Friday Rambles 2025-10-31

It's the spooky Friday Rambles for Halloween 2025.

That being said, I didn't draw anything for Halloween. Oh no!

excuses

Game Dev Stuff

This week was spent actually doing game dev work. The irony about doing a lot of game dev work is that I don't have a lot of other stuff to talk about. I can try going through a list of things I did, though. A ThingDid List if you will.

1. I started maining the GameMaker Beta IDE for Mac, after learning that they fixed a lot of UI scaling related stuff that made it impossible to develop with on Mac. It worked just fine! Every time I start my Windows machine lately I take radioactive damage over time, so this was a welcome development.

2. Apparently I chose a good time to do this, because they released the new production version of the IDE with all the fixes, like, yesterday, so now I'm running something that's stable and supported.

3. I rewrote basically the entire codebase, because it had a bunch of things in it that I decided I don't want anymore, and it was getting in the way of adding anything new, because I had done it all in this really annoying and bad way. I simplified it to be way more lightweight and manageable. I feel like I've said this before. But it's actually true this time. And I've actually gotten further because I'm not fighting with this unwieldy, terrible thing.

4. Things like, handling character sprite changes, or scene transitions, or choice menu selections, or whatever, which were previously quite janky are way simpler and more stable, I think.

5. I implemented a basic settings menu so I can make sure everything works correctly, like changing text speed or sound volume or whatever. I also implemented an autosave for the settings, in a better way than I did in Game 1. Probably.

Now that the scaffolding and features for the minimum viable product is done, I can just write the dialogue and draw the sprites and it'll all work now. That's the easy part. The story and main content of the game. No problem. Practically done.

You can't really tell, but this screenshot was taken with the game running with completely rewritten innards.

I also built 2.0.6c, which has 2 bugfixes that are so inconsequential that I don't even remember what they were. I didn't mark it live yet because it's not a super important patch and I'd rather do that during mid-week when there are less people playing. I had to turn on my Windows machine to build the new patch and and was forced to update Windows and then I turned it off after finishing my work and it automatically turned itself on again overnight. It also installed some kind of weird Copilot thing I can't turn off. Using Windows is a thoroughly unpleasant experience.

Merch Stuff

I don't know if I mentioned it before but I got a cool new bag that I'm enjoying carrying things around in. I've been using it to carry merch orders when I walk to the post office. Every time I get a new order I have another excuse to carry my cool new bag outside.

Anyway, I'm going to put my laptop in the bag and carry it to a cafe or something so I can get some writing done. That's how I wrote Overtime, but I didn't have this cool bag then.

Coincidently, Tiger-chan also has a cool new bag.

The End

That's all I have for this week. I am pleased with how productive I was, but it's mostly on the backend! Going forward I'll probably have more interesting things to show, after I start writing the different scenes and set pieces and stuff.

Thanks for your support, as always! See you next week!