for stone block. made half-slab variants for brown stone block, & drew rotated versions of relevant sprites. drew jumping sprites for the (default, demo) pc. drew some concrete sprites. drew a bunch of wooden wall & tiled roof sprites for buildings that aren't yet in-game. drew a bunch of rock and plant decor sprites that aren't yet in-game. and did a bunch of code stuff, but it really was mostly drawing stuff.

oh yeah i published 'a night at the gold saucer' over on itch! i spent the past few days tweaking a few final things and actually playtesting to find & fix bugs. lol i found like eight separate game-stopping bugs, & there are still a few bits that aren't working quite right, even accounting for the various half-finished sequences i didn't get to complete. oh well

(something i didn't really realize until i was doing playtesting, but a lot of the content is very weirdly gated -- there's a bunch of chocobo handler stuff, but the chocobo handlers only show up after you've fucked one of the racing chocobos after betting, and you can't do that until you've unlocked corel prison, and all the other chocobo bet result sequences are kinda unfinished, so there's no real clue that there's a whole bunch of chocobo gangbang & chocobo handler fisting sequences locked behind this one thing. plus the handler thing doesn't even trigger immediately; it triggers from a random encounter that's only enabled after that. so it's not really smooth game design there)

i'm gonna commit to at least one further patch, with some of the unfinished 'main quest' content added, plus the red xiii / mpreg endings added in behind the 'unfinished content' patch, plus a save system and sex scene tracker/viewer. that might not be for a month or so, though. after that... well, i got a bunch of other game projects i want to work on, so, we'll see how that goes.