You heard it! Our JRPG fangame about everyone's favorite weird polygonal woman is back in development and stronger than ever.

I had stopped it back in october since I felt I wasn't capable enough of tackling such a project. But after much learning and a few wacky games, come the beginning of april, I got everyone back together and many new people joined development too!

• OrchardPalace (art)
• saphtea (music)
• DemisurgeX (music)
• Dryest (music)
• KingCrowned (beta testing)
• FelipeNoel (art)

We are now a 10 people team, powerful enough to takeover the portal- I mean, overtake any obstacle we find! Please check out everyone involved in this project as they are incredibly talented people. Do NOT forget to also follow the other original members of the team!

• RoligtJackson (art)
• FalcoTz (music)
• Ugasisvelta (voice acting)

I've never managed such a large group of people for such a thing before but everyone is pretty chill and cool since we are all newgrounders. I am hard at work programming the whole game and in just a few days I've already done quite a bit!

The demo will be out on Pico Day for Windows, Linux and of course here on Newgrounds, so stay tuned and check out our updates for more info!

The Secret Ending has been implemented back into the Newgrounds version. It turns out there seems to be some issue with Screen Space Reflections on browsers! Thankfully it didn't use that much at all.

Make sure to play without failing once to check it out!

Some of my more dedicated followers may know I dabble frequently in the dark arts of low level dev. Be it making C programs for image viewing, working with OpenGL, contributions to raylib, since the start I held a fascination for how games used to be done (and still are by some) and how I can do it today with better tools.

The thing is I move faster than game engines. Clickteam Fusion worked til I needed more. Unity worked til I needed better (please don't use Unity.). Godot works. But after Decimation Journey I am not sure you'd catch me using it.

I move faster than this engine and it shows. I tend to hit onto a lot of things I have to come into solutions for. Some of these are to be expected. Some others are just silly. The UI features are so utterly powerful but very bad to work with. It's like a swiss knife without instructions. You are prone to cutting yourself while learning how to handle it and it sure stings.

The 3d portion of Godot looks great but has a hideous workflow. Some things don't even work well. Model animations are utterly janky to edit.

Shaders are handled very well but little control of the rendering is exposed. You have to touch the internal source code for that and I am not interested is playing around with a monolithic level C++ codebase. Classes, virtual methods, that stuff is a tad nasty to me.

Why don't I do it myself if I'm such a smartass? Glad you asked, I did for 3 games previously and a game I'll finish after I put out the DeciJourney demo does use the raylib framework. I think I just faced scope and some skill issues then. Nowadays I can handle things like TACTILE.

After DeciJourney is fully released I'll be working on Jim's Challenge Remazed and it'll possibly use something of my own. I can't specify for sure what it'll use but I'll most likely be coding it with Zig. It's a language trying to be a better C and it solves many problems well. Cross platform just works. Async just works. Compiles C/C++ too. Literally better C.

There is the possibility I'll also just use Godot as usual. It is good for 2D after all. But it is only solving a lot of these problems on 4.0 and that won't come out any time soon, much less for web browsers. There still isn't much work out there for Zig games on the web browser but WebAssembly being a target of the language helps.

At some point I'll have to decide if these games are too big for the browser and maybe DeciJourney is the time to ask it. People already are having a little trouble running TACTILE on the browser and I explicitly had to downgrade the experience. I had to use a lower quality codec for the cutscenes and cutout entirely the Big Thing about the Secret Ending.

I think the demo will be the only DeciJourney release on Newgrounds, I'd hate immensely to downgrade the experience. I hope you understand. It'll let me move onto focusing on delivering a better native experience though.

After 4 months, hopefully it'll have been worth the wait.

TACTILE is my latest and greatest in video games. In this post I'll talk a bit about it.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR ENDING! PLAY THE GAME BEFORE READING.

Award for 'Most Overdue Game Yet'

TACTILE was supposed to release in Pixel Day 2022. It did not release in that day.

I decided I would make up for it by using Godot Engine to build it instead of PICO-8. As we'll find out, this was a mistake that spawned my most technically complex game yet.

2D in Godot Engine is fun. It's probably the best thing about Godot. It also has corners missing where there should not be. As a result I wrote a basic map manager.

After loading the last map, if it understands that we hit the limit, it jumps to the cutscene where Cube corners Cone in a room.

Everytime Cube moves in the map, we check the map to see if the move was legal and what to do about the tile we just hit.

If we hit a mud block, we vaguely replicate a similar check, but accounting for turning water/void into floors.

If you fail once, the game locks you out of the true ending.

Award for 'Most Graphically Advanced Game in Newgrounds of April 2022'

This is not a joke.

This is the first time I featured so much 3D in a game. This RPG fight is based on the look and feel of Persona 5/Shin Megami Tensei. If you are on the true ending path, you have a much better spell.

You can still fail this path and be booted back to the normal one. Maybe don't do that.

Most of the nitty gritty is implemented in an AutoLoad I called the "SMT" AutoLoad. It uses a common pattern of mine where I use an AutoLoad to arbitrage communication between 2 any nodes that emit/wait for signals using it. It's like Inter-Process Communication but for nodes. Inter-Node Communication?

There is a banter system that mutes the main characters' shouting to play either Cube or Cone taunting the other every between 15-25 seconds. Simpler than I thought it'd be. Huh.

The Part You're Here For

Decimation Journey is now back in development. As of this writing I am moving back to using Linux as my main driver before I actually do so. Jackson is also going back to drawing new art for the game. Let's talk about what the hell was that secret ending.

I actually straight up imported the first floor (at least at its current state as a test room) and its music into TACTILE and only needed to make a few adjustments.

There might be more changes to it before the demo is out on Pico Day but whatever.

Before you ask YES, the game changes its resolution and enables FXAA to further match the current progress.

I am a stickler for accuracy so I thought it'd be amazing to just straight up make it as if a whole different game just booted up. You can also move/rotate in it. This surprised even Jackson.

The Veredict.

It's finally out. Now I can work on Decimation Journey. I'll be posting quite a bit about it. I hope you enjoyed me doing silly voices on TACTILE. Worry not, there will too be silly voices in Decimation Journey.

I wish this had been out sooner but I was facing a lot of a lingering "spiral of sloth" as to what to do. These past few weeks have been nothing but good work. I am very happy about that. I feel much more experienced thanks to this work.

Personally I don't think anyone will really care about TACTILE. It does not have ENA, it does not have gimmicky gameplay, and I am not backed up by thousands of followers and a fandom. The gimmick was that it became something else entirely at the end. (and then AGAIN in the secret ending.) I like surprising people like that. It makes me happy. If it made you happy that's amazing too.

Have a great day. I hope you will enjoy what's next. This will be very interesting.

I think we kinda made a huge party

Upcoming Games

• TACTILE (Around Mid-April)

TACTILE is finally having some bigger development on that Complete Genre Flip boss fight than usual. Animation work, modeling work, if things go well I'll have it done by the middle of this month.

ENA: Decimation Journey fangame demo (Pico Day release)

With ENASONA having reached levels of popularity I was not expecting, a lot of folks really wanna see an actual ENA JRPG, and well, that's just what I wish to come back to doing right up next!

The demo for the game will go up to the second floor's boss. I am starting soon to guarantee I can have a lot done and ironed out before Pico Day! Making a jrpg is hard.

I've also gotten a few more people involved in this project! It's pretty much my biggest thing yet thanks to this. I will not say who they right now are since they are busy folks but I'll point to @DemisurgeX who's been already helping out a lot with TACTILE thanks to his bangers, and whose boss theme for DeciJourney got frontpaged, so, yeah!

So get ready for some goodness. Some cubic, fangame goodness.

Gone.

Upcoming Games

• TACTILE

I've been having issues with some 3D quirks in Godot Engine. Working on the UI of a certain segment as well but other than that once I get that stuff done its smooth sailing til the end. Sokoban portion already done as well, I only need to create transitions between scenes and it'll be pretty much done.

• Detective Shoegum

Will be turned into a full 3D title. A lot of assets and all voice-acting is already done, though I'll redo a few models and other things to look nicer.

• Jim's Challenge Remazed (remake of Jim's Challenge)

Plot and characters decided. Will enter production after Shoegum. Will be based on some of the stuff from Sokoban portion in TACTILE + additions. Voice-acting will be done by me. Map maker will be implemented like original game but not suck.

• ENA: Decimation Journey (fangame)

Will return to production around june-july. Some things have been cut to allow the project to be mainly only me and RoligtJackson.

Upcoming Animation

• Floating Point #7: Outside the Box

Sequel to #6, follows Red and Blue escaping the Mandril Maze and coming across a box that warps reality. They fight over it.

That is all I have in mind. Stay well.

I'll proceed to do absolutely nothing about it (maybe a little piece? it'll be my 150th)