Friday Rambles and Gamedev Update 2024-01-05

It’s the first Rambles of the year 2024. The holiday season is finally over. New Year, New Me. And so on. Hope your new year is going well. Mine’s okay so far.

Steam and Selling Stuff

In Selling Stuff News: The Tiger-chan Plushie Sellathon and the Steam Winter Sale are finally over! I am now out of Selling Stuff Mode, back to normal, quietly existing in my gamedev hermit cave, no longer annoying my followers with comics about how cool the Tiger-chan doll is.

Above: total tally: 734! thank you

Of course, I also bought stuff during the Winter Sale. I got:

• Shapez
• A Short Hike
• Case of the Golden Idol DLCs 1 and 2
• Well, I guess I would have bought more but I also have like a huge backlog from that big story game bundle I got about two weeks ago, so I’m waiting for the next sale to get other wishlisted games

I played some Shapez. I really liked how low pressure, low stakes it was. Just making your big conveyor belt mega widget factory thingie without time or resource limits.

Speaking of Steam, how about them Steam Awards Winners? Congrats to them.

I was busy this week. I had real life 2024 stuff to take care of. I went to Costco. I jogged. I got a parking ticket. I went to a nice lakeside park for the first time and parked in a big ol’ parking lot but being unfamiliar with the place I couldn’t find the pay station so I figured I’d just pay on the way out, and the Parking Police didn’t like that. Whatever.

Wherein I brag about my new laptop

This was not an incredibly productive week for me as far as raw gamedev output goes, but I did more stuff on the, um, infrastructure side of things.

I got a new Macbook Pro. I hope my business will one day financially recover from this investment. But it’s nice to have a Macbook for work again. I spent a day setting up the environment, installing all the software I need, logging into all the accounts, and fixing newline headaches in git because all of Gamemaker’s metadata files get automatically updated with Unix or Windows style line endings whenever you open them in Mac or Windows respectively, causing git to think 300k lines of code just changed.

Above: git add --renormalize .

Interestingly, even though I was already debating getting a new laptop for doing work, I wouldn’t have considered getting a Mac for doing any actual game coding, because I’d always had a terrible time trying to get the Mac Gamemaker IDE to run my game or build anything without a massive headache. But this week I got a bug report that the game didn’t run on the latest MacOS (Sonoma), so I had to use my Mac Mini (basically used solely for building the Mac build of the game) to troubleshoot and fix the bug, and during the process, I found that I was able to run the game and do actual coding and debugging without any major issues. Huh. So now I’m doing coding and dialogue writing work on Mac. I’ll probably save any major changes for when I’m back on my desktop, but I can at least test dialogue in game and add minor features and stuff while I’m away from my desk for extended periods of time (like when I’m visiting family overseas).

Actual Gamedev Stuff

I fixed an urgent Mac bug, as mentioned above. I also discovered another Mac bug, for which I have a fix checked in but haven’t released yet. I’ll probably release it later with a bunch of other fixes I’ve made for the game in general. Mac players make up like, 0.01% of the playerbase, but I’ve spent so much time fixing platform specific bugs and navigating the annoying build processes dictated by Apple and whatever. Oh well. Linux has had a way higher player count, mostly due to Steam Deck (which I’m still not verified for yet, because I think Valve hates me personally)

Above: plz valve

I wrote a lot of dialogue. I used my new laptop sitting at my dining table instead of at my desk. It kinda helped me focus gooder and I think the change in scenery helped with getting the ideas flowing. Maybe the smaller screen helped with focus too. Hopefully at this rate I’ll have most of the bonus chapter done by the end of the month. I’ll probably be focused on localization work for the base game in February to release in time for the Spring Sale (and more importantly, my big move), so I want to get as much done before then while I have time.

Wherein I run out of things to talk about

I think that’s it for the week. I feel like I’m padding out this Rambles because I don’t have anything to really say. I was mostly busy this week with real life stuff and game progress hasn’t been really anything I can share with cool screenshots or whatever, because it’s all text.

Above: actually here’s a screenshot

I’ve also been trying to make the Rambles more interesting or newsletter-worthy lately with like, lengthy walls of text about stuff I’m working on and game or media reviews or whatever, but I think that’s just making me enjoy writing the Rambles less, and the unedited nature of these posts due to the short turnaround time required makes my writing look bad (well, at least worse than usual), and more importantly it’s taking a lot of time and creative energy away from making games, which for me is my biggest priority right now. [So while I do appreciate your support very much, all I can give you in return for the near future, I think, is a short weekly changelog of “stuff I did this week.” But hopefully I can make it up to you with slightly better crafted games and art.] <- (I actually wrote this part for the substack paid subscriber crowd, for whom i started also sending weekly rambles to recently, but I already know the Patreon crowd here is already well acquainted with terrible short weekly rambles posts lol. sorry <3)

Anyway, now that the dust has settled a bit from all the holiday stuff, I think I’ll be a lot more productive next week, so it’ll hopefully be a more interesting changelog. Thanks for your support, as always! See you next week.