Hello! Big fan of Glorious Trainwrecks in the shadows, and finally encouraging myself to be active in here.

Anyway, I'm finishing my first visual (kinetic) novel, Fiestas del Pueblo. It is kind of hard for me to describe the game beyond the premise. If anything gets your attention give it a try, it will only take about 20 minutes to finish reading.

It will be out next Sunday, but I wanted to start moving it around before.

I'm open to any comment or conversation here or anywhere. Let's be friends, love you all!

https://moonlight-demon.itch.io/fiestas-del-pueblo
https://twitter.com/moonlightd3m0n/status/1564339154984603649

Stumbled across this old forum post from 2011 where someone named "ValleyBell" posted a tool called "ClickTeam Extractor" for extracting resources from ClickTeam games that seems much more advanced than my KNPUtils. Includes source code and file format documentation! Given that it's hosted as a MediaFire link from 2011 it's a miracle that it's still online, so I'm mirroring it here.

Hoo! Never use the blog feature sorry.
anyway i spent the last 3 months writing a story about a cat n mouse who fall in love!
https://twitter.com/marikeDrawinge/status/1526189120195661824
https://gisbrecht.itch.io/the-love-of-gemma-and-ofelia
please promo if you can i spent 3 months on this >w<

and comment!? on itch. or here if you'd like
and for the first time, you can pay me for a thing because im not infringing on mario...yahoo

...turning a fable on its head!

FREE (no ads/grind/shop)

iOS https://apps.apple.com/app/id1558679967
Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.WonderingStar.Impossible_Isles
PC & Mac https://wondering-star.itch.io/impossible-isles

Impossible Isles is an original daily turn-based map-like puzzler for everyone. Just place tiles on a map according to simple rules to create a tiny world and score.
But every day the Imp resets the world - a new pack on tiles, dealt in the same order all day. A new starter map and wildcard. Even the Imp's path is the same all day so there's no luck, everyone plays the same content each day.

The game has a few secrets up it's sleeve so check your score against friends on the daily leaderboard (iOS/Android only).

FREE (no ads/grind/shop)

iOS https://apps.apple.com/app/id1558679967
Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.WonderingStar.Impossible_Isles
PC & Mac https://wondering-star.itch.io/impossible-isles

Impossible Isles is an original daily turn-based map-like puzzler for everyone. Just place tiles on a map according to simple rules to create a tiny world and score.
But every day the Imp resets the world - a new pack on tiles, dealt in the same order all day. A new starter map and wildcard. Even the Imp's path is the same all day so there's no luck, everyone plays the same content each day.

The game has a few secrets up it's sleeve so check your score against friends on the daily leaderboard (iOS/Android only).

Despite my lack of updates, only some of my lack of progress is because of Elden Ring. I can't help it. The game lets me marry a living doll. I have a type.

That said, I'm 100% going to miss the deadline but I don't care because I've been enjoying working on this game. My most recent efforts have been focusing on making a vehicle controller for the hoverbike thing the protagonist is going to be jetting around on and lemme tell ya, it has been an ordeal.[i] My first attempts basically just involved using invisible wheel colliders and having those provide all the functionality I needed, but it turns out that Unity's wheel colliders are kinda... awful for that? Figuring out what their specific dampening values and everything need to be is also an arduous process because they're all expecting ranges I'm expected to just guess I suppose.

My next solution was to use raycasts and physics forces. Figuring that the best way to ensure the bike from flipping would be to have some spread out forces, I put four of them around the bike and lowered the center of mass so that it was always inclined to stay upright. This [i]kinda worked, but it meant that applying forces at positions for steering had to have special offsets, and that resulted in weird torque behaviours that were a nightmare to diagnose and even more of a nightmare to code.

Not fun.

Then, one night, as I was tossing and turning in bed, I awoke in a start. Not because of inspiration, but because I'm prone to nightmares. To work myself down from the post-nightmare anxiety, I started thinking of new ways to get this to work, and I finally settled on a hybrid solution of an idea I had the night before and a new one as well.

Instead of using four raycasts, I use two, front and back. Next, I lock the bike's rotation along the z-axis and only ever change that with direct access from code to make the steering look "cool" by giving it a bit of a banking effect. Then, on top of all this, I added some dampening physics to it all. The front raycast gets a low dampening value to make it extra bouncy, and the rear raycast gets a high one to make it more rigid. In a way, it sorta recreates the suspension of a motorcycle! Neat!

After that, I added some extra quality of life stuff. Instead of immediately losing forward thrust in the air, I made it so that if you spend too much time in the air (about half a second), you start to have the amount of thrust the accelerator gives you drop to half its strength, meaning you can't fly around forever. I also added some functionality to make the bike automatically balance to face the horizon after a second or so in the air to help keep the player from flipping around all over the place. In the end, after far too many lines of code (both included, commented out, and deleted) I finally have something I think I really enjoy zipping around on, which is all I could really ever ask for!

Motion sickness warning on this video, by the way. I'm still mucking about with the camera system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIZVrT5BFNA

I just think it's neat!

So! I decided to take part in the Open World Jam and the first realization I had was "this is a terrible idea."

However, that's pretty useless when it comes to getting things done, so I threw it away. Instead of focusing on that, I decided to focus first on streamlining the process of making terrain in Unity, only to be met with the fact that the Unity terrain shader is... kinda awful.

There's constant repeating textures, horrible smearing along sharp inclines, basically everything that drives me up the wall when I play an open world game! Luckily, I am very smart, or at least persistent. The first thing I wanted to tackle was getting rid of the awful tiling pattern since I prefer to create natural looking environments, and repeating patterns in nature generally aren't built along explicit grids. The solution to this problem is something known as Stochastic Sampling.

The idea behind stochastic sampling, at least from a very simplified perspective, is to tile things using a triangle grid with semi-random offsets and blend between the grid elements. If you want a better explanation than I'm able to give, there's a very in-depth paper here (Google Drive link to a PDF). It seems daunting at first, but with a little bit of finagling, I was able to get much better results.

As you can see, the tiling is effectively invisible! The downside to this is that it requires three texture samples to pull off, but even integrated hardware is so overwhelmingly beefy and bandwidth capable enough that that's not much of an issue. On top of that, stochastic sampling means I can get away with lower resolution textures in the first place. Unfortunately, we can still see some very ugly smearing. Fortunately, this is also much easier to fix because all it requires is something known as Triplanar Mapping.

Triplanar mapping is much easier to explain than stochastic sampling, thank god. Effectively, you're projecting the textures towards three different normal axes and blending them: X,Y, and Z. Again, this requires sampling three times, which is some overhead, but thanks to the stochastic sampling there's not a terrible amount of overhead. It DOES mean that my texture coordinates are now in World Space, which takes some adjustments, but by applying this method, we get some suddenly wonderful results!

Smearing? Gone! Tiling? Gone! Self-confidence? Through the roof baybeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Most of what was left was really just generic cleanup and making things play nice with Unity's terrain tools. By including a reference to the _Control texture sampler in my shader, I'm able to use four environment textures and paint them the same way I would a standard Unity terrain, but with none of the gross texture distortions. I can even paint holes in the texture by adding the _TerrainHolesTexture sampler. This is a massive boon even if it took a couple days to get to work because it massively streamlines dealing with terrain.

Now there is one last problem: authoring terrain in Unity is a dreadful experience. You really don't get much control over the specifics of the terrain, such as height and other features, and making terrain stamps only gets you partly there. Rather than let Unity control me like some kinda game engine cop, I cut it out of that part of the equation and took to Blender instead. Really there's nothing amazing going on here as I haven't gotten terribly far, but the general process is

1. Create a terrain in Blender
2. Join the meshes together in a big mess
3. Export that mesh to Unity
4. Use a free utility called Object2Terrain to convert that mesh into a terrain

In a perfect world (men like me would not exist, but this is not a perfect world) I would simply export a heightmap from Blender and use that heightmap to drive the Unity terrain, but Unity's terrain only accepts heightmaps in RAW format, which is notoriously difficult to export to from just about anything aside from expensive terrain authoring tools. Thankfully, Object2Terrain works a treat.

That's all for now, I suppose! I'm very pleased with the progress I've made, since it makes content authoring a lot easier on the terrain front, and that's always a tricky spot with open world games.

so I recently stumbled upon some youtube video and it got me thinking..
thinking about stupid stuff that is so this will be just a ramble mostly
feel free to ignore it

I sort of remember searching for FPS games or list of FPS games and somehow
Chub Gam 3-D and Red Babe usually found their ways onto these lists
and I mean among the big ones like hanging out with Doom and Duke3D
the greats there was usually Chub Gam for some reason
and i'm not sure why it was selected among the many other GCS games
but to this day you can find it on wikipedia, it seems to be everywhere
(I wouldn't be surprised if congress has a floppy of Chub Gam for being
culturally significant)

and I'm not pro or against Chub Gam it's just strange to me how it seems
to be everywhere .. maybe it's just me

another similar anomaly is that at a time I remember nearly every game
developer interviews mentioned that the guy or gal has worked on
Project Gotham Racing in the past in some sort of role
so it was just like some random game and they would mention
XY or so and so has previously on the team for Project Gotham Racing
apparently everyone and their dog has worked on Project Gotham Racing
which also has nothing to do with batman it's some sort of other Gotham
i'm not exactly sure about that part

other similar anomalies:
- whenever Tim Curry appears on a talk show he always gets introduced
as the guy from Rocky Horror Picture Show (despite being on hundreds of other
projects, movies, tv shows, games whatever since then)

- Mega Man always ends up as called the "Blue Bomber" and it makes no sense
afaik the games didn't bomb and he is not using bombs in the games
I mean he is not exactly bomberman who literally uses bombs

Has anyone experienced or remember any similar things?

I came here looking for an old game someone made and decided to make a blog post!!!

I'm still around and still making games! I do miss my trainwreck days. I've thought about going back to it now and then, but my life has changed too much since dem wild west daze.

Hope everyone here is doing well!!! Thank you for keeping the trainwreck dream alive!!!

in contrast to my last post, i write this, and ive written it a number of times and closed the tab, losing my progress.
in contrast to the utter artistic pessimism in the last post.
i went on an art residency in 2019, to the island of nisyros, a round island with a volcano and just about two small towns. 11 days, we had two masters students who spoke fluent greek, 3 undergraduates, and me- i'd just graduated in july. my grandmother had just died, and everything was clearing up, and this trip was my first dip into post graduate life. before the burden of the arts space, and finding work, i had this. my gran would have been proud of me, for certain, a free holiday...
we arrive in rhodes, stay a night, have breakfast in a terrace courtyard- with a whole lime tree making up the ceiling, a red canary, eggs and ham. we get a ferry to nisyros. its a big boat, ice cold inside. we turn up on the marina at night and a guy on a moped attends to us. he was a bit of a slimeball, ominous guy, i didnt trust him at first and he didnt trust me.
we got a car ride to the bath house, where we were staying. the driver mentions his one available reference, manchester united- it struck me pretty hard, because i noticed how out-of-touch i was with reality. whenever football is mentioned, its like im back in school, and that ball hits me square in the head again, i realise i dont have a clue about it and that makes me out of touch.
we have 11 days to do whatever. id brought a crumb of hashish in a pair of shorts, so i was savouring it. listening to the leaked Kanye West Yandhi album. every now and then, i would catch recommendations through the radio, or through my new friends. Trash Island by drain gang was released at this time too.

the first night, i think, was our first exhibition opening in the basement gallery space. i was in greece- so i didnt make it, but my girlfriend at the time was there. come to think of it, she didnt talk much about it, but she probably couldnt get a chance between me gushing about the trip. to be fair to me, it felt incredible.
there was a small restaurant / taverna attached to the bath house. i spent the first day combing the beach and swimming in the ocean, i hadnt done for many years. cutting into those waves was damn scary, envigorating, always though they would push me back to the rocks.
days after, we meet with the mayor in his office. all their PCs are running Windows Vista. he agrees to let us have an exhibition at the archaeological museum, we'd visited days prior looking to hold an event there. we had basically turned up and demanded a venue, but this didnt matter to me, i couldnt feel self conscious, i didnt know the language. and everyone was kind, the mayor, the curator at the museum.
they were already busy, we couldnt have the interior space, so they let us install in the courtyard.
the mayor also invited us to a celebration event at a monastery at the top of the mountain. they cooked goat, i think, or a cow, and rice.
we cooked in a small outbuilding on a raised area behind the bath house buildings. the first few nights, having coffee, ham, we would walk into mandraki to buy pastries in the morning. all made by sweet, stoic grandmas.
there was a group of these grandmas at the celebration, headstrong, strategising on how to serve the guests. it struck me heavily because it reminded me of my gran, as that was the person she was too, just on the other side of the equator. i cried about it silently for nearly two hours, luckily it was dark, but my friends noticed when the lights were around. i told them i was mourning.

i would get an iced frappe from the taverna in the morning, smoke, listen to the owner groan along to Chelsea Wolfe. i would swim when i wanted.
my artwork was rudimentary. found object sculptures, glowing pigment, photographs, lots of photographs. i have a habit of finding ephemeral items and holding them up like relics, and then i inadvertently destroy them somehow along the way. i would trace images straight off my laptop screen in ink pen, or pencil, on japanese rice paper, mounted on aged archival paper. i'd found it in my grans shed when we were clearing out her home. it was a dark yellow from being in storage for so long. as soon as i got there i was determined to remember everything. it was like stepping into a fantasy! a dream. a bath house, i sat in the water, heated by geothermal energy, i floated in it. marble bath tubs.
we would eat at the taverna in the evening. play cards. one day, we took turns reading characters dialogue from macbeth. i was him, watching all my friends fight and die around me, before dying myself. poison! duels! how cruel.
the later half of the week was filled by hosting the exhibition. there wasnt much of a lazy-morning feeling when we had to go into town for breakfast. better to be in town before 12pm, because even in october, making that journey in full view of the sun was debilitating.
the exhibition went successfully. children arrived and stayed for as long as they were allowed. some spoke excellent english. i gave them all my glowing items, bones, stones, sticks. they loved them- all bright pink. tourists visited, but they mostly wanted to talk about themselves. locals visited, but they seemed to struggle finding things to say. even the mayors bodyguard, the guy who met us on the marina the first night, arrived to share his opinion.
some work on display was undoubtedly well made, beautiful. mine was not exactly so. and as a result the henchman stayed on mine a bit longer than others, looking at it intently. maybe he was picking it apart. weighing up what was good and what wasnt, just like i do when i look at artwork. he had seen other shows before, hes searching, on some kind of path. id seen a cross and some rosary beads wrapped on the handle of his moped , scuffed plastic, and some fancy metal-alloy brake locks. this is a swell for me, where the story swells, paths, journey, riding, spiritually, half-trapped and half protected by masculinity, one day i can put all that into proper words.

i dont see anything wrong with presenting half-good artwork... as long as it helps you appreciate what youre looking at more. its all in pieces, dont condescend an audience, let them see their bigger picture, let them interpret, thats a good thing.

the last few days were spent invigilating the exhibition, sat in the hot sun. we rented a car, and went to a beach far away from the towns. it was just us there. coarse sand, i could see every grain. they stuck to me like armor. i found a fragment of obsidian on the ground, wish fulfilled. i could see the clouds of the milky way when i looked up at the stars at night. but the steam was spent, all hot air, we were revolving again, down the barrel back to somewhere else. a new life, back at home, NEET now, but thats a boring story for another time.

this is when i decided to make games. it has been a twisted path, definitely weird, ive had to turn away from things that werent right. but its all good now, i think. we shall see.
i re-built the bath house and marina, its in a Unity project. it has a unique visual style, nothing like reality, but i love it still. i still work on it, the trip was in 2019, so its been nearly 2 years now. its no game, its just a place. dont know how to package it, ship it, gamify it, i dont want to. ill just keep working on it and it should fall into place.
ive spent a few solid months work on the Loutra virtual space. ive been learning unity at the same time, unreal engine, releasing other things, learning 3D. it will come out one day, and it will be a big picture. i promise

apologies for present / past tense mixing