What are some good GitHub alternatives that don't put license restrictions on the files in your repository? Codeberg seems popular, but I don't think they'd be happy with games with GPL code and "all rights reserved" graphics. I got a suggestion for codefloe.com - is that any good?

The Petal Crash port for Game Boy Color is now at a point where all four score attack modes completely work, and you can play a whole game to its completion and get a results screen. Multiplayer is close to fully working too. There's a lot of work left but the game being fully playable is exciting.

I commissioned @funnyhat12.bsky.social to draw some of my favorite Kirby characters as shiny rubber. I usually just get art of my own characters, but art of my characters interacting with characters I like a lot is a fun concept that I want to do more with. And it's fun to see them on their own too.

I gave Tilemap Town a feature I liked from Second Life, where each non-private map now has a URL associated with it that shows off the map and invites you to visit. Eventually I'd like to add fancier panning and zooming, and server-side map image rendering. tilemap.town/map/61 tilemap.town/map/320

Maffi is playing Wario's Woods, a basic SNES Mouse right! Commission for Nova! :3

blog.novasquirrel.com/tilemap-town... Here's another monthly Tilemap Town update - the big change was replacing the main tileset with one better designed for the platform, but I also added some client-side features (including the ability to make a list of tiles for easy access) and fixed some things

I have released a 2nd beta of my SNES audio driver. It adds transpose analysis to the compiler to detect all out-of-range notes caused by driver transpose. I've also rewritten the timer code to increase the max bytecode sleep duration to 65535 ticks. github.com/undisbelieve... #snesdev #spc700

It's been a while since I've drawn a mimiga

I've been really enjoying Kirby Air Riders and I finished the story mode yesterday. The demos were mostly focused on City Trial, but the racing modes are a lot more fun than in the original game. They feel less punishing about not playing 100% perfectly, and I think it's easier to catch up.

I love going so fast that I have a hard time not constantly ramming into walls. I guess that's the case in F-Zero too but in this situation there's no penalty for it so it's a lot more fun haha.

Did some big Tilemap Town updates recently; the main tileset was replaced with an expanded one that is actually properly set up for the way Tilemap Town does animation and autotiling, with extra variations/colors (@justthepulp.bsky.social set up the new image and I migrated the database over.)

Kirby Air Riders makes everything feel so impactful and I'm really looking forward to playing again next weekend since there will be another demo period. And then the weekend after that... the game will be out!

Implementing link cable communication in actual gameplay now, and I'm realizing that because I don't do any synchronization for the actual message transmission, I will probably want to figure out some sort of scheme to synchronize when messages *take effect* so the battle bar resets at the same time

I don't think github.com/NovaSquirrel... has any leaks, but the memory usage goes up and down in an unintuitive way and it's hard to tell if I'm using the Luau API in a safe way. Kinda wish I had some examples to look at, but Second Life is probably the only other program trying to do what I am.

Petal Crash sure has a lot of menus and screens. I've been working on setting up all the screens you'd use to configure link cable multiplayer, and getting everything properly synchronized. Board walls from Petal Crash Online are returning, and perhaps I can add brand new cursed wall options.

BLINDFOLD 🌧️

I tried Kirby Air Ride with friends, and I learned that City Trial is not fun when there's too big of a skill gap, and that racing games without strong comeback mechanics are pretty brutal against mistakes. But I'm not going to rule out enjoying the sequel until I have an opportunity to try it.

I got my Pi 4 originally with the idea that I could host stuff on it that benefited from having more RAM available than the 1 GB on my VPS, and where heavy load won't impact my site. Minecraft didn't work well when I tried it (but that was years ago, and it might not have been configured optimally)

I found a shower demo while exploring Second Life's 2025 Halloween Shop and Hop, and the idea of going and taking a shower in a public mall after being given the opportunity to do so was way too funny not to do. And then I realized that using this avatar of Sir Kibble from Kirby makes it funnier.

I hadn't been using my Pi 4 with a fan because the fan I had eventually started making concerning noise, but it seems to get absurdly hot without it, especially when compiling something. I think I fried it with static while moving it to a new case, and a new Pi 4 didn't work with my old OS install.

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

In addition to the usual "wait, is that Comic Sans?" I've ended up with "wait, is this the Chicago font?" because I like old games and computers. I just recognized Chicago in a Pokémon comic page I was linked.

As always I've been doing little Tilemap Town updates in the background; recently I tidied up the site a bit, made it so that you need permissions to read someone else's text item, made it so that you can restrict private messages to specific people, improved the login screen, and more stuff.

I was curious if writing to VRAM during horizontal blank was more associated with later Game Boy games like I thought it might be, but Tetris from 1989 does it so that technique has been used right from the very start. Though that's separate from whether or not it's common, or when it was common.

Finally got my link cable setup in Petal Crash for Game Boy Color set up to the point where a connection is actually established, but I'm not happy with the amount of latency in sending over a message. I know a few things I can try, but going much faster might require tricky synchronization stuff.

I wanna get a group together for the Splatoon 3 Splatfest next weekend. I'm planning on being on the ghost team. Is anyone interested in joining on that?

Mimigas are absolute underrated CUTIES and I had such a wonderful time drawing this lil guy <3 ✏️ Commission for lagombi! Thank you so much! 💖

keychain comms!!! please message me if youre interested or have any questions. these will be open until around the 15th or if i get a Lot of interest (so more than like, 5 slots)

New post: “Look, just fucking use Mastodon already” https://giants-club.net/articles/just-use-mastodon/ A short, unnecessarily profane rant about modern social media, not really serious but not really a joke, either. With apologies to McSweeney’s.

Trying to think if there's a better use for my MediaWiki installation than documenting an RP group that doesn't do stuff anymore. I already set up novasquirrel.com/world/ as a standalone thing that just focuses on my own worldbuilding, and that's probably better when collaboration isn't needed.

Thinking that maybe my feelings about the viability of working without a game engine are actually influenced a lot by the strong debugging tools that you get for free by making a game that can run in Mesen, and just how simple the systems my games are built on actually are.

I got to play Sliding Blaster 2 over Mesen netplay and was surprised to see that it does support two mice that way, though mouse control isn't friendly to lag. We spent a lot of time just goofing around and pretending the bouncing characters were like the DVD logo, or moving in silly ways.

Working on the versus mode in Petal Crash for Game Boy Color again, now working on finishing the garbage mechanic. Instant drop garbage was already in because of Trash Trial, so I implemented the normal kind, with targets for where garbage will fall in a few turns. #gbdev #homebrew #gamedev

Something that happens to me pretty often as I write Game Boy code is that I'll write a conditional branch to skip over a return or a call, and then go "oh right I can just make the call/return conditional" You would think that my 6502/65816 familiarity would cause more issues but it's mostly this.

I hope SAGE 2025 gets me some feedback on Sliding Blaster 2, since I don't think many people have actually played it yet. A lot of people have told me the graphics are cute though, and compared the art style to lots of different games (none of which I've played much of.)

I've been using my Raspberry Pi Zero W as a baseline to compare against for writing software that works on very weak hardware. Seems that if I want to do that, and have a GUI alongside arbitrary graphics, a pretty reasonable design is to use Qt with a custom widget that draws itself with QtPainter.

I think a lot of my interest in old computers is actually part of a larger interest in getting computers with low specs to do interesting/useful/entertaining work, which also applies to single board computers. Though I am also separately very interested in computer history and old Windows aesthetics

I wanna figure out if anyone I actually know and am friends with is going to Anthro New England 2026 so I can potentially figure out who to room with and who won't be super busy with preexisting plans. I don't want to room with a stranger (tried it and it sucks), but don't want to room alone either.

Game dev is really a "for fun" thing for me, but sometimes tasks come up that happen because they're needed rather than because they're fun in themselves, and they can end up just feeling like work. Sometimes I can find enjoyment from solving interesting problems within them though.

Extending my Furnace to Terrific Audio Driver project so that it can also accept Impulse Tracker files wasn't too difficult, though there's still work to do and everything needs to be tested. Internally it converts the file to Furnace-style representation and then converts again to MML.

My tracker experience is mostly in Famitracker, Furnace, and SNESGSS, and I was surprised to see that a lot of other trackers treat effects in a very different way, likely because a single effect column means more complicated behavior is needed. I'm used to effects sticking until explicitly stopped.

I think in order to make more progress on my SNES shooter game, I need to think about what a complete version of the game would look like and how it would be structured, and do some planning. I'll also want to polish things up graphically and audio-wise of course.

Here's a Brionne Maffi by @funnyhat12.bsky.social using the design I made. Always a big fan of the way she shades rubber, making it look real.

When I did the big refactor that made Tilemap Town entities all generic and able to be nested arbitrarily, it was really funny that players could exist in other players' inventories, but that's opportunity for mischief as people realize that's something you can do.

I'm glad to see the Game Bub crowdfund doing well; it's up to 57% and plenty of time left. I did end up backing it because I want to support open hardware, even if I have many GBAs already. And it's just a cool project in general.

Here's my #SNES mouse-controlled shooter game so far! It's definitely far from being 100% done, but it's in a state where I feel comfortable showing it off and having people try it out! Multiplayer and regular controllers are supported. forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.ph... #gamedev #snesdev #homebrew

It's happened a bunch of times where I encounter a MIDI or chiptune version of a song *first* and then much later find the original it was a cover of, which is funny because it feels like I'm finding a fancy remix (as people often do with game music), but that's actually just how the song sounds.

I underestimated how much sound effects add to how a game feels, even if the sound effects are very simple and placeholder-ish. I have my SNES overhead shooter in a spot where I should be able to have a demo for people to play with soon, since I put in actual level progression and some missing stuff

POV You're on a date with Xenia

art for NovaSquirrel