Looks To The Doodles

Clouds by Sally Gottschalk

Redid all the level backgrounds for my game Crazy Critters Attack!

Finally working on this project again after 7 months! I think I'm committing myself to finishing this now, I've put everything I have left to do into GitHub issues and I've started working through it all.

luna

"How do you find all these small/weird/indie games??"

Ask your friends for recommendations

Follow forums/blogs/youtubers whose job is to talk about videogames and play the games they talk about

If you play a game that you like, look up the developer and play whatever else they've made

MOST IMPORTANTLY: ACTIVELY browse storefronts like steam and itch.io YOURSELF and play/buy the games that seem interesting to you. Relying on bloggers and youtubers should only be the start of your exploration

Post about the games you play

Reblog this if it’s okay to DM you and shoot the friendship shot.

Hi! I make tiny indie games, mostly jam games. You can find me on itch.io

On this day 5 years ago, I made the very first commit of my first game, Crazy Critters Attack! Its been a very fun journey working on this project and making games in general, I'm really proud of how far I've come.

Completely reworked the in-game UI of my game Crazy Critters Attack! I chose a more industrial style for the UI with big metal buttons, caution tape and LCD screens. I also docked the level progress to the left side of the screen instead of leaving it as a weird tab below everything else. Lastly, I picked some new fonts! Before I was just using one of my computer's built-in system fonts, and now I'm using Rubik and IBM Plex Mono.

friend sent me this and ive been steaming over it all day fr

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".