April prologue

Last month

Hello!  I spent much of February and nearly all of March working on Cherry Kisses (nsfw), our Strawberry Jam 3 jam game that missed the deadline by a good three weeks.  Oops!

I had a great time working on it, though; it might be the neatest (in both senses) game we've released.  It's very slightly a shame that it's a sex game and thus has a limited audience right out of the gate.  But it does what I wanted incredibly well: it's a narrative game, practically a VN, but with more player agency than the typical loop of "read text, get menu".

I'd like to write about the idea and dev process, though that raises a question I keep bumbling into.  I love to talk about stuff I'm working on publicly, but I keep making narrative and/or puzzle games — so how do I talk about them without spoiling them?  I seem to end up mostly talking about small technical details and avoiding mentioning the game itself.

The harder version of this question is what exactly I should offer to the $4 beta testing tier.  How do I share an early version of a narrative game, where the story is necessarily incomplete or incoherent in places because it's not done yet?  What useful feedback could anyone possibly give beyond "this isn't done yet"?

Maybe I'll just toss up a few in-progress builds of the next thing I make, whatever it is, and see what the $4 folks make of it.  I didn't do that here since it was a jam and I was in a hurry and I spent three weeks thinking I only had two more days of work left, ahem.

I also released a particle wipe generator, based on code I wrote to make the screen transition in Cherry Kisses.  That was surprisingly enjoyable to make, without even needing any libraries — the web has finally reached the point that vanilla JavaScript isn't tedious to write and I don't feel like I'm fighting CSS quite so much.  WebGL is ridiculous, though.

This month

I'm gonna be busy with IRL stuff for another week or so, so it'll be a little quiet.  But I'm pumped to be releasing stuff again and will be doing hecka more of that.

I'm also itching to write some more, so I plan to blog about both Cherry Kisses and about how the particle wipe generator works.  I might even pick up the book again.

I liked writing the particle wipe generator as well, so I'll be keeping an eye out for more opportunities to make little tools like that for underserved niches.  I do like building tools; I just had to stop myself from doing it some years ago because I kept trying to build swiss army toolkits that could do everything, and they never reached a baseline usable state.  Small and specific is probably better.

I'd like to make a couple smaller and not-porn games, as a change of pace after six weeks on a single game.  I might finally resurrect rainblob?  Or maybe something entirely different; baba is you has been massively inspiring.

I'm getting back into art yet again, after spending a month and a half too busy to do much of it.  I glanced at my 2016 art recently and was surprised how much I experimented with color back then, whereas the last year or two has been mostly sketches, so I'd like to do more of that.  I want to understand color better, not just for painting, but also for picking pixel art palettes and designing UI.

We still have to finish Alice's Day Off, of course.  I'll probably work on that intermittently.  It's nice that it's made up of a lot of independent chunks, so there's no big game-spanning context to fall out of my head; I can just write a bit and be done with it.

I had fun streaming Strawberry Jam games with Ash; maybe we should do more of that, though I don't know what new things we could bring to the crowded "person plays video games on internet" genre.

Plus, you know, various things on the backburner.

I feel like Cherry Kisses has rekindled me, finally!  It started out seeming impossible to design, and came out beautifully.  Super excited to see what else I can pull off.

Thanks for your support, as always!