Week 60: Lots Of Things

Another good week!

This week I did lots of things. Here’s one:

I’ve been wanting to implement the Wave Function Collapse generation algorithm in Pico-8 for a while now! It’s an algorithm that takes a tiled sample and generates bigger samples based on the construction of the original. The results are surprising in their complexity and very good in general.

It is not yet considered as a Pico-8 Doodle because I do want to push it a little further if I can! (and I think I can)

I will be writing about it in this next week’s Doodle Insights, so look forward to that!

This week’s Doodle Insights was about thinking of colors as numbers and what that allows you to do!

It ended up longer than I intended but it was pretty fun to write! Check it out!

On Friday I made the first Itchy Friday happen!

On Itchy Friday, I ask people on Twitter for free itch.io games, I play them (if I can) and I recommend my favorites with mini-reviews! This will be probably be happening once every two weeks for now! (it was supposed to be a weekly thing but I don’t think I’ll be able to do it that often)

Anyway, I found some super good games and you really should check them out!!

Flying Pop-Pop was the main focus for this week but I couldn’t do as much as I wanted to. At least I’m finally satisfied with the different effects I added and getting there was not easy.

I also worked on a new enemy but didn’t share any gif from it yet… So here goes an weekly recap exclusivity!

Flying Pop-Pop is still set to release end June / start July but it may get delayed to a bit later in July. Because I’m gonna have some work to do.

 

Someone reached out to ask me if I did any freelance dev-ing. I answered that I’m open to opportunities… and after a few more mails, I’m taking the opportunity.

I’ve been pretty shy about contracts up to now but I actually think this is a good thing for a few reasons:

• First of all, it seems the guy wants me to have a lot of creative space, he wants me to make it my thing, which I like very much.
• Second of all, I’ve been struggling to get back to full pace since I nearly burned out towards the beginning of the year. I think this will be a very good motivation to get that pace back and hopefully keep it going after the end of this project.
• And finally, I’m obviously getting a substantial amount of income for this contract. This will help me feel better about spending money again and also buying equipment, such as the PO-20 from Teenage Engeneering! I’ve been looking at synthesizers for a few months now and I think this is a great place to start. It’s like a tiny sound-box except a hundred time better and you can make actual music with it. This will finally allow me to dive into music creation!

Of course I can’t say much about the contract itself or on the project yet, as we just agreed on it. (I may have said too much already) But I should be able to show some of it along the next few weeks and possibly talk about it in the weekly recaps. My patrons may also get more detailed info!

This however does not fully stop the development of Flying Pop-Pop or the weekly articles or the Patreon content. All of these will keep on coming, even if not always on time. Flying Pop-Pop in particular will be the most slowed down by this.

To end on a happier note, today I wrote the last Snippet Decrypt! The Snippet Decrypts were a Patreon-exclusive weekly series where I showed a snippet and then wrote about each line of it. There’s been 10 issues of it and they will stay as a Patreon-exclusive for one more month, after which I will be uploading them to this blog.

Meanwhile, I will be starting a new Patreon-exclusive series that will be less about code and more about design and systems! If that sounds interesting to you, sign up there!

 

This was a very busy week! But good!

Next week, I’ll be focusing on my new contract work! But I will also write the Doodle Insights about logic data generation! There should even be one or two Pico-8 doodles! And hopefully some progress on Flying Pop-Pop!

Have a great week!

Take care!

TRASEVOL_DOG