It's here! And I mean it!

It's also on Windows and Linux. Ain't that neat?

Now go play it before I throw you in the pit. Have a nice monday!

Been some time, huh? I'm finishing up Laserpit. You shoot one another with lasers. It'll be available here alongside Windows and Linux.

I also released an april fools game on that day. It's about Hikari Maiden slapping the hell out of some mothmen.

Apparently I'm search banned on twitter. Cute.

You can always follow me on other places listed in my profile links. Take the time to also check out my recent art. Last month I drew Mistral from .hack everyday.... I posted some highlights alongside usual art.

I'll make a front page post when Laserpit releases then go back to work on Conflict deFuse.

Protagonist Fusie's design is beginning to converge which is lovely. She's such a mischievous witch, I think everyone I showed her to loves her. Me included!

ChatGPT is becoming the big thing and I have incorporated it into my tool set. This has allowed me feats such as writting a RSS feed maker for my website (I'll get to it in due time.), some random useful batch scripts, even things like an interface... to ChatGPT's API.

Not really feeling like working on this further since making games is more of my thing. I hope to see UI creators improve on stuff though. TavernAI and similar let you create and use character "cards" (PNGs/WEBPs with .json data, or just raw .json) that make the model act like a character. This is superior to the usual boring personality of GPT-3.5/GPT-4.

Dammit, she's onto me... AGI real?! Hope her level isn't max....

Most people are using this so they can do naughty things to their favorite characters. This is stupid. You could be using this to have your questions answered with an actual personality. Mind you as always, always expect models to be confident even about factual errors. I've caught GPT-3.5 fumbling around when asked to write GDScript. However they tend to arrive pretty close to the crux of the the answer and if you know the subject well you can spot the issues and just either correct the model or do some fixes. Be smart, be cool.

libtcc is not super well known! I asked about exposing functions from game to C 'scripts' and got a thoughtful reply. Have yet to test but subsequent questions did fully check out with my 3-4yo C knowledge.

If you know the space well, GPT-3.5/GPT-4 and alternatives such as self-hosted models (LLaMa is my favorite, I got it to run on my PC through llama.cpp and models based on it such as Vicuna manage almost 90% parity with GPT-3.5 quality!) let you get the boring stuff done so you can think about the important bits. It's also good for chatting with for certain creative thought processes. Like the perfect rubber duck debugging duck.

I've also managed to try out a fork of TavernAI where there is some small support for extensions. One pretty much does now what GPT-4 will eventually include: image2text.

It's not perfect but it's pretty close.

Considering you can also get it working with a self-hosted model, anyone with a high end PC and enough reading-the-freaking-manual can already have GPT-4 at home. Now that's the stuff.

Anyways, stay tuned for more for now. Have a good saturday.

It all comes tumbling down

I thought it'd take longer. Oh well! I officially do not care anymore if my twitter account drops dead. I am already everywhere else! You can check out my links for that. My website too! I got a website. I'll update it a bit more in January.

Oh yeah, you might be wondering how I've been doing. I'm officially moving to a short gamedev kind of mindset so it's taking a while to adjust and get stuff setup. The Weird Room: Hikari will likely come around early January. It'll feature a new post-ending scene, and improved resolution. It is also the first game using the Gunner Engine, my Raylib-based solution for retro games. I'll disclose more info eventually, but it's quite nice to finally be moving away from Godot Engine :))

I got a new phone, I'll be using it after all this school kerfuffle is over, it has a bigger screen and more RAM. I could read so much Don Quixote with this bad boy...

ENA: Decimation Journey: Episode 1 will resume development after some more unnamed games are out. I'll be getting rid of art/music from certain individuals I won't name and replacing them with work from others and my own. I'll also be doing some graphical updates to bring the game to a more PS2-esque look too. Stay tuned!

Okay, that's all the time I've got, I gotta get back to playing Gurumin on my personal computer.

Oh, been a while since last news huh?

Recently the Mobile Game Jam ended and now that I am sentenced to a few months of college taking up most of my week I've had plenty on my mind to talk about.

Ever since releasing the ENA: Decimation Journey demo, the reality has been that 25k+ don't equal much in the way of actual interest in any of your other work. You don't see people really excited or much of anything for even FIGHTER.NET outside of my gang of buddies I love to do things with.

And you know, I try to act all tough and awesome as some kinda indie one man army whose friends are his power (keyblade not included) but at the end of the day I'm still human and still affected by considerably petty things like seeing everyone else be more successful than me. The world doesn't revolve around me but I can't help but feel like I should be getting more recognition, dammit.

TACTILE and EDJ's demo were just utter exercises in my serious dedication to building games almost entirely by myself, one a spiritual successor of sorts to my first ever game, a Chip's Challenge clone, the other a ENA jrpg fangame attempting to be about as ENA as you could get with such a concept and an original setting.

But I mean, nobody really cared much about TACTILE (outside of my buddy artist RoligtJackson because he is awesome, and Demisurge who did some music too) and EDJ at the end of the day didn't really do much. People loved it but you wouldn't really be able to tell from a few glances. Heck, the trailer for the demo managed to score 2 trophies, and we still got rated 4th best game of the month, so those are huge accomplishments. I guess with such a large thing you expect way more?

Which is where my trouble lies. Should I expect anything? What is the point, really? We are all conditioned by social media in some fashion to expect some kind of pseudo feedback for whatever we said or took a photo of through micro interactions and it seeps into other facets of making things online and honestly it was best to just let that go when working on FIGHTER.NET. I went into it with the idea I will ultimately win nothing, get nothing, and not be recognized for anything, and it significantly cleared my mind and made me much happier.

In fact, I'll go so far as to say this game is more of an artifact than anything. The real joy I had was all the days I spent with my devteam just having fun playing games and talking about stuff. Making things for you and your folks first just turns out a lot less toxic mindset than thinking about all the prizes and fame you'll get. You will get nothing in return first and foremost, because you are not entitled in any way to such a thing. I wish artists did get more pay, serious problem, but that's a different topic.

When you do not care about superficial nonsense it makes games development that much less stressful! The joy of creating is way more interesting and fulfilling. I think some of us could use a mindset like this when it comes to creative work in general.

Look, my next release won't even be something interesting either. I'll be remastering... A remake of a certain game from a few years ago and it's been fun getting to put in new assets and animation, try to get a little closer to what I intended it to have. It will be desktop only for the time being due to being my new custom engine but honestly, I don't need to be worried about having my games on Newgrounds all the time. You too are not entitled to my work, and sometimes certain things will take longer to appear in certain places and that's ok.

After all, the fun is in getting to make cool stuff, nonsense like appealing to the common denominator is dumb. I ain't a AAA studio!

Yep! They are on ko-fi and 2 slots open right now. Tell your friends! Tell your parents! Tell your mailman! Don't trust your mailman! These news are of great importance. Imagine getting your character drawn by me!!!! I can do it.

Share the link with your buddies too, why not:

https://ko-fi.com/uneven/commissions

Hi, it's me, the Solo Programmer/3D Modeler/ENA & a few other chrs VA behind the ENA fangame that swept the natio- I mean Newgrounds. Me and lots of other folks like @RoligtJackson have worked hard these past 2 months on a silly SMT-like experience many have enjoyed in spite of all the issues it had due to time constrains.

Today I'll share the deets. I know you love the deets.

The background of the Main Menu

From the start I wanted a really sick 3d background. I made it happen sometime after I had modeled the landscape around the Ice Cream Tower. The idea is every next floor will change it. I'll be sure to implement this in the first chapter.

A look inside the shops

Câmbio's store gives the impression of being bigger than it actually is modeled. I'll add more detail in the future but worked well.

Monumentia's hair is a shader comprising of a "space" texture sampled by the screen; this makes it as if the space is being taken entirely by it. The sampling is not aspect-corrected so its not stretched well correctly but I used a vec2 to slightly correct it.

shader_type spatial;
render_mode unshaded;

uniform sampler2D tex : hint_albedo;
uniform vec2 scale = vec2(1.0);

void fragment(){
    ALBEDO = texture(tex, SCREEN_UV * scale + (TIME * 0.2)).rgb;
}

Map Making is hard

Godot Engine's Tilemaps are pretty cool, but harsh to work with in some instances. Like defining the map.

Why yes, I did use random textures to define every single type of tile. This was totally a great idea. Yep. Didn't have time to make an actually nice map maker though, just gotta roll with what you know.

THE DOOR

I'll give the shader. Just don't ask me about the DOOR.

shader_type spatial;
render_mode unshaded;

const float PI = 3.1415926535;

uniform float power = 0.5;
uniform float vacuum_power = 0.05;
uniform vec4 albedo : hint_color = vec4( 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1.0 );

void fragment( )
{
   vec4 CENTER_VIEW = INV_CAMERA_MATRIX * vec4( WORLD_MATRIX[3].xyz, 1.0 );
   vec2 diff = ( normalize( -CENTER_VIEW ).xy - VIEW.xy ) * ( -CENTER_VIEW.z );
   float to_center = length( diff );

   ALBEDO = albedo.rgb * textureLod( SCREEN_TEXTURE, SCREEN_UV + ( normalize( diff ) * sin( to_center * 2.0 * PI - (TIME * 2.0)) * power ) * vacuum_power, 0.0 ).rgb;
}

Talking about Dialogue

Surprisingly simple. Signals are pretty sick.

I implemented it by passing a bunch of strings the system consumes. When it's done with a string or the player is skipping, its ready to go to the next or stop for good.

And typewrite is passed the pitch at which to play the weird voices I made so it sounds more masculine/feminine. Fun fact: they are all toki pona. See if you can figure out what they mean exactly.

GUARDIAN

I wanted the stairs to look like they are moving but didn't have time to make a nice texture and everything so I just modeled it all. The GUARDIAN themselves will probably get a touch up in the future but it was a fairly odd design I had from the beginning. I wonder what the next GUARDIANs will look like.

The Ending Screen

Click this, its very funny. You should check out @DemisurgeX too. Great music. And @saphtea for that banger opening theme.

Free Open Source

It's on Sourcehut. I don't put things on Github anymore, I hate where they're heading. I want to contribute money to Sourcehut in the future for their great git hosting.

The Battle System

The most utterly complex thing I've ever written. Weeks of time spent, lots of bugs fixed and found, refactoring, just utter chaos.

And still not everything was implemented like selecting a party member to heal. Time was not on my side, oof. But it works, darn it.

Not Very Fond of Godot Engine

Rant time.

Did you know Resources, you know, Godot's version of ScriptableObjects, in spite of how useful they are and easy to save/load to disk, can reload without your knowledge? I only learned this when leaving the shops reset your entire stats for some reason.

Turns out Godot just throws things away and reloads with enough scene changes. I'm not even using C# for it to use garbage collection and I had to move player resources to an Autoload to keep them from being reloaded on a whim. I hate this.

Godot's input handling means there may be race hazard-style bugs when implementing UI that responds to key presses. It resulted in UI locking out for a few players because things responded in a hard to reproduce order. I did not use most of their GUI nodes because they are better meant for mouse input. And generally very confusing. Their input mapping is incredible though, I'll give 'em that.

Is it easy to use? Yes. Is it great to prototype stuff and get something going quick? Yep. But wow, this engine has been screwing with me when I least expect it since when I first collabed with Jackson and the others on -FUTURE- LOVELESS. Signals weren't even firing sometimes back then.

I'm suspecting it may just be the time to be free from this nonsense and go engine-less just like I wanted to long ago. I did it thrice, can do it plenty more, specially now that I'm equipped with more knowledge. It'll even still be on Newgrounds too as far as I can manage. Just anything to be away from the pain and suffering and have more joy programming videogames.

Computers are weird, man.

Epilogue

It's amazing that more than 10k people have played this fangame. That's a bunch of people, won't even fit a theater anymore like I usually tend to vision. A lot of people didn't really follow us and that's kind of lame but its ok. Some people just wanted a gosh darn ENA game and I delivered something. It's also kind of sad JoelG hasn't really acknowledged it. I figure he might just be really busy but I don't really mind if he never pays attention to it. I hope in the following months to make this an even sillier and fantastic fangame, maybe even one of the greatest of all time, that'd be something. If you wish to follow what we're doing, links below. Follow everyone. Or I'm going to make the battle encounter sound be a boing sometimes. That was a threat.

• Uneven Prankster (Programmer, 3D Artist)
• RoligtJackson (Artist)
• FalcoTz (Musician)
• Ugasisvelta (Voice Actress, Beta Tester)
• DemisurgeX (Musician, Beta Tester)
• saphtea (Musician)
• Dryest (Musician)
• OrchardPalace (Artist)
• KingCrowned (Beta Tester, Artist)
• FelipeNoel (Artist)
• metto (Beta Tester, Artist)
• itsreddqueen (Artist)
• NG Dummy (Artist)
• Taka (Artist, Chr Designer)
• sereneFalconer (Artist)
• Vapolygon (Artist)
• Pommisc (Artist)

Stay well and have a good one.

What are you waiting for? Try it out! It doesn't bite. The browser's memory, maybe.

Kept you waiting, huh?

ENA DECIMATION JOURNEY FANGAME

DEMO TRAILER COMING SATURDAY

the law resides in the DOOR. you are GUILTY.

Upcoming Games

• ENA: Decimation Journey (DEMO) (FANGAME)

With ENA: Decimation Journey back on development, there's been some progress mainly on implementing the somewhat complicated turn-based combat for the game. Hopefully around this very week it'll be finished as turns can already be consumed by actions.

Expect to see lots more pretty soon on that end! I hope to grind that out so the demo is finished around the end of the month. It's been amazing to have so many people on this project and there will be even more after the demo!! I hope to reach out to some people I think are sick. AND I hope you'll enjoy the demo coming next month!!!

I'm writting this after getting home late so I'm one step away from doing a backflip and landing in my bed... Thankfully tomorrow I can already begin doing all this goodness.

• Detective Shoegum

That game about the silly detective with big eyes will be released after the demo as a little something between the DeciJourney demo and finished game. It's very short, already mostly done and for desktops only.

Here's the titular smoking that mystery pack. Goood night, stay well.