birdwatchers united / transmittens; nero’s day at disneyland / abiku. shipping tomorrow or the next day.

tif made me french toast last night! thankss for ANGRY BUNNY:

we watched “the castle of cagliostro” which i have been TOTALLY mispronouncing and did some wii fit. tetris slept under a pile of clean laundry. i cemented the evening as a perfect good times by forgetting to set the alarm.

reminds me that i have quite a few pictures backed up from some adventures that need posting. should also help me to disengage from game dev for awhile so that i can get some tapes out.

so, more to come. REAL LIFE STUFF.

was going through all the new art assets for cloud cats and it struck me how out of place the player sprite looked. it makes sense; the first version of green cat was done in about five minutes back when i envisioned CLOUD CATS as a short one-level shmup.

i like the third eye in the new version a lot better, as well as the tentacles; i toyed with the idea of adding a cat mouth, but discarded it because it looked pretty silly. i’m going to animate the tentacles and try to add some light emitting from the third eye for the psi blasts. the idle, charge, and both psi animations are done; i like this a lot better:

i’m going to ditch the radiating square chunks and just make different colored auras to represent the player’s conduct; also i will make something appropriately dramatic for the cat kythe build-up. i just replaced the graphics for the portals recently; i’ll post some screenshots when i have time.

i think i will probably redo the sprites for the clouds and trees from fruit snack patagonia, as well; they were made before the style of the game really started to emerge. then i need to finish it, because i have too many projects going concurrently. particularly, i need to be working on music stuff and sending out tape orders. i’m afraid i have become decidedly deadbeat about the label and i need to get it back to a place where it doesn’t feel like a chore and also so i don’t feel like i am letting down THE UNIVERSE.

kind of happy with this. boy version.

girl version.

cave hopper. this is the biggest variety. maybe. i am going to make their behavior similar to ants. there will be a small fungivore that also lives in the caves that will act as a prey animal for the hoppers.

hoppers are basically communal headcrabs. of the deeeeep.

a mural that offers a significant revelation to our star-crossed protagonist; i’ll be making a hi-res version to show when you examine it. can’t talk about it too much without spoiling plot elements. it’s interesting thinking about how to go about delivering “plot” in a procedural dungeon crawl, but i think i have a nice solution. versnoof has a mythos building up around it that is refreshing and fun to write. it’s nothing that hasn’t been done by other people, but i am still pretty excited about it. as with cloud cats, it’s been fun to let the story emerge as i make design decisions, rather than the other way around. the game is much creepier than i intended when i started making it.

wishing i did more tiles for cloud cats, as they are fun to make and it’s nice to have limitations to work with. making versnoof art is comparatively fast and easy to keep consistent. still, i love all the art i’ve made for cloud cats so far and i think it will look better in an installation format (it’s much louder, for one). versnoof will be an alone-in-the-dark game. it  has been good for cloud cats because it has clarified a lot of the graphic design. i know now that i’m going to have to replace the sprites for the portals, among other things; should force me to write better code for handling the portal animations and hitboxes, too.

here is some blurry phone-camera concept art:

for versnoof (the hero i like the best is basically me, down to the flannel and the satchel. i’ll be making a girl version as well. go egoism):

for cloud cats:

some old obsessions there. nice to finally give them life. EATS TAPES (the boombox) is from fruit snack patagonia, which doesn’t make much sense.

basic walls and floors for versnoof. i did them in greyscale because the main character has ingested special shaman foods to let him (or her) see the vibrations of the crystals that will kill versnoof. so the tiles will probably flicker in different colors.

my head hurtss.

GET ALL TREASURRE

took a little break today to try my hand at some procedural generation. this is a little cave generator that i hacked together using code from a number of the smarter dudes at the TIGSOURCE forums; mainly pgil and chevyray. you can navigate it with the arrows and press ‘z’ when you reach the exit to generate a new cave. treasure chests are randomly generated based on distance from the start and size of the room.

eventually this will be a game where the protagonist, in fulfillment of the vision quest set forth by her tribe, attempts to descend into the cave and kill the VERSNOOF, using bone darts that she fashions from its other, less lethal denizens. there will also be magic crystals.

it is nice to work with tiles, for one thing. this will be a much smaller game than cloud cats and it will not have very many scripted events. just a bunch of objects, bouncing off each other.

windows cave test here

the fruit snacks for fruit snack patagonia:

would love to show you the sprites for the orange slice and the grape cluster, but they are embedded in the game. because. yes. i made them with the sprite editor in game maker.

not really sure about the second shark, but we’ll see how it looks when it is spitting insano bullet patterns. i kind of like how spazzy it is without its bullets.

the stegosaurus is a mentalist who fires lazor beamss, which is why his mouth does not open.

I NEED TO EAT SOMETHING SO BAD.

some feathers for wolberr. happy anniversary, tif!