This event was a lot of fun. Highly recommended! :) (Hit me up if you want an invite to the discord. It’s not just for newbies, but very newbie friendly.)

Movie trailers spoiling the best bits of movies is way too common. Imagine if they made Fight Club now. The trailer would start, "In a world where your best friend is imaginary..."

Got really excited to play in this "premodern" Magic the Gathering format with a bunch of my old cards. Turns out the local scheduled events don't actually get enough players to happen, they just leave them on the calendar in case people show up. Boo!

Just got home from the @jonathancoulton.bsky.social show. It was wonderful! He closed out the set with You Ruined Everything, which is my favorite. I sang it to my daughter so often that she (mostly) knew the words. She's 16 now, unbelievable. youtu.be/in_Zi0V_PJY?...

If you're still on Windows, I highly recommend checking out scoop. It's so freaking good. scoop.sh (And yes, I'm getting off of Windows ASAP. My wife's business relies on some software that I can't get to work on Linux. Soon!)

I'm making pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and pumpkin ice cream tonight, and I'm excited about my pumpkin protein bars being delivered tomorrow. I think I like the stuff.

I love this. Well, except for the random Arby's attack. After nearly two years on this diet, I'd kill a man for a Beef and Cheddar.

I used to be a huge kickstarter games backer. I love supporting indies! Most of them were good about releasing something eventually. Lately it's just one abandoned project after another. Look, if you take money from people, you have to finish the game before you move on to a new exciting project.

Trying to gauge if anyone would be interested in backing Mansion of a Million Monsters!, my cartoony zelda-like whodunnit game! Is that you? If it is, could you click on the "notify" button on the kickstarter page below and share? Thanks! www.kickstarter.com/projects/lkm... #gamedev #indiegames

I won my Street Fighter 6 local tournament today. Had a super fun time and felt like I played really well.

You’re almost certainly not making the next Hollow Knight. If this causes even one person to struggle to pay rent because they quit their job to chase a long shot… oof. Don’t let your dreams be dreams, but be smart, please.

They have the opportunity to do the funniest thing. "It's an announcement of a delay."

Another somewhat embarrassing post. (These are hard to look at.) When I started at the beginning of 2024, I made up a goal of 180 pounds, fully thinking it was impossible since I was at 375. Today I weighed in at 179. This is bananas. Before and after:

I played in two Street Fighter 6 tournaments today. Got first place at MO Games Con, getting a really fun trophy and some neat swat. Got third place at Dino Rush, losing twice to the person who won the whole thing. It was a really awesome day!

I won an in-game Ryu only tournament. It was pretty silly fun. They should fire these on-demand like the tournaments in Magic Arena.

I bought a print at an art fair a few weeks ago. My daughter found some elements that appear to be AI generated. (A mushroom growing out of nothing, something that looks like it tried to imitate a signature.) I'm so upset. I love supporting artists, and hate that I have to watch for this slop. :(

Reading about the Stop Killing Games stuff going on, makes me think about dead games I used to play. I wonder if there would be anyone interested if a dev resurrected Hex TCG or Hero Academy. I really miss Hero Academy.

ALL RIGHT, I’M DOING IT! 👀 Full EVO 2025 CROWDFUND stream schedule in the image. 📺 CAN WE RAISE $1,000 TO SEND ME TO EVO? 🤨 $10 from 100 people would get us there. 💸 Saturday: 12:30-10PM—SF6 and FGC 👊🏻 Monday: 9:30AM-6:30PM—Mass Effect 2 fresh save 🚀 BE THERE! 😄🙌🏻

I just backed The Swallowtails NEW ALBUM: Perspective on @kickstarter.com www.kickstarter.com/projects/the...

Forgot my camera was on in this zoom meeting. Zero chance they didn't see my sigh and eyeroll when they talked about adding AI bullshit to our product. Oops.

Back from a trip to Kansas to help work my wife's art fair booth at an art/music festival. It was so much fun, but I think I caught something. Sore throat and sniffles. :( Right before I left, I ran into a graphics lag problem on the new Linux box. I think I've solved it. This thing might work out!

Say I wanted to get a mobile gaming device (like a SteamDeck) for a trip next week. Anyone have a recommendation? Is SteamDeck still the best, or are any of the competitors better yet?

Another strange problem I had to overcome. I have Windows installed on one hard drive, Linux installed on another, and I installed a third drive that I want to have as just a shared data drive between them. I formatted that one as NTFS format, as that seemed workable on both sides.

Other than a PEBKAC error with my graphics driver, Linux setup was pretty smooth. And you know what's crazy? My project (which is mostly C++ using zig as a build/package tool) just builds and runs. First try! (Just "git clone" + "zig build run".) I can't really believe it how great this is.

@noelfb.bsky.social has convinced me to give Linux another shot as my main dev system. Going to attempt to setup a dual boot Linux Mint machine. Wish me luck! (Google seems to think it's the most noob-friendly option. If you disagree, I welcome input!)

So, I think I've figured out how to recommend Expedition 33. If you like Sekiro, try it. If you expect Final Fantasy, you're in for a bad time. While it looks like a JRPG, it is not. (Not just because it's French.) You are expected to die repeatedly to the bosses until you learn their patterns.

I guess I missed the whole "parrying is a bad mechanic" narrative that happened when I was off in Chicago. Just play games that don't use that mechanic? It's not that big of a deal. Do you walk into a sandwich shop and announce you don't like bread in your food?

I finished Expedition 33 last night. I LOVED this game. But I hate the ending(s). Without spoiling any details, right at the end they give you a choice. But both of the choices feel bad. (By design.) If you want me to choose, give me real agency. Otherwise, just tell me the story you want to tell.

Final result, I finished 513th out of 1300ish players in SF6. Not what I wanted, but at least I won one and didn't just get demolished. Luck of the draw in your bracket is rough. I hate the double elimination format that the FGC uses. The Swiss format used in TCG tournaments is so much better, IMO.

I’m out of SF6 at Combo Breaker. I lost to (Evo champion) Problem X, and a really strong Blanka player. Very stoked to win my first match and I didn’t play horribly against players much better than me, so I’m happy enough.

At a @mattdinniman.bsky.social (Dungeon Crawler Carl) book signing/talk. He came out and said hi to people in the line. Gave him a fist bump, lol. Really nice dude!

"Notice: This game is excluded from Steam's Family Sharing service." I only share with my daughter who rarely plays game, but seeing this in your steam game store page will really make me think twice about buying your game.

I'll be at Combo Breaker (my first FGC major!) this weekend. Any of my mutuals going to be there? If so, want to meetup for some Street Fighter or grab a meal or something? (Feel free to DM me!)

Decided I'm going to embed Lua into my level data. Initially just for load time configuration. ("Is this variable true => then initialize an entity" kinda stuff.) The AYCB version of Lua won't build in Zig 0.14, so I created my own. Another lib for the collection. :) github.com/jessechounar...

Three hours in, and I really love the music in Expedition 33. I just find myself walking around humming the Lumière theme. I have no idea what the words mean, but it's pretty.

Posted a github issue, with a (very small) potential fix. The dev asked for a PR, which they thanked me for and merged quickly. I love when open source actually works how it's supposed to. It feels so rare lately.

Some folks in the St. Louis gamedev coop have been looking for speakers lately. I might have signed up talk about using Zig as a build tool/package manager for C++ projects and the math in 2D collision detection. I don't know which topic (both?) people will want to hear, but I gotta get to work.

Apparently they added a different function declaration syntax in C++ (checks watch) 14 years ago and I never noticed. Instead of: int Add(int a, int b); You can write: auto Add(int a, int b) -> int;

I'm looking for more pixel art platformer devs on here. Share some cool folks to follow. :)

For my book club, since we'll be meeting next during Pride Month, the theme is books about LGBTQ topics or by LGBTQ authors. I need to nominate a book, but this is way outside of my wheelhouse (I read mostly sword and sorcery fantasy novels) so does anyone have any fiction recommendations for me?

Is it just me or are debugging visualization tools sexy?

Arc (the browser) crashed super hard and wouldn't restart. After rebooting windows, it starts, but forced me to log in again and it has lost all of my bookmarks. Time to try out Zen browser. Been wanting to move away from Chromium anyway, but I lost a bunch of fun stuff. :(

After being on this diet for fifteen months, I think I've finally had a breakthrough. There are finally some moments when I'm not thinking about food all the time! Unfortunately, it's when I'm sleeping.

Animal Well does a lot of things really well, but I think my favorite (and this is sad) is that I can start the game and press start twice and I'm playing. More games need to do this. I don't want to see splash screens for the dev, publisher, engine, middleware, etc. Lemme skip that junk and play.

Billy Basso is insane! Dude crammed so much stuff into Animal Well. I did the flames, then the eggs. (With some help.) I looked online and saw the other layers of puzzles he built in that almost nobody will see. I'm very impressed, but also a little intimidated by how much work this must have been.

I watched a couple of videos about Animal Well and now my timeline is all "How to design great Metroidvania levels" and "How to create great platformer tiles" type stuff. I don't know why it suddenly started feeding me good stuff, but this is awesome.

It has only occurred to me recently that my goal weight is actually within reach. (The goal is 180 pounds. I started at 375 and I'm currently at 208. So not close, but getting there.) The second I hit 187.5, it will be impossible to stop me from singing Stone Temple Pilot's Creep all the time.

Apparently my steam account was hacked. If you got a weird message from me, don't click the link. Very icky!

My experiment with Zig as a build tool continues. Now I'm also using it as a package manager. (Sort of.) You can tell Zig to fetch from github (by release or specify a hash) and use those files in your build. An example of doing that with the spdlog library: github.com/jessechounar...

Been experimenting with using Zig as a build tool for my C code. If you've got Zig 0.14.0 installed and some free time (and feeling friendly), could you try building and running this? (It's just some old opengl code, nothing big.) It should run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. github.com/jessechounar...