no promises

Decided to upload some old screenshots of other projects ive had laying about. I have two, the first is called "Steve Reich presents...Table For Two". I don't actually have this project anymore and sadly these are the only two screenshots I still have of it, but I remember being super proud of what was there. Losing the project kinda kicked me back into this non game making lull again, sadly.

The second one is called "The curious adventure of Zippity Treason". I don't remember where the name came from but for some reason I had this idea of making something that was completely non interactive. As in you pressed a couple buttons at the start and then the game just, did its own thing for the rest of the journey while you watched it.

If it weren't obvious enough, this never really got past these three screenshots, namely because I had no idea what to do to begin with and how itd even work. Making what is essentially a self contained tv show in tgf is quite a daunting task, and I only realized it after i got past the initial screens that actually have interaction on them. Thus, nothing ever actually came out of this, but hey, its a neat thing to look at anyway.

Ends with a nice throwback to HOLIDAY RUNNER, with the owl warning Windlebee (that's you!) that there's no interactivity from this point forward. Probably because theres nothing actually there in the game files. How ironic that someone who adores the heck out of the Multimedia (aka Interactive Television) era tried to make something entirely non interactive. My best guess is my thoughts at this point were that, considering I constantly make these non interactive bits of klikart in the level editors, why not try making a game that pretty much completely consists of that?

Now that, in itself, gives me the idea for an art gallery type program in tgf. Ooh, I feel those creative juices flowing already!!

I downloaded godot like three weeks ago and it is really good and really quick for making games once you figure it out. Also, performance has not been an issue for me at all so far which is nice.
Being able to make a game in a couple of days instead of weeks or months is extremely thrilling and I am making a lot of them.
Now I am making a new slightly longer game called Salt Bug, which will be a platformer game. When I first started making it I had intentions to include a lot of metaphysical themes, but I kinda got distracted and now I've forgotten what they were, so before I can finish it, I need to remember what they were.

thinking about what i used to do here in combination with returning to tgf1, making stuff with no real aim or purpose. part of the reason why i stopped making klik things must be motiviation issues. along with the obvious lack of inspiration to create something that you can actually play? maybe. the problem comes in that i can create interesting looking scenes, but i struggle when it comes to adding some sort of interactive element to it. the things that made my old games interesting to play have kind of gone.

i think another factor in it all might also be pinned down to how whenever i had something going that i really liked, i accidentally lost the files for it not too soon after due to not backing it up or something. take that "GAMEVISION" thing i posted about a couple times back in 2014/15. that thing wouldve been a neat artsy thing that takes place in an unusually small window for a klik game. or even one i never posted about here, "table for two", which imo was one of the funniest and most finely produced things ive ever done, only for it to be officially lost to the sands of time. i should fish out those tweets again.

and then we also come to the collab with mno. both of us are incredibly proud of what we have there as it is, but i hit a point somewhere that caused me to just be unable to continue. at the same time, mno also had some issues, but she's since continued making games whilst ive sat in the background not really doing anything. so mental health also comes into this a bit too, i guess. ive contributed some writing to her newest game, which she might have posted by now but im not too sure. youll probably be able to tell which lines.

regardless i wanted to have a look back at my contributions to this site specifically, as well. maybe starting from the top. another factor that powered my klik games was the non caring surreal-ish humour, something which i feel ive kind of lost. i look back on things like delciious and shit like that and wonder what i was even doing. i mean delciious is fairly self aware because its literally the first thing i ever made and its awful, house runner is alright ish maybe. but then you have the random things like evil faces midi player, which is literally an injoke between me and smedis2 at the time and nothing else.

its equally annoying that what id consider one of my finest actual games you can play is 18, which has this really embaressing birthday song to my then-boyfriend, who not too soon after that broke up with me because he supposedly thought he loved me but in reality didnt, due to. some reason? i have no fucking clue about that and needless to say i was pretty hurt by it at the time, but i kept the game up because i was rather proud of it. we eventually drifted apart and ive not spoken to him in like 5 years so oops. i wish i couldve updated it so it had a better name and didnt have the birthday song in there but. hey.

the other thing id consider to be my best work would probably be nice ass baby? theres something about that game which not only flows really well but just has good design in general. its bizarre, it sometimes doesnt work properly and the ending is unnessicarily hard and requires the most precision key presses ever. im really proud of it despite it pretty much being complete and utter garbage.

a problem thats stuck with me from since those times is id get a cool idea for something, announce that i was gonna do this idea and NEVER do it. it's happened multiple times now. possibly the only one ive actually enacted on is a music podcast which takes material from the noise-arch collection on archive org. but regardless. house runnner is probably the one popular game i made at least back then, and for good reason. its a fast paced slide into chaos that barely makes any sense and is the perfect candidate for this website in general. certainly not something to show off, but it fits the aesthetic this website goes for.

naturally i started going about reeling off ideas for the second house runner to various people online. still not done it. ive also mostly forgotten the ideas to it as well. however, i did make two "runner" spinoffs. theres one ive since lost completely, but was for youtuber azuritereaction called "dez runner". he played it and still has the video up on his channel, along with a video of him playing house runner. i think he thought positively of them but who fucking knows at this point lmao.

after dez runner comes holiday runner, featuring the singular mr picken. it loosely follows the exact same pattern has house runner but with different events and the obtaining of a mysterious item called "CRUM", which appears to just be a large ball that says "CRUM". its probably the one thing i still reference every now and then, with the captain "never forget crum". bless it.

suspiicious is probably one i still like quite a bit too. just this really extensive sleuthing job, only for it to cut short and end with a segment that plays the same as delciious. its this kind of dumb humour that gets me quite well. same with the hanging man, which was just a college project that the teachers SOMEHOW let me get by with despite it barely meeting the criteria. i think i put either the old id software or microsoft office address in that thing too. heh.

oh, and cant go forgetting about the classic "hank hill shoots things in the back", a sequel/remake of a previous game that i attempted to make at 2am back when klik of the month was a (regular) thing. im pretty proud of this one too, theres a lot of effort put into it to make sure it actually plays well and is relatively fun. it's probably the most gamey game, more so than 18. there even used to be an online high score board before clickteam took the site down, which is a shame.

then theres my twine games. you have rogue shaving pimps, which was this bizarre game done for a jam that i cant remember anything about. it goes places it really shouldnt go and i regret having a large chunk of it in there because it couldve been so much better. theres also birthday bish which is literally just a full play by play of my 18th birthday, that also includes useful tips for spreading marmite. and then you have the mess that is crealink, which is the last "game" i posted here. if you cant tell, i love being artsy as hell, its a feel and aesthetic that i adore. sluggish morss is one of my favourite game series, even. the problem with crealink is that its entirely stream of conciousness writing that doesnt actually go anywhere or mean anything. id love to actually make something that just, feels like youre in a dream with how it flows and sounds, while still being vaguely coherent with plot.

then theres also my blog posts of yore, a few of them ive definitely deleted because i remember there being way more than whats currently there. im pretty much ashamed of everything below this and my other recent post lmao. start from the top; the glorious trainwrecks video project. i still think this is a really cool idea regardless of how inconceivable it is. imagine, it'd basically be like classics of game but its just embracing every single aspect of the game with pure love.

then we have the really forced and awkwardly created "backstory" to house runner which explains the key collecting part. im striking that out as noncanon now, btw. after that we have my discovery of the fantastic game creation tools website which has a ridiculously extensive list of game engines and shit like that. im still impressed by it today. its even still being updated, amazingly. anyway.

here we go. this is the awful one that i take back every word on. i have no idea what the fuck i was on when i wrote "monologue 2" but i regret it deeply. its just a massive post of me being just a pure an utter fun ruining asshole because i wasnt used to new people coming to the site. its a public post thats literally denouncing the actions of another user that can /literally see that post in full/. glorious planewrecks, a site where theres all manner of free to use assets etc sounds great, even if opengameart exists, bc then you have more choice. the concept of gathering everyone together so they each make a single level which then is combined into a game sounds phenomenal and fascinating, it could lead to something really interesting. i remark about other events before beginning to talk shit on ANOTHER new user at the time. this time 2013 me berated them for uploading all their old games dating all the way back to when they were a kid (which is amazing that theyve managed to keep all that saved and usable tbqh). i played one of the games, and talked about how it wasnt great and then berated them for asking for donations and pretending to be a software company.

so two things to the above paragraph. first, go fuck yourself 2013 me, you're an disgusting arsehole. second, reha soft and drblowhole20, if you two are still kicking about on here: i'd like to finally apologize for my mean spirited words on that blog post. they were entirely unneeded and im deeply ashamed of ruining your fun.

the remainder of my blog posts from that point are just vague teasers of games that never happened. as previously mentioned, "GAMEVISION" was lost due to me not backing it up, as was whatever "PoP" was. also notable is me starting to use they/them pronouns and officially mentioning it in a post, which is cool. still usin em.

and finally theres the teasers for the game me and mno are doing. the first teaser still looks absolutely amazing and i might have to reuse it for whenever we finally post that thing. second teaser is obviously rushed. i hope to resume work on it at some point. its sat at this one place for about 3 years, without me being able to continue it. whenever it does arrive though, itll be the one thing im the most proud of. aside from being a fantastic work of art (imo), itll stand as this amazing trophy of beating my motivational issues and being able to finish what i start.

and that, for me, will make everything worth it.

- avery

looking back at my previous blog posts and im such an idiot lmao

anyway im not promising anything this time, i need to stop being molyneux 2.0 already. me and mno are still interested in bringing out the thing we were working on a couple years back (the screenshot isnt it and nor is it done) but life is still in the way. that and motivation. everything else i previously posted has pretty much been lost. ideally i would like to get back into doing things again since making dumb klik games for this site was really fun.

i love you gt, you were the community that introduced me to the software that finally let me create video games, even if they were awful pieces of crap that tried too hard to be funny (and succeeded in being funny). ill never forget you, even if ive dropped off of klikking for a while.

its funny because ive noticed i seem to come back at least once every year. most likely having remembered that this place exists as well as klik. the power of good memories driving me to reappear once again only to vanish a day after. *shrug* my memory is not great and depression can get a hold of you p bad too (starting therapy for that soon so, yeah)

man i made this a real downer huh? oops

Stream of Pretentiousness on itch.io

I'm starting to get antsy with this project. For me it's hard to keep any one creative thing going on a daily basis because my mind bounces around to so many different places (as you might have observed). And I need breaks like anyone else, so I'm planning to take at least a week off after I've completed a month's worth of entries. Maybe that'll be the time to revamp the cover image and other aspects of branding, plus institute private early access to new updates for my Patreon supporters.

Being antsy, I naturally thought "Why don't I just hammer out a bunch of daily twines on one day, and just sit back and release them. That'll buy me a couple days where Stream of Pretentiousness doesn't get in the way of other things."

I decided that was against the spirit of the project. The point is to force myself to use skills like scope control and time management to make daily work on this project sustainable, not to slip into using crunch and major waves of effort, then letting myself burn out.

Still, in the next iteration of this I think it would be healthier to make 5 updates per week, not 7.

Today's entry is probably the sloppiest one so far, because I happened to be awake when the clock passed midnight, and I wanted to get a headstart on my goals for the day. It feels a bit like bending the rules to do 2 of these updates in the same continuous stretch of wakefulness, so I'll try not to do it again.

I just uploaded today's chapter of Stream of Pretentiousness, bringing the count up to 12 (unless I need to count again)!

This chapter deals with my emotional response to getting so many new Patreon supporters in such a short time after coming out as queer to my family/friends. I'm not sure it does justice to both the positive and negative ways in which the experience was overwhelming. If anything, it emphasizes the positive, which is fine by me because absolutely everyone has been amazing about the whole thing!

P.S. I'm considering making Stream of Pretentiousness available to patrons only, or at least giving patrons early access to new chapters. Basically the game would cost $1/month. (Making money from it might give me a strong enough incentive to keep going longer.) Any followers have an opinion on that?

Stream of Pretentiousness on itch.io

I'm making a new chapter of an experimental Twine game every day. As of posting, there are 5 chapters and I haven't missed a day. I'd fiddled around in Twine before, but not much, so I'm really learning as I go. My goal with this project is to break down the mental barriers telling me my work needs to be perfect, polished, while also being unoffensive to every conceivable player (because I do value accessibility in my games highly—but that can become a big encumbrance).

So far it's also been a place to express my inner thoughts, process my life, and explore my issues with gender.

I heard about this community forever ago and it's been on the back of my mind. I thought I'd give it a shot and actually share here now that I have a project which is such a good fit.

See you tomorrow!

Hasn't been a while, isn't it? Guess not, because my last blog post didn't even get a comment, that shows i'm likely fading from previous popularity.
Well, you know, regarding the plans for a possible Mr. Cat visual novel game, is that i've decided to make a transition to the Twine engine. It won't be made as a visual novel because it seems now an odd idea for making a visual novel that is not a dating sim with pigeons like Hatoful Boyfriend, the story is going to be darker and a sort of a 80s adventure game reminiscent of Shadowgate, but it's not even going to be a "real" text adventure because i totally suck at making text inputting games. It really makes you forget about the terms used to move onwards, so it will be a hypertextual adventure!

The game i'm going to do at some time still won't be Mr. Cat IV, it's going to focus on a extended universe of the Mr. Cat franchise with many new characters and possibly there might be less funny stuff because i've started writing the plot and it's already going gritty. It will focus on Sergeant Duck, the main character of the spin-off, with a very sad backstory. The rest won't be revealed because there's 99% chances it's story is told in lots and lots and lots of words than the other Mr. Cat entries, of course, it's not going to be made in Clickteam Fusion, because that engine only left many words that isn't lots like this one!

On my Mr. Cat GameJolt page (http://gamejolt.com/games/the-mr-cat-trilogy/136212) i wrote a more serious version of this blog which might explain in a different way, maybe i'd suggest that you'd read this http://gamejolt.com/games/the-mr-cat-trilogy/136212/devlog/presumable-announcement-another-spin-off-is-in-the-initial-works-3w2wuxvp after you read this blog post. Just a suggestion, because i never felt better to copy the text from that article.