What are some projects of yours that are "on hiatus", as the optimists say?
A few years back I was working on a homebrew game for the Channel F. I got pretty far in terms of getting the basics hardware systems working, but eventually got distracted by ZZT and *checks notes* ...a global pandemic.
The basic idea was that it was a sort of competitive platform-shooting game. Your shots wouldn't hurt the other player, but rather just knock them back a bit. However, there would be a bit of tension, because any shots that would make it to the goal on the other side would shorten that player's bridge.
I was liveblogging my progress for a little bit on another forum (https://selectbutton.net/t/tuning-in-to-channel-f/9827).
The Github repo is here (https://github.com/alex-west/ves-vs-game) if you're curious.
aww yea look at that animated water. that's the stuf
somehow i was able to animate that water with old one byte of state to worry about
considering the system has 64 bytes of "memory" normally, that's actually a pretty substantial cost for the effect
Like, in comparison, the SNES has 128kB of work RAM. This is like if I used 2 whole kilobytes of that for a graphical effect, proportionally speaking.
worth it
During the pandemic I fell in love with the works of the musician Seth Haley and ended up finding a like minded community of people who really resonated with his music. From them I found out about many of his early works that were lost due to the wiping of myspace and general internet rot. I took it upon myself to try and preserve and track down as much as I could find. I ended up creating a public archive Seth Haley archive (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eZxwJnJTk59Ei9XMpn4Ah9MzufEnxr-J) so other people could easily access his disparate works. If you're a fan of Boards of Canada, down tempo and/or synth funk you might enjoy some of it
I was able to find a fair amount but I stopped a few years ago and keep thinking I should get back to it...
i have never heard of this artist, gonna check this out
Sort of as a follow up a few years ago I decided to sort of fill the void in releases that the artist was in. He easily had albums worth of great material but he was going through some rough things with his health and his creativity so it had been quite awhile since he'd put out a proper release so I though "How would I make his next album?". I'm not versed in making music so it was a fun learning process trying to think about what makes an album different than just a collection of song and how to flow them into each other. Ended up pretty happy with the end result: https://youtu.be/VZkJ6gEJsqk
A year or so later a few people had reached out to me with their own takes on the same question and and really liked what other people had done so I thought of doing a sequel with the remaining stuff and threw this up last Christmas. I had less of an idea going in so its kinda weird
It still needs cleanup and is about half done but I keep putting it off like so many unfinished projects...
Quote from: Cera Sizzle on Fri, 2025 - 08 - 29, 12:41 AMEnded up pretty happy with the end result: https://youtu.be/VZkJ6gEJsqk
sorry it took me so long to listen to this but this is insanely good
ur good :catgirl: , glad you liked it!
A Princess of Slime. Metroidvania. A 'horrible person becomes a monster' sort of fairytale where you are the horrible person. Multiple endings. Though some of what I wanted to do might be done in another game, probably even too much to come back to this one unless its vision is significantly changed.
Be Brave. Dungeon crawl w/ procedural generation in vanilla ZZT. I ran out of steam for inventing/trying new things TBH and you can't really do that if you're making a procgen-based ZZT game and you want variety.
Greenstar. Tactical/grid-based JRPG with exploration. If you've played Rad Codex games, sort of like Horizon's Gate or Kingsvein but in space and with some factional storylines more like Elder Scrolls. Haitus might be generous in that this one never even got past some simple unit movement tests, if that, in prototyping.
Totems of the Yonder. Procedurally-generated Mini-Metroidvania. An itch prototype exists. This one might actually come back with a vengeance as to how much content it has (thinking a single campaign/proper 'win' would mean clearing multiple maps/'games'.) But there's a lot of "ifs" including "can I accomplish something that has better rooms than A Robot Named Fight (I think maybe yes because Weapon Hacker which nobody's ever heard of already did that for the most part) and also equal or better map structure (less sure about this.)
UP NORTH, ZZT-RPG-based parody of Elder Scrolls, especially Skyrim and Morrowind (my most beloved WRPG). Weave vs Vanilla undecided, but the map had a literal skill tree in it and how could I not one day want to return to it?
I will try to post actual maps of my several unfinished ZZT RPG ideas in whatever thread is most relevant but I need to actually go to bed
Around May of last year I started working on a gift for my sibling. They have a few OCs and I thought it would be a nice gift to redraw one of their pieces in a different style. I'd also been thinking about trying out a vector art style inspired by keikawakami (https://linktr.ee/keikawakami) and thought my sibling's characters would look nice in this style. I pretty quickly realized this was going to be a pretty big effort for my skill level at drawing and working on it ended up feeling like a slog and sort of gave up after a few months of working on it off and on. I'm not sure why but I think it was a combination of first attempt frustrations, not knowing how to handle some sections and just a general clash with my usual art "vibe". I'm a moody ***** artistically 😅 and this was just too happy a piece and I kinda hated it eventually. Maybe now months later and I can pick it up again...
13c.png
That looks very cute!
I'm not very experienced with vector art. I tried using Inkscape once and it was very intimidating. What was your approach here?
This was probably a terrible idea but I approached it like drawing on raster graphics but with using shape + resize functions to get the precise curves I wanted. Or in some cases just use a graphing program and defining the line as a function mathematically.
umbrella arcs.pngworking8.1.png
desmos2.png
This is for another drawing but the redrawing/shifting you see in this is a similar process I used for a lot of the more detailed areas like the hands
math: is there anything it can't do :smug: