What’s Nonadecimal been doing lately?!
January 22, 2:00pm: Arrive in San Antonio for PAX South
January 22, 7:00pm: Social Justice Warriors greenlit for Steam
January 23-25: 3 days of PAX South booth
January 26: Overwrite months of Social Justice Warriors code in airport all-nighter
January 27: Still awake from PAX, pirate code from own game
January 28 – February 27: recreate SJW code from decompiled dlls, prepare Steam release, never sleep
February 27: Release Social Justice Warriors on Steam, 24 hours without sleep
February 29: Patch Steam achievements into SJW, 72 hours without sleep
March 3: Go to day job, drive to LA, fly to San Francisco
March 4: 1 day of GDC
March 5, 12:00am: Fly to Boston
March 6-8: 3 days of PAX East booth
After all that, I feel like I earned a few months of less intense game dev and more importantly, game playing. I made some serious progress toward my goal of beating FTL with every ship on Hard. There’s only a few left but they are HARD. I also spent some time trying other casual games such as Tales of Maj’Eyal, Hotline Miami 2, Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, and The Yawhg.
The best part about the last 2 months has been the freedom to explore new prototypes without being constrained by a particular project or feeling guilty about not working on a game. I dabbled with 2 prototypes, a sandbox for testing my emotional NPC model and a cyberpunk story generator.
The emotional NPCs, despite being destined for a cyberpunk game of my own, ended up in a Victorian simulation of 5 manors populated by their owners and servants. Conveniently the manors and their occupants are enumerated A-E. While I got the sandbox built, I didn’t make much progress on the complex emotional memories yet. I’ll be continuing to tinker with this as the mood strikes me.
I’m more focused on the cyberpunk story generator and what may come of it. My ideas for procedural narrative, paired with the emotional simulation, go back to 2010 when I first had the terrifyingly time-consuming idea for an infinite RPG. Years later, now that I’ve actually made some decently successful attempts at making games, I feel more comfortable starting to explore that original idea in some smaller-scoped projects.
I’m also still pursuing the idea of a more traditional game, a sidescrolling shooter set in an alien jungle. The alien life is composed from triangles while the human technology is made from rectangles, emphasizing their different origins. I’m still working on the design and color but I’m happy with the improvements in my second draft of the jungle scene. I think it’s good enough to start designing the alien creatures that are camouflaged by the bright plant patterns.
I still have some responsibilities toward Social Justice Warriors that I’ve been addressing off and on over the past month. I pushed several bug fixes to Steam and I’m planning another semi-major update and 25% off sale coming May 11th for the game’s 1-year anniversary. It’s been a tough year for a lot of people since the game first released on itch.io. More on that in another post.
